The U.S. government is spending $1 million so Ukrainian students can study in the best universities in the United States and Britain.
The grants will be issued through the Western NIS Enterprise Fund, an investment fund established by the U.S. government via the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The grants in 2016 will fully cover the tuition fees of 13 students studying in master’s degree programs. Funding is expected to be raised to $5 million by 2018, to cover the tuition fees of 40 students.
Specifically, the scholarships, known as Seed Grants, will cover tuition fees for master’s programs in business administration, public administration, public policy and law studies. The 13 students who won the grants will attend the best universities in their field — MIT Sloan School of Management, Yale School of Management, Duke Fuqua School of Business, University of Michigan Ross School of Business, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and others.
The tuition for a two-year program at Yale School of Management, for example, is up to $130,000.
To apply for a Seed Grant, students have to present a letter of admission from one of the universities. Besides tuition fees, the applicant has to provide additional financing to pay for daily expenses, which may sometimes exceed $50,000 over two years.
“This year we’ve seen a positive trend of an increase in the number of applicants keen to enter the leading American schools to gain the necessary skills and implement their ideas in Ukraine,” Jaroslawa Johnson, the president and CEO of the Western NIS Enterprise Fund, said in a recent statement.
“It is important that scholarship recipients come from various fields, ranging from investment banking and the oil and gas sector to education and communications,” Johnson said.
In 2015, the Seed Grant covered the expenses of five students. The Western NIS Enterprise Fund expects every alumnus to return to Ukraine after two years of studies and apply their skills for at least three years in the country.
If they fail to stick to these conditions, the recipient will be required to fully repay the grant in six months, including interest.
