<p>The Fulbright Program is one of the most successful fellowship programs around. About 1,500 students and 1,300 scholars from the United States and abroad are studying and working on Fulbrights this academic year.</p>
<p>Started in 1946, the international academic-exchange program offers grants that are awarded by binational Fulbright commissions and financed by the U.S. government and the government of each country in which the awards are available. This year the United States contributed nearly $221,000 to the fellowships.</p>
<p>But the U.S. State Department, which oversees the program, has been concerned in recent years about the lack of diversity among American applicants. They have been, and still are, overwhelmingly white and from four-year institutions.</p>
<p>This year, for example, only seven of the nearly 760 American scholars come from community colleges, and only 10.6 percent of American students who received Fulbrights are black or Hispanic.</p>
<p>School/Winners of Applicants</p>
<p>U. of Michigan at Ann Arbor 31 of 144
Harvard U. 29 of 106
Yale U. 26 of 71
Northwestern U. 24 of 93
U. of California at Berkeley 24 of 94
U. of Chicago 23 of 101
Brown U. 21 of 71
Cornell U. 20 of 75
U. of Wisconsin at Madison 19 of 76
Georgetown U. 18 of 44
Stanford U. 18 of 67
U. of Southern California 18 of 50
Columbia U. 17 of 79
Duke U. 17 of 47
Indiana U. at Bloomington 17 of 52
Johns Hopkins U. 17 of 66
Boston College 16 of 48
Pennsylvania State U. at University Park 15 of 52
Arizona State U. at Tempe 13 of 42
U. of California at Los Angeles 13 of 43</p>
<p>It is hard to judge these statistics without knowing what % of the applicants come form community colleges, and what % of the applicants are black or Hispanic. If the answer is ~10% for both, then their acceptance rate is equal to 4yr college students (or to white students).</p>
<p>BTW, it would not surprise me at all to see a higher acceptance from 4yr schools than from community colleges, since, on average, these are higher caliber students .</p>
<p>Smith had 17 winners, and 23 fiinalists out of 32 applicants, plus 5 French Gov’t Teaching Fellows (Fulbrights paid by the French Gov’t rather than the U.S.). This is a far, far higher success to applicant ratio, and far, far higher per student ratio, than any of the above-named schools.</p>
<p>I may be wrong, but I thought Smith had 15 winners. I also read that Pomona had 16 awardees, but one declined. Per 1,000 students, Pitzer received 11.5 Fulbright grants, followed by Pomona (10.3), Swarthmore (8.1), Smith (5.8), Williams (5.1) and Kenyon (4.8). University of Michigan Ann Arbor received 31 Fulbright awards for 1.23 per 1,000 students, followed by Harvard with 29 fellowships for 4.4, Yale with 26 fellowships for 4.9, Northwestern with 24 fellowships for 3.0, and UC Berkeley with 24 for 1.0.</p>
<p>so what does it mean to have more or less per 1000 students? What does it mean to have a lower or higher percentage of applicants receive awards? (OK - better prepped applicants leads to a higher win percentage).</p>
<p>The program is " the largest U.S. international exchange program". It is not an academic competition. Indeed, the program website says “Developing a strong, feasible and compelling project proposal is the most important aspect of a successful Fulbright application.”</p>
<p>So what conclusion do we draw from success in getting these? That their grads write “trong, feasible and compelling project proposal”. OK. A good, transferrable skill, but not one worth competing over. </p>
<p>We have enough rankings already. Do we really need another?</p>
<p>newmassdad, I think it’s just because the Fullbright is something most everyone has heard of.
Even back in the dark ages, my dad called my grad school fellowship my “Half-bright scholarship”…</p>
<p>I agree with Little Mother - per Capita ranking is important - should UMich be ranked first with 31 awards and an undergraduate student body of 26,000, or Pitzer, with 11 awards and a student body of 1,000?</p>
<p>LACs - Ranked by Total Fulbright Awards</p>
<p>Pomona 16 (does not include one award which was declined)
Smith 15
Swarthmore 12
Pitzer 11
Williams 10
Amherst 9
Vassar 9
Wellesley 9</p>
<p>Ranked by Awards per 1000 students (Top 6 LACs and Top 5 Univ only):</p>
<p>So tell me what the significance of having a high number of Fulbrights is?</p>
<ul>
<li> does it mean the college encourages students to apply?</li>
<li> does it mean they coach them better?</li>
<li> does it mean they take Fulbrights because they did not get anything better?</li>
<li> does it mean the students like overseas travel?</li>
</ul>
<p>Then tell me how this translates into better education for our kids?</p>
<p>It was 17 for Smith, plus the 5 French Govt’ Fellows (which are Fulbrights funded by the French gov’t rather the U.S.)</p>
<p>The significance of Fulbrights is two-fold: unlike Rhodes, Marshalls, etc., the award doesn’t depend on the brilliance of the students (the winners of the latter would likely have been good candidates for these awards wherever they went), but rather on value-added while they were in college - specifically in languages and area studies majors. Secondly, they depend extraordinarily heavily upon preparation (Smith also ranks first or second in research as opposed to teaching Fulbrights), and the quality of advising.</p>
<p>One easy way to see this is to rank the schools not per capita (which also has some special problems that I won’t go into here), but by average entering SAT scores. When you do that, you can more clearly see the value-added proposition.</p>
<p>Newmassdad–I think we can draw a conclusion from Smith’s data: that they are very good at getting students to apply for Fulbrights, and helping them write good applications. Additionally, that they are less good at getting students to apply for and receive Trumans, Rhodes, etc. And I say this as a Smith alum and Truman finalist, who had a good friend at Smith who was a finalist for the Rhodes and the Marshall. We were both pleased with the level of support we got in preparing for our interviews, and I don’t think we would have been better candidates had we gone to any other school. </p>
<p>One thing to consider: a LOT more Fulbrights are awarded each year than Rhodes, Marshalls, or Trumans. So it’s to be expected that a college would do better at Fulbright than the others. Also, since the Rhodes values athletic as well as academic accomplishments, it makes sense for Div III schools to be under-represented in the pool of winners compared to Div I or military schools.</p>
<p>Also, in my graduating year (2 years ago) we did have a Beineke and a Udall winner, so it’s not like Smith students never get them.</p>
<p>First, as for teaching Fullbrights, the fact is that some universities offer better teach abroad programs. The Fullbrights may be more prestigious, but they involved smaller living stipends and provide less support while you are living abroad, so kids at the universities with their own programs are less likely to apply for them. </p>
<p>Second, a lot of the Fullbright projects aren’t terribly academic. I know one person who lived and worked on a “sustainable” farm in New Zealand for two years; another who apprenticed to a midwife in the Carribbean, another who traveled around Spain collecting Jewish folk tales. I’m sure all were valuable experiences for the people involved, but none of these needed standard research skills. </p>
<p>Third, while Smith does have an excellent program in foreign language, one heck of a lot of kids who do Fullbrights requiring foreign languages learned the language before going to college. The husband of a friend got one to Israel. It was all those years at a yeshiva in NYC, not his college, that gave him the language skills. </p>
<p>In all honesty, most of the kids who won Fullbrights at my kid’s university were nowhere near the top of the class. They just came up with an interesting project and/or spoke a foreign language, especially an unusual foreign language, fluently. </p>
<p>So, while I congratulate anyone who wants one and wins one, I don’t agree that the fact that a college wins a lot of them means it’s “added more value” to its students than any other college has.</p>
<p>It’s silly if not downright destructive to try to turn this into yet another ranking. All the schools with multiple awards are to be congratulated for getting significant numbers of their students interested in the Fulbright program, and for supporting a large fraction of them through to success in winning the award. The rest of it, attempting to rank schools per capita, by the ratio of successful awards to applicants, or in any other way, is just so much b.s. </p>
<p>Remember, this is an academic exchange program, not a merit award. There’s competition for the awards, to be sure, but having a large number of Fulbrights (either absolutely or relative to the size of the student body) is not a proxy for academic distinction, for a whole lot of reasons. First, there are a lot of other things for highly qualified graduates to do, many of them just as prestigious if not more so, such as going directly to top graduate or professional programs here in the U.S., or pursuing other kinds of fellowships, or going directly to work in highly sought-after positions. Second, the bulk of Fulbright awards tend to go to people in traditional liberal arts fields, which is immediately going to skew per-capita counts in a way that disadvantages both engineering schools (you won’t find an MIT, Caltech, or Harvey Mudd listed here, for example, because not many engineers pursue Fulbrights; but that’s no reflection on the quality of education those schools offer) as well as large multi-purpose universities which typically have only a fraction of their undergraduates in liberal arts programs. So per capita ratios are simply comparing apples to oranges; it’s nonsense. The relevant comparison group for Michigan is other large public multi-purpose universities; within that group, their production of Fulbrights is absolutely stellar, though Berkeley is close on their heels and Wisconsin not too far behind.</p>
<p>And mini and stacey: I believe the correct number for Smith is 15 for the 2008-09 award year, the number reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education story linked in post #1. The Smith website you link in post #7 is reporting a total of 17 for the 2007-08 award year. That’s last year’s data. Either way, though, 15 or 17 is a terrific accomplishment, and I applaud Smith for it.</p>