Up to 25 Mexican students will be able to pursue Harvard Ph.D.’s for free under a partnership with a Mexican science and technology council announced yesterday.
The program will cost $1.04 million in its first year, and over $2 million in the following years, making it the largest single fellowship program in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS).
“This is another important step toward Harvard’s transition to becoming a global university,” University President Lawrence H. Summers said yesterday in an interview. “It is part of the process for globalizing financial aid and globalizing access to Harvard.”
He added that this program would serve as a “template for relationships that can happen with other countries and the University.”
The program comes out of an agreement between Harvard and Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia (CONACYT), Mexico’s National Council of Science and Technology. CONACYT, Mexico’s top government agency funding graduate education, is composed of 27 public centers that research scientific and technological developments.
Summers likened CONACYT to the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities.
The CONACYT-Harvard partnership program comes at the heels of a number of financial aid programs initiated by Summers during the past two years, including an initiative begun this year that waives tuition for undergraduates whose families make less than $40,000 a year and the Presidential Scholars Program unveiled in January 2003. That program established a $14 million fund to boost financial aid in some of the University’s graduate and professional schools.
“[The new program] puts Harvard in an increasingly strong position to recruit foreign students from Mexico,” Summers said yesterday.
He added that the fellowship initiative comes at an important time.
“It comes...after a period in the 1990s when U.S.-Mexican relations substantially strengthened with NAFTA and our involvement in responding to the financial crisis and with closer cooperation with drug issues,” Summers said, but he added that “the last few years have not been easy particularly because of strains of immigration issues after September 11th.”
At the Treasury Department, Summers helped engineer a $25 billion bailout to prevent Mexico from defaulting on its loans.
The cost of a five-year degree program at Harvard is $230,000 in the sciences and $204,000 in the social sciences and humanities. Under the partnership agreement, Harvard will pay 43 percent of the costs of science doctorates and 39 percent of the costs of humanities and social science doctorates. CONACYT and the Fundacion Mexico en Harvard, an alumni group, will pick up the remaining tuition costs.
The University will not impose a limit on the number of students who can be eligible for the CONACYT-Harvard Graduate Scholarships, and it estimates that the program will fund about 20 to 25 students each year.
Summers said yesterday that Harvard was in the process of developing similar fellowship programs with other countries as well, but would not comment specifically on those efforts.
“We are discussing many different things with people in many different countries,” he said.
—Staff writer Lauren A. E. Schuker can be reached at schuker@fas.harvard.edu.