The U.S. Department of State is teaming up with American women’s colleges to encourage more women from Muslim-majority countries to study science, technology, engineering, and math.
The new NeXXt Scholars Program will recruit female students from predominantly Muslim countries who are interested in the STEM fields to U.S. women’s colleges.
The program, which kicked off with a gala Saturday night in New York, will pair each undergraduate scholar with a female scientist, often a graduate student or newly minted Ph.D., as a mentor. The students will also be given a five-year membership to the New York Academy of Sciences, where they will be able to take advantage of the conferences, networking events, and online journals of the prestigious scientific society.
The effort is the brainchild of Sandra J. Laney, a foreign-affairs officer in the Office of the Science and Technology Adviser at the State Department and a women’s college graduate. Ms. Laney was working as a research scientist at Smith College, her alma mater, when she met Weam Zaky, a young graduate student from a conservative family in Egypt.
Ms. Zaky’s family had balked at sending her abroad to study but had agreed to let her go because they believed that a women’s college would provide a safer learning environment, Ms. Laney says. They eventually became enthusiastic about Ms. Zaky’s decision to study in the United States, and she is now pursuing a doctorate at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Fewer than 20 percent of all students from Muslim countries earning bachelor’s degrees in STEM fields from U.S. institutions are women. (They make up 29 percent of all undergraduates from those countries enrolled in American colleges.)
But Ms. Laney says she believes that number could be higher if more families, who might hesitate to send their teenage daughters overseas, knew about the women’s-college option.
What’s more, she notes, these institutions do an especially good job of producing female scientists, graduating women in scientific disciplines at 1.5 to two times the rate of coed colleges. And the quality of science education is far better in the United States than in many predominantly Muslim countries, says Ms. Laney, who did part of her graduate work in parasitic tropical diseases in Egypt. “It’s taught theoretically—it’s taught at you,” she says of science education in those countries.
Ms. Laney says the idea for the NeXXt program came during her first day at the State Department, where she is a fellow for the American Association for the Advancement of Science in a program that brings research scientists into the federal government. Her boss asked for suggestions for possible science projects in the Muslim world, in the wake of President Obama’s speech in Cairo encouraging closer relationships in the region. “All of these things just came together in my mind, and I blurted out Weam’s story,” she says. “That was really the inspiration for the program.”
Much of the NeXXt Scholars effort will focus on outreach to young women interested in the sciences, many of whom may not have considered studying in the United States. It will be led by local EducationUSA advising centers, which will recommend students for the program.
The State Department hopes to recruit 75 students over the program’s first two years, starting with next fall’s entering class.
All admission and financial-aid decisions will be made by the 36 women’s colleges participating in the program. There is no monetary award that comes with being a NeXXt scholar, although Ms. Laney says she expects that many of the individual colleges will offer financial assistance.
She also hopes to raise private funds for scholarships and to underwrite orientation programs and workshops for the students.
The U.S. Agency for International Development has provided $50,000 to help start the mentoring program and provide memberships to the New York Academy of Sciences.
Each college that admits a NeXXt scholar from overseas will be able to designate an incoming American student as a “STEM sister,” who also will be given a mentor and a science-academy membership.
Elaine Zundl, an assistant dean at Douglass College, the women’s college at Rutgers University, says the NeXXt Scholars program complements her institution’s long-standing efforts to encourage more women to study in the sciences and other nontraditional fields.
Bringing in more international students will expose American students at Douglass to new perspectives, says Ms. Zundl, who leads the Douglass Project for Rutgers Women in Math, Science, and Engineering. “We spend a lot of time pushing our students to go out into the world,” she says, “but we don’t get an opportunity to connect with women who can’t otherwise find us. I feel like the State Department is just delivering these students to us.”
More global news from The Chronicle
SIGN UP: Get Global Coverage in Your Inbox
JOIN THE CONVERSATION: Twitter LinkedIn
