How does IFP identify, recruit, select, and support such an unusual group of fellows?
The program has developed a unique model: an integrated approach to increasing access and equity in higher education that also contributes to social justice. The model combines outreach to previously excluded beneficiaries with an emphasis on enhancing fellows’ knowledge, skills, and capacity to serve as transformational leaders in their home countries.
Local Partner Organizations
As a global program operating in 22 countries, IFP’s effectiveness is closely tied to its innovative structure: a Secretariat in New York manages the program as a whole and sets policy guidelines, while partner organizations in 22 countries manage key aspects of the program in each local context.
This decentralized architecture has enabled IFP to sustain a flexible, country-based operation within a single global framework.
Identification of target groups
To achieve greater equity and educational opportunity, each local partner considers gender, race and ethnicity, religion, region of origin, economic and educational background, parents’ education and employment, and physical disability. Although these factors affect access to educational opportunity in all IFP countries, their relative weight differs in each context.
Gender-based prejudice, for example, impedes women from pursuing higher education in many African countries, while in Russia and Brazil, women are in the majority, at least in certain academic fields, and thus do not require special targeting. IPF partner organizations work with local scholars, activists, public intellectuals, and public sector representatives to develop locally meaningful definitions of “disadvantage.”
Tailored recruitment strategies
Educational opportunities typically tend to be concentrated in major urban centers and are focused on urban elites. IFP has therefore developed innovative methods to reach remote and disadvantaged populations.
These include: advertising in vernacular languages in local media markets; working with universities, NGOs and government entities in rural areas; offering information sessions to potential candidates who otherwise would not apply; and relying on program alumni from the targeted groups to recruit new candidates.
Partner organizations in each country refine these strategies each year based on the previous cycle’s candidate pool. After two years of national outreach in India, for example, IFP focused recruitment efforts on a narrower band of states in the country’s poorest regions.
Comprehensive selection criteria
IFP’s emphasis on social equity and educational opportunity as an entry threshold is in marked contrast to other international fellowships programs, and the inclusion of non-academic criteria to judge candidates’ relative merits as “transformative leaders” is also distinctive. These criteria are developed by local partners: first to define basic eligibility in relation to “equity and opportunity,” and then to determine individual competitiveness in regard to academic qualifications, leadership capacity, and social commitment.
IFP enhances its ability to attract diverse candidates by eliminating any age limit, by permitting study in a wide range of academic fields and disciplines, and by allowing fellows to enroll in universities located in any part of the world, including in their home country or region.
Locally-constituted, independent selection panels
Selection panels bring a high level of familiarity with local needs and conditions. Local knowledge enables panelists to assess candidates on IFP’s multiple dimensions, from equity and opportunity considerations to leadership, social engagement and academic performance and potential. Another advantage of locally-constituted selection panels is that candidates can submit applications in their own language(s).
While IFP employs well-known “best practices” in selections found in other fellowship programs (panel members representing different constituencies and subject areas, multiple levels of screening and review, standardized scoring and ranking systems), these are adapted to local needs. In Brazil, for example, where race and ethnicity raise complicated questions about identity and discourse, interviewing is done by black-white-indigenous combinations of panelists that often surprise candidates who hold their own assumptions and biases about prospective interviewers.
Worldwide, IFP has earned a reputation for transparency, stemming from the professional standing, integrity and independence of the selection panels. To safeguard the perception (and reality) that the program is not captured by special interests, neither Ford Foundation nor IFP officials are permitted to serve on selection panels.
Pre-academic training, advising and placement
IFP does not require that a candidate has been accepted at his or her chosen university, a requirement that is often a significant barrier for people with limited access to higher education and insufficient knowledge and means to identify and apply to high quality post-graduate programs.
During the one-year “fellow-elect” period, IFP provides preparatory training and placement support for entrance into universities. Working with local providers, the program offers pre-enrollment training to fellows-elect on an as-needed basis in areas such as computer literacy, research skills and academic writing, as well as foreign language study. For about one-third of IFP fellows, preparatory training continues after arrival at their host universities.
During the fellow-elect period, the selected candidates also receive educational advising to help them refine their study objectives, which in turn facilitates their placement in universities. The investment in preparing fellows for academic success is one of IFP’s most important and effective innovations.
IFP convincingly demonstrates that academic excellence and equity are fully compatible goals, provided that candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds receive preparation and support to “level the playing field” prior to starting their degree programs. Over 95% of IFP fellows-elect enter high quality post-graduate programs within the stipulated one-year placement period.
Monitoring
IFP’s unique decentralized system requires partner organizations to maintain contact with active fellows regardless of their study location. This creates a supplementary support system that goes well beyond regular student services provided at host universities.
To access important program benefits such as professional enhancement and family funds, and to take advantage of special IFP features such as sandwich programs or English language programs at the University of Arkansas, fellows must request approval from their home country partners. In order to renew multi-year grants, fellows must provide their local partners with proof that they have completed the current academic year in good standing. These reporting requirements allow partners to provide their fellows with additional guidance on how best to utilize the fellowship to finish their academic programs and meet degree requirements.
IFP’s outstanding completion and graduation rates are evidence that this supplementary support system is highly effective. Among the first 1,000 IFP alumni, 98% finished their post-graduate programs and nearly 85%, including doctoral fellows, earned their degrees. Especially for fellows who study abroad, the local reporting responsibility keeps students connected to their home countries.
Support for return and alumni activities
Although concerns about “brain drain” cannot be fully assuaged, IFP demonstrates that the problem can be addressed through a program’s intrinsic design features. By favoring candidates who demonstrate sustained engagement with their home communities, offering the possibility of earning one’s degree at home while spending short periods abroad, and nurturing strong fellow-partner relationships, IFP has not succumbed to “brain drain.” More than 80% of IFP alumni are now living and working in their home countries or regions.
Further incentives for return are built into the IFP system through partner-provided services including counseling for returning fellows and information on job and study opportunities. Partners also enable returning fellows to stay connected to the program, as recruiters, selection panel members, and active members of country-based IFP alumni associations and networks.