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A new US$750 million scholarship scheme at Stanford University is set to be used to train top students from across the globe, including possibly from Hong Kong, as future world leaders.
Stanford’s outgoing president John Hennessy said, in a recent interview in Hong Kong, that the university would be looking for people who are academically outstanding, who “have already done something” that showed their emerging leadership qualities, and who were passionate about contributing to making the world a better place.
Nike founder Phil Knight donates US$400m to Stanford, creating world’s biggest scholarshipBut this raises doubts over whether the scholarship will become a tool for elite students – often from rich family backgrounds – to develop their personal connections to forge their future careers.
Hennessy admitted that he could not guarantee every student would give back to society after taking part in the leadership programme, but he said the university would “go the extra mile” to find students from disadvantaged backgrounds who possessed the desired qualities and make sure that the programme would admit those committed to change.
“Certainly it’s a programme for students who are elite in terms of their ability and their desire to do something,” Hennessy said. “But I think we are going to have to do our work to ... ensure that we are reaching students.”
Hennessy said there would not be any threshold for academic scores, but applicants’ academic performance should be good enough to qualify for Stanford’s graduate programmes.
The Knight-Hennessy Scholars programme, also named after Nike co-founder Philip Knight, who donated the single largest amount of US$400m, will admit 100 top students every year.
They will be nominated by undergraduate universities around the world for admission to Stanford’s various graduate programmes.
Hong Kong is ‘ready for democracy’, says top US scholarThe programme will grant each student US$50,000 to US$60,000 a year to cover tuition fees and living expenses.
The university will begin accepting applications from students who have completed at least three years of undergraduate education in the summer of 2017 and admit its first batch in autumn 2018.Besides normal graduate courses, there would also be regular meetings, lunches or dinners with existing world leaders for scholarship recipients, Hennessy said.
But with such high academic requirements, many are concerned that the programme may miss out some aspiring future leaders who underachieve in their studies, such as Hong Kong pan-democrat poster boy Joshua Wong Chi-fung.
Wong, one of the most prominent student leaders during 2014’s Occupy movement who was featured on Time magazine’s cover in the same year and was named one of the world’s most influential people by several leading publications, did not excel in his Diploma of Secondary Education exams and admitted himself that he was not an academic high achiever.Hennessy said students who were not academically strong would struggle in the university’s programmes and therefore would not be the right kind of candidates.
Hennessy believed the programme would train up new generations of leaders who would handle global issues such as climate change, poverty, equality, health care and refugee crises in innovative ways.He said these people would differ from existing leaders in that, over time, they would have alumni from the scholarship programme in every industry, which would become a much-needed link for them to get things done.
Stanford currently has 32 students from Hong Kong and 1,400 from the mainland. The number of students there from Hong Kong ranged between 32 and 41 over the past five years.
(SCMP)
