International Scholarships

LisaBoxWilliams

Hi from New Orleans! We are considering offering scholarships to dependent children of employees in non-us offices which include Australia, Ireland, Great Britain, France, and Canada. Does anyone have experience with this? Some of my specific questions are:

1. We normally make the check payable to the university and the student jointly. What does the payment look like? Is it a wire transfer?
2. One of our requirements is that the award go to dependent children. We use the IRS 1040 page 1 to determine dependency. What is equivalent in other countries to prove dependency?
3. Will the Foundation get the deduction for the scholarship grant paid internationally or will it just be an expense?
4. Do you have different due dates based on different semester breaks or year end breaks? I don't even know if each country's university calendar runs on semesters or not.
5. One of our requirements is full-time enrollment status or at least 12 hours in most cases. Any suggestions on what that would look like internationally?

Many thanks,

Lisa B. Williams

Goldring Family Foundation

GMWscholarships.com

LindaFord

Hi, Lisa,

I manage programs for the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (based in Tulsa, OK). Our organization is a professional society for people who practice applied geophysics and has a global membership. We offer scholarships to students studying geophysics at universities around the world, including all of the countries you've listed. I can provide some input based on our experience with some of your questions.

1. For our international scholarship recipients, we send a wire transfer to the recipient's account. Of the countries you list, Canada is the only one we where have been able to successfully send the payment to the university without creating a lot of trouble for the student attempting to access it. And, honestly, we are looking very closely at doing the same with scholarship recipients in the U.S. too. We have had a few recipients in the past two or three years describe situations in which having the payment made directly to the university for an outside scholarship has a negative impact on their financial aid packages with the university. For some, the university reduces scholarship or grant aid, instead of allowing the student to maintain aid that does not have to be repaid and reduce the student loan amount. If send it directly to students in these situations, they can use the scholarship to pay the self-pay portion of their package.
2. We do not require the student to be a dependent, so I'm not sure how you would determine that.
3. Scholarships paid through our Foundation are treated the same regardless of where they're sent. Tax implications for the recipient are different. For those outside the US, there are no US tax implications, but they have to be aware of how receiving a scholarship from the US impacts on their tax status within their country.
4. Our scholarship award process is highly competitive, so we have only one deadline. Of the countries you list, only Australia has a different academic year. Theirs follows the calendar year rather than having the academic year start in the Aug/September timeframe. Most of the countries you list operate on a semester or term basis. Some have slightly different starting points than we have in the US (for example, some start in October and run through January for the first semester). The way terms are structured seems to depend as much on the individual university's approach, as it does in the US where some operate on trimesters, rather than semesters. Keep in mind that in the southern hemisphere (i.e., Australia), fall semester would actually start in February. Given these differences, we talk in terms of scholarship year and define the beginning and ending date for that year from our end. It runs with the academic year for most of our applicants, but for others it spans the second half of one year and the first half of the next.
5. You will definitely want to have recipients from these countries describe how their enrollment works and how full-time student status is determined. For some schools in Great Britain, for example, students do not actually enroll in courses. They meet with faculty members who guide them in research that results in a course of study directed toward a degree in a particular area, but there are ways for the university to verify full-time student status for you.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have additional questions.

Linda

Society of Exploration Geophysicists

www.seg.org/scholarships

LisaBoxWilliams

Linda, Many thanks this is all very helpful.