This is the VOA Special English Education Report.

This week in our Foreign Student Series, we look at financial aid that comes in ships. Scholarships, fellowships and assistantships.

But first we talk about financial aid of another kind: grants. A grant, unlike a loan, does not have to be repaid.

One of our examples this week is the University of Missouri-Columbia, known as Mizzou (pronounced mah-ZOO). Mizzou is a public university with more than one thousand five hundred international students this school year. The total student population is more than thirty thousand.

Mizzou has a grant program for international students. The Curator's Grant-in-Aid program is for those who get good grades and take part in university activities. Graduate students who receive a grant get nine free credits to take courses. Undergraduates receive between one thousand and five thousand dollars in support.

Students must have attended Mizzou for a year before they can receive a grant. And they must reapply for the awards each semester.

Some grants are called scholarships or fellowships. Scholarships are for undergraduates; fellowships are for graduate students. Awards may be based on financial need or on grades, talents or other requirements. The Global Heritage Scholarship at Mizzou, for example, is only for international undergraduates whose mother or father graduated from there.

The scholarship pays seven thousand five hundred dollars a year for tuition. Full tuition is currently almost nineteen thousand dollars.  

Tuition is about the same at another public university, the University of Arizona in Tucson. It offers an undergraduate scholarship for international students who earned high marks in high school. The program is open to all foreign students who have been admitted to the university. Winners receive between two thousand and ten thousand dollars a year to help pay tuition.

Seventy international students are currently receiving the scholarship. The University of Arizona has more than two thousand international students this academic year. The school had close to forty thousand students during the fall term.

Assistantships are jobs paid with money or free classes. Graduate assistants help professors for about twenty hours a week. They may teach undergraduates, grade papers and tests, and assist with research.

And that's the VOA Special English Education Report, written by Nancy Steinbach. The earlier reports in our Foreign Student Series are at voaspecialenglish.com. I'm Steve Ember.