Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977–1980, Volume XXX, Public Diplomacy

98. Memorandum From Robert Pastor of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Brzezinski)¹

Washington, October 24, 1977

SUBJECT

• North-South Scholarships

In my conversation with General Torrijos before his trip to Europe, he asked me why the United States had never established a scholarship program for bringing poor but talented Latin American students to the U.S. on full scholarships, as the Soviets did. I said that it was my impression that the USG financed the study of many more developing country students than the Soviet Union did, but since he thought otherwise, I said that I would look into the subject further.

I asked CU at State to do a study, and although they tried to dance around the question, it turns out that Torrijos is right.² There are many more foreign students in the U.S. (203,000 in 1976) than in the Soviet Union (30,000 in 1973). But the USSR gives 13,000 full scholarships for undergraduate training, while only 10,000 students representing a relatively larger proportion of graduate students receive some U.S. government assistance. And few of these students, according to CU, are poor, and none are actively recruited, as is the case with the Soviet Union’s students.

Quite independently, Landon Butler called me and said he had spoken to David McCulloch (author of Path Between the Sea)³ who had suggested that one way to sell the Canal Treaty would be to link it to a program for bringing Panamanian and other developing world students to the U.S. for their education. His argument was that Americans would feel more comfortable about giving away the Canal if they knew the U.S. was training Panama’s next generation of technicians and leaders.⁴

The President’s trip offers a great opportunity to launch such an idea. It is surprising to me that U.S. Embassies do not try to search for talented but poor secondary students to help them further their education in the U.S. If nothing else, the U.S. might want to consider a scholarship fund for the top fifty secondary students who can’t afford a college education in each developing country. This doesn’t have to be a response to the Soviets’ program, particularly since there is much evidence pointing to the counterproductive nature of study in the USSR—to study there is to learn to despise the Soviet communist system, not to love it. Nor should this detract from an important point CU made in their report: that we want to help build the universities of the developing countries rather than train their students here. CU’s argument (or rationalization) for not funding undergraduate education is that it will “Americanize” them and increase the chances that the nation’s most talented students would emigrate to the U.S., thus contributing to the “brain drain.”

Certainly, we don’t want to de-nationalize the next generation of a country’s leadership. But no one could argue that a four-year scholarship program for fifty students will de-nationalize a country. And incentives should be included to ensure that the students return to their country when their education is completed. In this regard, it would make sense to launch the initiative in Venezuela and to build on its experience, since it has recently established an unprecedented scholarship program to train about 5,000 students abroad now.

Venezuela and other middle-income countries are in a position to send their young abroad, but certainly not to help the poorer countries. The initiative would therefore have the advantage of using an idea and the experience of the middle-income countries, but be targeted at helping the poorer countries.

If you agree that this idea merits the President’s consideration, I will draft a short memo for you to send to him setting out the proposal.⁵

1. Source: Carter Library, White House Central Files, Subject File, Foreign Affairs, Information-Exchange Activities-Educational, Executive, Box FO–35, FO 5–1 1/20/77–5/31/78. No classification marking. Sent for action. Copies were sent to Butler, Thornton, Erb, and Owen. Inderfurth and Dodson initialed the top right-hand corner of the memorandum. Brzezinski drew an arrow on the first page of the memorandum pointing at Pastor’s name in the “from” line. Also in the folder is an October 26 memorandum from Thornton to Brzezinski, in which Thornton endorsed Pastor’s proposal and referenced the CU study: “The critique from State/CU is correct in its own terms but those terms just are not relevant. This would be a political act, not primarily an attempt to make a major educational impact on a country. There would have to be special selection procedures and the like—and CU should have nothing to do with them. Probably the selection should be made with minimal US input (just enough to ensure that the recipients were not children of cabinet ministers!). The relevant model is the Rhodes scholarship—although we should avoid any attempt to duplicate that unique institution.” (Ibid.)
2. Attached but not printed at Tab A is an October 13 covering memorandum from Hitchcock to Pastor, transmitting an undated study prepared in CU entitled “Foreign Students in the United States.”
3. Reference is to The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977)
4. Inderfurth placed a vertical line in the left-hand margin next to this sentence and wrote: “I doubt this! RI.”
5. Brzezinski approved the recommendation and added: “First staff it out & check it out.” For Brzezinski’s letter to the President, see footnote 5, Document 119.