Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper recently reported that thousands of Brazilian students will fill the halls of Canadian universities over the next four school years as part of the rising South American country’s project to send vast numbers around the world to study science.

For Canadian universities, it’s a chance to add bright recruits from a country with a growing middle class, in the hope that increased research and academic links will continue long past the four years of the scholarship programme. But it will also mark a major expansion of ties with an emerging nation that Canada has struggled to bring closer.

Up to 12,000 students will go to Canadian universities and colleges under Brazil’s Science Without Borders scholarship programme, that country’s ambitious effort to send 100,000 students to study abroad. The United States has already signed up to take 20,000; Britain, France, Germany and Italy will take 6,000-10,000 each. In Canada, it is being led not by governments, but by universities, especially a group of graduate research schools that have seized the Brazilian offer.

Students will be taking up subjects such as biotechnology, ocean science and petroleum engineering, which the government regards as essential for the nation’s future. The programme will cost 3 billion reais (US$1.65 billion), a quarter of which will come from businesses and the rest from the Brazilian taxpayer.

Source: The Globe and Mail