Yale Divinity School is launching a challenge-grant drive to support scholarships for international students. The program offers donors a matching gift from an anonymous foundation with the aim of raising a total of $300,000 in new funds to help international students pay for their YDS education.
The giving challenge connects to a goal in the current YDS strategic plan reflecting “the shift of the global Christian center of gravity from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere,” as the plan states. YDS is committed to enrolling a larger number of international students and providing them with the necessary financial support, in addition to adding international exchange programs, enhanced study-abroad opportunities, global institutional partnerships, and a global scholars program.
“We are grateful to the foundation for energizing our effort to improve scholarships for international students,” YDS Dean Greg Sterling said. “For YDS to fulfill our mission of service to church and world in the years and decades ahead, we must build more relationships with students and scholars from other cultures and continents, especially the Global South. In order to do this we must make YDS financially feasible for more students from those regions.”
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Kyama Mugambi, a Kenyan scholar who serves on the YDS faculty as Assistant Professor of Global Christianity, notes that there are now twice as many Christians in the Global South as the Global North. The seismic change in Christianity’s demographic profile has profound implications for institutions like YDS.
“Conceptual frameworks that once guided scholarship on history, mission, and theology are becoming outdated,” Mugambi said.
Building on the work of the late Lamin Sanneh, YDS has been developing its global Christianity curriculum and broadening its engagement with people from the non-Western world, Mugambi noted.
“Students from Oceania, the Caribbean, Asia, Latin America, and Africa enrich the institution with their diverse cultural, social, linguistic, and theological perspectives,” Mugambi said. “Efforts to recruit such students from around the world have grown tremendously in recent years but need to grow more. Scholars from the non-Western world bring valuable experience that opens new research trajectories while challenging existing models.”
“These scholars also help establish links with institutions beyond the Global North, making contact with innovative but under-resourced schools in places where Christianity is thriving in unprecedented ways. These partnerships across continents affirm the shared global heritage of Christian history while cultivating insightful dialogue about the future of the faith worldwide,” added Mugambi, who will lead a travel seminar in Kenya for YDS students this May.
Yale Divinity School has enrolled many international students across the decades, and about 21 percent of the current first-year class comes from countries other than the United States, including China, Brazil, India, Ghana, Korea, and others. That percentage trails many of the other professional and graduate schools at Yale.
Sterling points out that finances are the chief impediment to enrolling more international students at the Divinity School. YDS currently provides full-tuition scholarships for all students with demonstrated need (who constitute upwards of 90 percent of the student population in any given year) as well as some support for living expenses. Yet the high cost of living in New Haven continues to be an obstacle for many of the promising young international scholars YDS seeks to enroll.
The challenge-grant program aims to attract $150,000 in donations, with the 1:1 match from the foundation bringing the total to $300,000 for scholarships.
“Most of the people coming to us don’t have employers who are paying for their graduate education, and they don’t have sufficient resources to cover the cost themselves,” Sterling said. “Through this challenge-grant program we are attempting to provide more financial aid for these students so they can afford to live here.”
“In the 21st century. we must think globally,” the Dean added. “This is one important way we are doing that.”
The challenge ends December 30. Those interested in learning more or giving to the challenge grant program are encouraged to contact Rod Lowe in the YDS Office of Alumni Engagement and Development, at rodwin.lowe@yale.edu.