Budi Waluyo, a former PhD student of Sothy Eng (FCS), recently published a study based on his dissertation examining how an influential international scholarship program impacted the recipients’ capabilities, instead of looking at what’s typically measured, their economic success.
Published in the journal Research in Comparative & International Education, the article, “Examining a Model of Scholarship for Social Justice,” detailed what the study demonstrated about the impact of international scholarship programs for social justice. The research is a case study of the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program (IFP), the first model of scholarships for social justice. The co-authors used the human capability approach advanced by Amartya Sen to conceptualize the measurement of the impacts, proposing an alternative approach that allows scholarship sponsors to see scholarship impact in terms of people’s capabilities, rather than simply their economic growth.
Using the data from the 2012 IFP Alumni surveys and the fellows collected by the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, this study examined the relationships of the foundational rationale behind the creation of IFP as well as the proposed structural equation model built upon the human capability approach with fellows’ impacts on social justice in their home countries. It employed structural equation modelling as a statistical technique, showing that fellows’ success in terms of life choices was positively related to their impact on social justice and that their capabilities and achieved functioning also positively predicted their impacts on social justice.