Wheaton College in Massachusetts is offering a full scholarship to the refugees who are escaping conflict and students from the seven Muslim-majority countries mentioned in President Donald Trump's executive order on immigration.
Dennis M. Hanno, the Wheaton college president announced that the Wheaton Refugee Scholarship being offered by the liberal arts schools with 1,600 students will be covering all costs of attending the college in Norton, Mass for the school year 2016-17, the Washington Post reported. It will include the tuition, room and board and a student activity fee amounted to $61,512, with $48,694 of it covering the tuition.
Hanno said in a statement that the Wheaton Refugee Scholarship is being established as a way of adding voice to the chorus of the Americans across the country who are calling and appealing for the immigration ban to be lifted, according to US News.
He added that the Wheaton is a global institution that is dedicated to improve the world by "advancing knowledge and sharing it", and the president's executive order that bans immigration deprives them of their ability to carry on that mission.
The executive order is the ban on the entry into the United States of the citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen for the next 90 days. It also temporarily bans refugees and indefinitely bans those who are from Syria.
The Institute of International Education said that about 1 in 20 of the more than 20 million students enrolled in the colleges and universities of the US are from the other countries. In fact, around 17,000 of them are from these seven countries that were banned by Trump.
While there are a number of scholarships that immigrants and foreign-born Americans can take advantage of, this is the first one that is created for the purpose of helping out the students who were affected by the president's travel ban.
