Abstract:

Education for all along with the Millennium Development Goals and many other conventions were created to provide the meaning of quality and equal access to education regardless of any bias to gender, ethnicity, or belief. As a result, many initiatives were created to support and offer better educational opportunities for students from different backgrounds; one of these initiatives is scholarships that are provided to students who have high academic achievement along with outstanding extracurricular activities and are from different socioeconomic background to study in one of the best private universities in their country.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the underlying issues, causes and relationships that fellows face forming their identity while adjusting to the university and residence life given. That is, students, who are awarded theses scholarships, come from totally different socioeconomic background than the regular students enrolling in these universities in a very critical period which is adolescence. The paper is going to explore some theoretical writings in this regards as well as some in-depth interviews with fellows from two different programs in Egypt (Leadership for Education and Development (LEAD), Leadership Opportunities Transforming University Students (LOTUS)) as well as one program from the United States (Isabella Cannon Leadership Fellows Program (ICLFP)).

In this study, eight interviews were conducted: four fellows from the LEAD program, two from ICLFP, and two fellows from the LOTUS program. In addition, the interviews include different students from different background. The Egyptian participants are from Qena, Marsa Matrouh, Damietta, Sohag, and Beharia, while The American participants are from New York, Ohio.