A Discussion with Ingrid Morjan, Director of the Department of Economic and Financial Assistance, Rafael Landívar University, Guatemala City, Guatemala

With: Ingrid Morjan Berkley Center Profile

May 27, 2015

Background: As part of the Education and Social Justice Project, in May 2015 student Nicolas Lake interviewed Ingrid Morjan, director of the Department of Economic and Financial Assistance at Rafael Landívar University (Universidad Rafael Landívar, URL). In this interview, Morjan discusses scholarships at Rafael Landívar University and the Development with Justice program.
Can you talk about the different scholarships the university has?  

The university has 18 different scholarship programs. Of those, there are four that are funded from external sources, one of which is funded by KfW [development bank Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau]. All the other scholarships come from donors or foundations; any one person can donate to support a scholarship. Total, about 600 students, or around 10 percent of the total number of scholarship recipients, receive their scholarships from an external source.  

So a large number of students have some form of a scholarship?
 

Yes, we have about 5,000 total scholarship students, the majority funded by university money. The university allots from its resources 40 million quetzals every year for the scholarships, and it gets another 3.5 million from external funds. The majority of the scholarships are in regional sites in the interior of the country, and the majority of them are funded from here. So some of the money students who attend classes here in the central campus pay is to finance the operations in the regional sites.  

Can you describe the Development with Justice program?
 

Sure, the project started in 2004, and in its first phase it had 78 scholarships and was financed by a German bank named KfW. The Germans liked how the project was going so they approved a second phase in 2011 and that was called “Development with Justice,” because they wanted to put an emphasis on justice. It’s for that reason that it supports mainly common and poor people, and 50 scholarships are given out exclusively for majors involving justice, like law, criminal forensics and investigation, and legal translators for indigenous languages. In addition to those 50 scholarships there’s another 350 in other majors like psychology, math, physics, agriculture, business administration, nursing, and social work.  

How do you select students for the scholarship?
 

We have a process where they apply and have to meet criteria to be selected. We have an economic level that the students have to be below, and we give preference to the women and the indigenous. People apply for the scholarship, we have an interview, and after there’s a committee in my department where we examine the student’s case, and different officials give their opinion on whether the student should be selected.  If everyone agrees then we send it to the Germans and they gave the final word, but we’ve never had a problem where they’ve denied a student. For the program we have to have a majority of scholarship students be women and indigenous, and right now we have 70 percent women and 77 percent indigenous.
 

What have been the successes of the Development with Justice program?
 

One success has been our ability to select students with scarce resources. The scholarship recipients of the Development with Justice program don’t have the capacity to pay any of their academic costs. They need assistance with their matriculation fees, travel, lodging, food, materials, and everything. These are people that without a complete scholarship wouldn’t be able to study. It’s also been a great success that we’ve been able to have female scholarship recipients. Why? There are different studies that show that women, because of machismo and being subjugated in their daily lives, if they reach higher education, are more likely to have their children in school and rise out of poverty. These women are getting that opportunity.  

The URL has a Jesuit identity. How does this influence the program and the scholarships in general?
 
 
An important part of the URL, since it’s Jesuit, is our mission, which we say is that we’re here to make the best university possible for the country, not of the country, but for the country. And, that we’re going to help make society more just. One way we do that is that the scholarships of the regional campuses have subsidies. While here a major might cost 2,500 quetzals, there it’s only 400 quetzals, for the same major, same title, not a single difference.  

In your opinion, what’s the future of the project?  

The future of the project is promising. The politicians of my country don’t want a private university to control these funds; they want to handle them. We don’t want that to happen because of the latest news about all the corruption. The university is private and Jesuit but has a public vocation. The money the students here pay don’t go into a bank; what happens is that they go to finance the regional campuses and the scholarships. The government approved the two prior phases of the program, but not this upcoming one yet, because they want control of the funds. We will figure it out, and we’re happy because it will be more students we can help.
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