CLS expands its Russian program by 150%.

Sure it would have been better for me to post about this before the application deadline (Jan. 25), but I just want to voice my approval of the State Department's expansion of the Russian language program of its Critical Language Scholarship. Also, I am pleased that they moved their programs from St. Petersburg to Nizhney Novgorod, Samara, and Tomsk. I imagine the academic environment in these cities will be better than in St. Petersburg, considering the cities are smaller, there are less foreigners, and students presumably will get better host families (instead of the entrenched extra-income seeking host "families" in St. Petersburg I've heard so much about).

Now if they could just expand the program even more. They took 30 people last year, with presumably 75 to be accepted this year. But when you consider the remarkable interest in the program from students (in 2007, they received over 6000 applications, 550 of which were for the Russian program; yes that's a 5% acceptance rate), and the stark need for more critical language speakers in the US, there should be no reason that the program could not triple or quadruple in size. But considering no such program existed at all in 2006, I wont get too upset about a 150% increase.

One last note: CLS's Farsi program in Tajiksitan, where students learn a bit of Tajik as well, was not expanded from last year.