EDUCATION REPORT - Foreign Student Series #20: Military Colleges

By Nancy Steinbach

Broadcast: January 13, 2005

I'm Gwen Outen with the VOA Special English Education Report.

Our Foreign Student Series continues this week with a report about military colleges in the United States. We will talk about two examples.

One is the Virginia Military Institute, known as V.M.I. V.M.I. is a public, four-year military college in Lexington, Virginia. It accepts women as well as men. Its one thousand three hundred students are called cadets.

New cadets learn some things from older ones. One thing the older cadets teach is the honor system. Cadets must not lie, cheat or steal -- and they must not accept lying, cheating or stealing by any other cadet.

Cadets who violate the honor system are expelled. The school considers the learning of self-control to be an important part of a college education.

Lieutenant Colonel Stewart MacInnis is associate director of communications and marketing at the Virginia Military Institute. He says V.M.I. has forty-five men and women from eighteen other countries this year. Their home countries include Canada, Kenya, Lithuania, Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea. These cadets are mostly studying business and international relations.

The cost for one year at V.M.I. for someone from outside Virginia is about twenty seven thousand dollars.

Another public military college in the South is The Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina. It also accepts both men and women for its four-year program.

The Citadel has close to two thousand students. It says they receive a traditional military education. Graduates are not required to enter the armed forces. But about thirty-eight percent of them do enter the military after graduation.

This year, The Citadel has fifty-six students from thirty-two countries outside the United States. They are studying mainly business, science, computer science, mathematics and engineering. The cost is about twenty-five thousand dollars for the first year. After that, it drops to about twenty-one thousand dollars.

Internet users can learn more about the college at citadel, citadel.edu. The Web site for the Virginia Military Institute is vmi.edu. And all of the reports in our Foreign Student Series can be found online at voaspecialenglish dot com.

This VOA Special English Education Report was written by Nancy Steinbach. I'm Gwen Outen.