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The US-Ireland Alliance is pausing its long-running George J. Mitchell Scholarship Program due to a lack in commitments from big donors, the nonprofit, nonpartisan organization said in a news release Wednesday.
For 25 years, the organization’s nationally competitive post-graduate scholarship has funded up to 12 scholars a year to study any discipline at higher education institutions in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
While the Alliance is not experiencing immediate financial hardship, “operating on a comparatively small budget and on an annual basis is very different from having the stable, permanent funding necessary that comes with an endowment,” Trina Vargo, founder and president of the Alliance, said. “It is time to pause to determine if there is sufficient interest in retaining the most prestigious scholarship that uniquely sends young Americans to the island of Ireland.”
The scholarship class of 2025 has already been selected and will move forward as planned, but there will be no 2026 class.
Although academics perceive the Mitchell Scholarship’s prestige to be on par with the Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships, its $9 million endowment is substantially less than its peers’ (Rhodes has a $508 million endowment, for example), according to data supplied by the Alliance. The organization said it needs a minimum endowment of $40 million to sustain the scholarship for the long term; If the Alliance can raise more money for the scholarship, the Irish government has committed to match up to nearly $22 million.
Vargo, a former foreign policy adviser who aided in the Northern Ireland peace process in the 1990s, created the Alliance in 1998. The scholarship program—named after former U.S. Senator George J. Mitchell, who led those peace negotiations—is “dedicated to consolidating existing relations between the United States and the island of Ireland and building that relationship for the future,” according to its website.
In 2022, the Alliance lobbied the federal government—and got the support of dozens of members of Congress—for more funding for the scholarship but it didn’t materialize.
“The support we’ve enjoyed for the last 25 years is very much appreciated and necessary, but unfortunately, it’s not sufficient,” Vargo said. “Hence the need for a bridge to the future, which an endowment will provide.”
