It’s not an exaggeration to say that Science Without Borders changed Lube’s life. The grant gave him enough money to live well and buy a laptop for school. After receiving his degree in Brazil, he went to UBC to get his master’s in wood composites. “Science Without Borders was the best chance I have ever had to succeed in my life,” he said.

Although the long-term effects of the program won’t be seen for some time, educators around the world already agree with Lube: that Science Without Borders has been a huge success. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff recently pledged to send another 100,000 students abroad starting in 2015. The program was a huge experiment in the effort to raise Brazil’s scientific prominence and boost its manufacturing economy—and it was expensive, costing the government over $2 billion U.S. dollars already. Science educators around the world can interpret Brazil’s program as a case study for how federal governments around the world are promoting STEM education and demonstrates just how international the disciplines have become. The number of Brazilian students who enrolled in international institutions, and the fact that they thrived there, indicate the program’s short-term success, which has some American educators wondering: Can the U.S. government ever sustain a program with the express purpose of sending its students away?

Since inflation and stagnation of its currency in the late 1980s, Brazil has been an economic powerhouse over the past decade. This year Brazil had the seventh-highest gross domestic product in the world and, as one of the “BRIC” countries, it’s positioned to play an even larger global role by 2050. With a wealth of natural resources ranging from minerals to lumber, Brazil has one of the strongest industrial sectors in the Americas, making up almost 30 percent of its GDP.

Even though Brazilian education emphasizes STEM fields, politicians and industry professionals wanted to see the country’s innovation taking a larger role on an international stage. Brazil has some of the top universities in Latin America, but policy makers quickly saw that giving its students training at could help boost the country’s mastery. So Science Without Borders, or Ciencia sem fronteiras, was born. In July, Rousseff said of the program: “This is a program designed to ensure Brazil is able to be innovative, and to generate interest in the sciences and the application of technology in all areas including industry and agriculture and especially to facilitate research in basic sciences.”

The program was met mostly with enthusiasm, but some educators had concerns. Eduardo Gomez, now a professor of International Development and Emerging Economies at King's College London, wrote a critical op-ed for the BBC shortly after the program’s launch. He wondered if Brazilian students would try to stay in their foreign institutions instead of returning to Brazil and expressed concerns that the government was spending too much money on students who had already made it through the school system and not on the students earlier in their educational careers. “Before aspiring to build a world-renowned, technically sophisticated workforce, perhaps President Rousseff should invest more in her primary and secondary schools, where the future of Brazil's scientific and technological progress truly resides,” Gomez wrote.