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The article reports that a U.S. government panel's report has asked the Congress and the President to create a new fellowship program to increase the number of American undergraduates studying abroad a decade from now to one million a year. The number of students who go abroad has grown strongly in recent decades. Almost three times as many students went abroad in 2003-4 as in 1991-92. The commission said its goal of one million students by the 2016-17 academic year is 50 percent more than the 640,000 students who would be expected to study abroad 11 years from now if current trends continued. The program would be known as the Lincoln Fellowships.

The article informs that the Educational Testing Service introduced a new version of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (Toefl) that it said was a better gauge of how well foreigners seeking to study in the United States and other countries could really speak the language. The test, which is known as the Toefl, is taken by most foreign students who are being considered for admission at English-speaking higher-education institutions, including those in the United States. In 2004, nearly 750,000 students took the test. In 2005, students taking the exam are paying a fee of $140 each.