Good Opening Can Be a Scholarship In the competition for the best students, colleges and universities are always looking for

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问题                           Good Opening Can Be a Scholarship
    In the competition for the best students, colleges and universities are always looking for an edge. This year, Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, is trying a novel approach: offering scholarships to prospective students who are also elite chess players. With the scholarships, officials hope to attract students who might not otherwise apply to the university, which is part of the state system.
    "To be quite frank, Tech is not Harvard and we have to compete really hard for the best students," said Dr. Haraldur Karlsson, an associate professor of geosciences at the university who is also the chess club’s adviser. "And there tends to be a link between good chess skills and good academic skills."
    This year, Dr. Karlsson said, the university selected seven recipients for the scholarships. One is enrolled at Texas Tech, but six are prospective applicants, three from overseas.
    "We are accessing a different pool," Dr. Karlsson said. "We are getting them to look at us."
    Texas Tech joins a small group of institutions that have decided that good chess players are likely to succeed academically and that offering chess scholarship can elevate a college’s reputation. The University of Connecticut’s engineering school, hoping to lure applicants away from the country’s top engineering programs, also began offering chess scholarships this year.
    Other institutions with such programs include the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the University of Texas at Dallas, each part of its state’s public university system. According to Jim Stallings, director of the Texas program and also chairman of the college committee of the United States Chess Federation, the governing body for chess in this country, there are "10 or so" such programs nationwide.
    Founded in 1985, Maryland’s program is one of the oldest in the nation. Dr. Alan Sherman, the program’s director since 1991, said university officials supported the scholarships not only to attract good students but also to raise the profile of the institution. Dr. Sherman estimated that the program cost about $250,000 a year.
    For that investment, the university has one of the most successful chess teams in the country. It has won the Pan American Intercollegiate Team Chess Championships, the elite event in college chess, many times, including in 2005. The other big winner nationwide is the University of Texas at Dallas.
    Dr. Sherman said having a successful chess team benefited the university. "I see the competitive team as a means towards a more important end, which is bringing smart people to campus who will do things in math and science and other fields," he said.

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答案between good chess skills and good academic skills.

解析 见原文第二段"And there tends to be a link between good chess skills and good academic skills."
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