Popular, powerful Facebook really knows how to make friends and treat them well! Their new Facebook Fellowship program is a great example of two important higher education themes: graduate school has value and there is financial aid beyond federally funded assistance and private student loans.

Jill Laster of the Chronicle of Higher Education described the Facebook Fellowship program in the Chronicle’s “Wired Campus” column. Apparently, the fellowship’s financial aid includes a stipend, money for grad program expenses, and 2010-2011 tuition.

Facebook is seeking 5 full-time doctoral students, enrolled in American colleges or universities, to work with Facebook developers to find ways to improve the social network’s Internet technology and social media. Fellowships will likely go to students interested in studying these Information Technology topics:

• Internet Economics
• Cloud Computing
• Social Computing
• Data Mining and Machine Learning
• Systems
• Information Retrieval

Hot IT careers for 2010, anyone? The thing that’s striking about this list is the obvious intersection of culture (sociology) and technology. It doesn’t take a tech genius to see that social media and social networking are the IT specializations to pursue right now.

Be sure to drop in and visit the CourseAdvisor Facebook page after checking out the fellowship. CourseAdvisor and OnlineDegreeFinder have many friends/Friends in common.