The New Why of Partnering

When the 2008 recession hit, college and university administrators were faced with a conundrum: Cut programs and staff or find new sources of revenue. At Santa Barbara City College in California, Carola Smith, senior director of international programs, turned to the college’s longstanding international partnerships. Having these partnerships already in place allowed the community college to quickly ramp up recruiting arrangements with their partner institutions abroad, bringing in badly needed tuition revenue.

“Between 2006 and 2009, we tripled our international enrollment,” says Smith. “That helped to support programs and keep courses open that we would otherwise not be able to have.”

With heightened external expectations and tightened budgets becoming major factors in shaping the ability of institutions to do their work, they have had to learn to work interdependently, and a growing number are choosing international partnerships as a way to accomplish goals they could not have alone.

Leveraging Relationships

According to Mapping Internationalization on U.S. Campuses, a 2017 report based on a 2016 survey of more than 1,000 universities conducted by the American Council on Education’s Center for Internationalization and Global Engagement, partnerships with other institutions ranked among the top three priority activities for internationalization. And nearly half of the survey’s responding institutions reported beginning or expanding the number of international partnerships in the last three years.

Santa Barbara City College’s Smith says her campus’s partnerships have ended up creating a host of benefits that extend far past enrollment and revenue. One partner, International Business School in Sweden, sends 100 to 130 students to Santa Barbara City College every year for a certificate program. The program, launched in 2001, boosts the Swedish students’ job prospects back home, and helps deepen the California campus’s internationalization.

“We had wanted to expand our international student population and at the time we were really interested in diversifying,” says Smith, who first arrived at the college in the 1980s as a student from Germany. “We didn’t have a lot of students from Scandinavia.”

Today, Smith can rattle off a list of countries where the college has or is developing partnerships: China, Germany, Rwanda. “For us, the program expansion has not been the primary focus,” she says. “It’s been how we can provide a diverse program.” That motivation to attract students of many different nationalities continually drives her and others at the college to look for new partnerships abroad.

Understanding the purpose of a partnership is key to making sure its outcomes fit with institutional goals, says Victoria Jones, the chief global affairs officer at the University of California–Irvine. “A partnership needs to be evaluated based on the strategic objectives for which it was created,” she says. “Some partnerships are designed to be revenue-generating. Some partnerships are designed to stimulate joint publications and research. Some are designed to enhance the student experience. So you can’t apply the same evaluation criteria to your whole portfolio if they’re each serving different purposes.”

At Irvine, as at many institutions, researchers develop scholarship-based partnerships with colleagues throughout the world. Jones’s team steps in when agreements require more strategy or are particularly complex. Once a business school professor who taught international negotiation, Jones notes that the goals for each institution in the agreement may not be the same, but if both sides are happy and fulfilling their own goals, the partnership is more likely to continue. That means fewer resources devoted to starting over.

For UC-Irvine, where 91 percent of undergraduates participate in faculty-led research, the need to provide students access to in-the-field research experiences often drives partnerships.

Getting More Out of Fewer Partnerships

Even as institutions increasingly prioritize international education, some are focusing more of their efforts on a smaller portfolio of partnerships. According to the American Council on Education’s survey, 5 percent of U.S. universities reported having reduced the number of partnerships they enter into.

“While it is difficult to generalize, I would suggest that universities with a long history of international agreements are moving to fewer and more strategic agreements,” says Jane Knight, a University of Toronto researcher who studies the internationalization of higher education.

That’s not true of universities newer to internationalization, she says. Such campuses are often trying to develop agreements as quickly as possible in an effort to “brand themselves as an international university.”

That shift toward deeper partnerships and fewer inactive agreements is something Janaka Ruwanpura knows well. As the vice provost, international, at the University of Calgary, Ruwanpura is trying to quantify the value of individual partnerships. Calgary has more than 330 agreements with institutions in more than 50 countries. If he could rate them, Ruwanpura thought, then he could identify both the partnerships that could accomplish more and the ones that could be discontinued.

Over the course of a year, Ruwanpura and the University of Calgary developed a system he calls IPARI, or the international Partnership Assessment Rating Index. Using IPARI, Ruwanpura assigns points to three categories: academic programs and collaborations, mobility programs, and research collaborations and impact. Each category breaks down further into detailed rubrics that help Ruwanpura assign a numeric value.

“When you have a large number of partners, you forget what you’re doing. You work with maybe 30 percent of your partners in an active way, but the others you’re just hanging on to,” he says. “What is the point of doing that? What we want is to see whether we can actually bring the [level of] relationships up so that we work better together.”

Ruwanpura is now visiting partners, ratings index in hand. This summer he met with five universities that Calgary partners with in the United Kingdom. The goal, he says, isn’t just to winnow out languishing agreements; it’s to determine the specific ways to get more out of the partnerships they already have. “By doing a conversation,” he says, “we can assess our partnerships and then maybe elevate those partnerships into more sustainable ones.”

More and more universities are beginning this process, Knight, the University of Toronto researcher, says. There’s a “growing realization that it is of critical importance to develop criteria and systems to plan, monitor, and evaluate international agreements on a regular basis,” she says. “It is not the number of agreements that matter. It is how productive and effective they are.”

Grand Valley State University in Michigan began a similar process more than a decade ago. “Eighteen years ago, when I first started, we had partnerships with all kinds of institutions,” says Rebecca Hambleton, the director of study abroad and international partnerships there. “Back in 2004 or 2005, we created a guide: How were we going to address these international opportunities?” Ultimately the campus built out the partnerships that were chosen to continue.

“We’re not going to go gangbusters. We’re not interested in having 150 partners on our books,” Hambleton says. “We don’t want to ever sacrifice the great work happening at one program [to build others.]”

One of the programs Grand Valley is committed to is a longtime student exchange program with University of Cape Coast (UCC) in Ghana. The program began in the 2000s after a former Grand Valley Fulbright student helped the universities connect. Each had resources the other needed: Grand Valley wanted to build a more robust African studies program. Cape Coast wanted to train its faculty and staff in technology. Both were institutions originally formed as teacher-training schools before becoming full universities. It was a natural fit, Hambleton says.

After three years of grant funds that supported faculty exchanges, Grand Valley had to get creative to finance undergraduate student exchanges. “We worked out a mechanism where we send two students to UCC and they send us one student,” Hambleton says. “We’re able to basically capture those tuition dollars and put those toward scholarship support to bring a UCC student here.”

Now Grand Valley saves effort on time and resources by expanding its Ghanaian presence rather than focusing solely on new one-off partnerships. Through University of Cape Coast, for example, Grand Valley’s social work faculty connected with the University of Ghana to form a new offshoot partnership.

Hambleton believes the established nature of the Cape Coast exchange has helped it become popular with students. Since the student exchange began in 2002, Ghana has risen to be among the top five study abroad destinations for the university. “That would never have happened before,” she says.

Getting Creative

Of course, as at Grand Valley, the perennial challenge is finding a way to pay for all the plans faculty and international officers dream up. If programs can involve more students than before, resources can travel farther.

Kari Knutson Miller, the dean of university extended education and associate vice president of international programs and global engagement at California State University-Fullerton, says she once talked to a Brazilian university administrator about a potential partnership. The idea sounded good at first, Knutson Miller recalls. "But then she said, ‘Maybe we could send one student to your campus and you could send one to ours.’ I clapped my hands to my head and said, ‘No!’”

Such an arrangement would involve a disproportionately large amount of paperwork for a single student. Knutson Miller needed something that would draw in many more.

So, in her retelling, Knutson Miller suggested an alternative. “I said, ‘Do you have a classroom somewhere in Sao Paulo where a Fullerton professor could teach your students for no fee, and you could send one of your professors to do the same here? Yes? Great.’ That’s what we want to do: creative reciprocity.”

Fullerton eventually developed both a STEM-focused mobility partnership with Universidade Estadual Paulista in Sao Paulo and an exchange agreement with Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro. Over a three-year period, Knutson Miller saw a 97 percent increase in study abroad participation.

“We achieved our initial goal,” Knutson Miller says today. “And not just in terms of numbers but proportionally. Our first-generation and ethnic diversity percentages align with the campus percentages now.”

The success of the work in Latin America also led to collaborations with institutions in Mexico through the Consortium for North American Higher Education Collaboration. The area is a key region for Fullerton, which is a designated Hispanic-Serving Institution, and is trying to keep a variety of international education options open to a broad array of students.

“We are a minority-serving institution,” Knutson Miller says. “A fairly large percentage of our student body is Latino. The opportunity to have short-term programs in Latin America is appealing because of proximity. It reduces costs and also reduces jetlag. You can set up creative experiences that are even a few days in length that give students a taste of study abroad opportunities.”

Another way in which some universities are doing more with less is by creating international agreements with other universities from the same country. That’s precisely what Washington State University did with Michigan State University when the pair conducted a two-year demonstration program in Rwanda in the 2000s.

“There was a call for proposals to do this higher education grant to help the University of Rwanda develop a master’s in agribusiness,” remembers Colleen Taugher, the associate director of global research and engagement for Washington State. “I knew [Michigan State] would go for it. They’re bigger. They have so much experience, but I really wanted to be a part of it.”

Instead of applying for the grant outright, Taugher proposed a plan. “I called them and said I have a lot of ideas. If we partner, I won’t compete with you." Taugher says she offered to work with the other university collaboratively instead, and they agreed.

Michigan State won the grant and led the effort to develop the master’s degree program at the University of Rwanda. For two years, Michigan State and Washington State sent over three students each year to gain experience working with coffee farmers in the country, as well as with undergraduate peers from the host institution.

“We love to partner with other universities,” Taugher says. “They fill in gaps in our technical knowledge. Nobody’s an expert in everything.”

For programs like this one that require so many resources and involve so few students, working with other universities to lighten the load can make the process more viable, Taugher says. When universities try to pull off a tiny international program or launch a faculty-led program on an obscure research topic, “they probably can’t get enough students to make it fly,” Taugher says. “By pooling resources, they can make it work.”

Going Big by Keeping It Small

Perhaps the largest international partnership gaining ground at the moment is the University of Arizona’s micro-campus concepts, with more than a dozen already operating around the world. The university is betting heavily on the idea that offering dual degrees from Arizona and each host university is a more sustainable model than developing international branch campuses fully owned by Arizona. Instead of building satellite campuses, Arizona borrows classroom space at university campuses abroad, and Arizona professors teach local students—or Arizona students who are studying abroad. Students pay tuition based on local rates, not on those in Tucson.

The concept, says Brent White, University of Arizona vice-provost of international education, originally came from a desire to offer an international legal dual degree, but soon evolved into a broader effort. Recruiting international students to come to U.S. campuses focuses on a small fraction of students wanting an American degree, he says. That’s only serving the global elite: Either they’re wealthy enough or they’re lucky enough to get funding,” White says. “We saw this huge demand, this huge population that would likely be interested [in an Arizona degree] but would have no chance of coming to Tucson.”

White and University of Arizona law school dean Marc Miller came up with the idea of a micro-campus, which would, White says, address both the high infrastructure costs of building branch campuses and the lack of student mobility. In 2015 the University of Arizona launched its first micro-campus iteration: an undergraduate dual degree in law with Ocean University of China in Qingdao.

White and Arizona’s Office of International Education have since replicated the concept elsewhere. In addition to the Qingdao campus, Arizona has a micro-campus in Cambodia and agreements with 11 more institutions. Approximately 550 students have participated so far. The eventual goal is a global network of 25 campuses reaching as many as 25,000 students worldwide. With each new micro-campus, White says, students across the network have new study abroad options and experts on multiple campuses have the opportunity to collaborate.

Of course, few colleges have the resources such an ambitious project requires; most start small by necessity. Carola Smith of Santa Barbara City College, for example, is just beginning work on a budding partnership in Sri Lanka. She’s met with government officials there, but like every partnership the college embarks on, it starts on a person-to-person scale. As it evolves, like all partnerships these days, it could take on any number of forms. And, she knows, it’ll likely change over time.

“You have to give them time,” she says. “Nurture these partnerships and over the years they’ll kind of mushroom.”

Best Practices for Successful Partnering

• Get buy-in from all involved from the faculty all the way up to the president’s office and the board. This can help in funding new opportunities.
• Consider what your institution has to offer others. Develop reciprocal arrangements. One-sided agreements don’t last.
• Establish goals specific to each partnership. Evaluate partnerships based on the reasons for which they were created.
• Don’t overcommit. Ensure that your institution has the infrastructure to deliver on its promises.
• Develop consistent policies and procedures. This helps protect an institution from liability.
• Support students both before an international experience and after they return. Coach students returning from in-field programs in how to talk about their experiences in interview settings. This can help them receive internships and job offers.
• Monitor and repeatedly revisit partnership portfolios to keep them fresh.
• Get creative. The classic one-for-one student exchange partnership is only one way of doing business.