Leadership

The message is impossible to miss. One day each fall at North Central College dozens of senior administrators, faculty, and students don maroon T-shirts emblazoned with a three-word imperative: Please go away!

Students are heeding the study abroad pitch, not just because of the human billboards, but because the college has hired more advisers, made study overseas possible at no additional cost beyond airfare, and nearly tripled the number of semester offerings. North Central has come a long way since opening a small Office of International Programs two decades ago at a time when it enrolled fewer than 30 international students and sent only 23 abroad. Now 10 percent of the 3,000 students study in other countries each year. Recruiting efforts and copious financial aid now bring nearly 100 international students to the United Methodist–affiliated college in the suburbs of Chicago each year. At an institution where 90 percent of students are from Illinois, North  Central is progressing toward a goal of a 5 percent international student population.

The college was founded in 1861 by leaders of what is now the United Methodist Church to serve the families of German immigrants. The 65-acre campus sits in downtown Naperville, an upscale suburb 30 minutes from Chicago’s bustling Loop and lakefront. It changed its name from NorthWestern College in the 1920s to avoid confusion with much larger Northwestern  University. Early graduates served as missionaries in Japan and China. “Service and civic engagement are an important part of the culture of this campus,” said President Troy Hammond, who has a PhD in atomic physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but came to academe from the business world. 

Nudging a Campus to Internationalize

Hammond’s long-serving predecessor, Harold Wilde, set the regional college on a course to internationalize in 1994 when he tapped English professor Jack Shindler to direct the fledgling international office, a job he still holds today. Shindler wrote a dissertation on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, but turned early in his career to directing the English as a second language program at Texas Southern University before joining the North Central faculty in 1981. When the international office started, it was just Shindler and a part-time secretary but he now runs a heavily trafficked, six-person shop with its own English Language Institute. Framed above the door to Shindler’s den-like office is a poster inspired by a salute from Wilde calling Shindler the campus “nudge” on all things international. “I nudged not just faculty but students out of the nest,” said Shindler, who as a Williams College student once convinced a chapel board to convert an empty fraternity house into a coffee house and gathering space. “I feel like we’re still doing that. This is a kind of coffee house in the best sense of the word where people come, share talents, talk to each other, network, and make this place more international.”

“We couldn’t have gotten where we are without him,” said Devadoss Pandian, the now retired vice president and dean of the faculty. Norval Bard, a professor of French, said Shindler “has a disarming way about him. He rarely says no. When you come to him with a new idea, he might say, ‘We’ll look into it,’ but he always leaves the door open to explore new ideas.” Francine Navakas, a humanities professor and associate dean who directs interdisciplinary studies, credited Shindler’s “magical planning” with helping land nearly $1 million in Title VI and foundation grants to build East Asian and Middle East/North African (MENA) studies. The college’s structure, with four academic divisions but no separate schools dividing liberal arts from business and science, helped, too, said Navakas. “We don’t have the big walls and barriers that some institutions do.”

Broadening Student and Faculty Horizons

North Central has marshaled resources to give students and faculty ample opportunities to learn and do research in other countries. The college provided grants to 33 faculty over the past five years for projects overseas. The  Office of International Programs arranges lectures, film screenings, and other events on campus focusing on global themes and works closely with faculty to incorporate these topics into courses. It once switched topics yearly, but now spends three years drilling deeper into a single global concern. The current cycle examines globalization and its ramifications. Islam, environmental change, and human rights have each been the focus in the past. The college provides stipends for faculty to join a summer reading and discussion group and sends them to a summer institute at the University of  Chicago’s Center for International Studies.

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Perry Hamalis, professor of religious studies and director of the College Scholars Honors Program, has taken part in nine of those seminars. His honors students are required to study abroad. “We’ve just redone the curriculum and added a new history of ideas minor,” said Hamalis. “The new curriculum now is truly global, pulling from the Indian subcontinent, Africa, Asia, South America, as well as European and North American sources. Previously, it should have been called history of Western ideas.”

The college distributes $40,000 to $50,000 each year in Richter Grants for undergraduate research anywhere in the world. These awards up to $5,000 date back to 1977 and for many years were funded by the Paul K. and Elizabeth Cook Richter Trusts, which provided similar opportunities at other colleges. Recently the college has supported the grants with its own funds. Miguel Purgimon Colell, a junior from El Salvador in the honors program, used his award to fly to Rio de Janeiro during the World Cup in 2014 to study the economic impact of the games on the lives of ordinary Brazilians. His economics professor, a Brazilian, put him in touch with academics and a government official in Rio, and he interviewed residents from all walks of life. He also managed to snag a ticket to the Brazil-Colombia match. “North Central has allowed me to do things I never would have imagined I could do,” said Colell, who is president of the International Club and is studying to become an actuary.

International Students’ Outsize Impact

North Central had just 51 international students when Jesús Velasco was hired as international student adviser in 2012. Two autumns later there were 94 from 40 countries. “Our exchanges from partner universities really boomed,” he said. But the college also stepped up recruiting to enroll more four-year students. It once took “an armchair approach,” said Marty Sauer, vice president for enrollment management. “We didn’t do much outreach or travel. It was simply a matter of accommodating international students who found us.” Now Megan Otermat, an assistant admissions director, recruits overseas and devotes full time to working with international applicants and advising those who enroll.

Otermat found Uyen Lam, 20, at a college fair at an international school in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Lam had spent a year at high schools in Florida and “had a long list of criteria that I wanted for college. North Central fit about 80 of them,” said the finance major. A $20,000-a-year scholarship clinched the deal.

Rosa Moraa received a full scholarship when she transferred from a sister school, United States International University, in Nairobi, Kenya. Now, with a bachelor’s in international business in hand, she is completing a master’s in leadership studies and overseeing student activities as a graduate assistant. Moraa, raised on a farm, said she was once “very introverted” but discovered “it was very easy to make friends. I’d recommend this school to anyone, even those who are scared to come, as I was.”

Exchange student Youssef Balti was among 80 young Tunisians chosen by the U.S. State Department for scholarships and sent to institutions across the United States for a year. “I’m here to learn about democracy and the American culture and take the best from it and bring it back to Tunisia,” said the 20-year-old finance student. A Thanksgiving feast with a friendship family “was a huge experience for me.”

A new pipeline opened with the launch of the English Language Institute in 2014. Applicants are conditionally admitted to the college and already four of the first 15 students have gone on to matriculate. “It will take a little time to measure how many stay and how many go, but the early signs have been very positive,” said Katherine Pope, the director.

Making Study Abroad Affordable

North Central has put study abroad within the reach of students by charging a flat $3,500 fee on top of tuition regardless of whether a program costs two to three times that much, as some do.

When Kimberly Larsson was hired in 2003 as the sole study abroad adviser (she also advised international students), North Central had only nine exchanges and a half-dozen direct enrollment programs. Now it has 17 and 31. It operates programs of its own—one in Costa Rica, one in England, and a third in which students study in both China and Japan. “Study abroad at North Central is very personal. It’s not an assembly line. When we started, we didn’t have a study abroad fair or even a brochure,” said Larsson, who herself studied and worked in Sweden and taught English in Japan. North Central has three 10-week terms with some classes in December. If students choose a fall program abroad that extends into December, they can earn 15 credits without paying an overload fee. Financial aid also carries over. “It can be a fantastic deal,” said Larsson.

The faculty-led December courses now are more “professionalized,” said William Muck, a political science professor who coordinates global studies. “It used to be the faculty would pitch an idea and say, ‘I’d like to take a group of students here.’ It was very loose in terms of organization. Now the faculty must propose courses a year in advance, submit syllabi, and go through a rigorous academic review process.” For long-term study abroad programs, students must take a two-credit seminar that meets weekly in the term before departure, write an essay while abroad, and upon return participate in reentry activities and write a capstone essay. 

Pushing Students Out of Comfort Zones

Kimberly Sluis, vice president for student affairs and dean of students, who coteaches a preparatory class, credits Shindler and Larsson with “busting open the possibilities” for study abroad. Sluis has twice taken students to Ghana, where she was once a Peace Corps volunteer.

International business professor Robert Moussetis has led hundreds of students on classes and cultural trips to more than a dozen countries, including Mongolia. “I tell them, ‘That will be the best and most wonderful learning experience you will ever have. You will survive. You will figure it out.’”

Three North Central students were in Nairobi, Kenya, when the Westgate shopping mall massacre occurred in September 2013. Two left, but Ben Redmond resisted entreaties to come home, and kept studying at United States International University and volunteering in an AIDS clinic. A biochemistry major who aspires to work for Médecins Sans Frontières, he credits North Central with “sparking my interests by pushing international experiences so much.”

Three seniors won Fulbright scholarships in 2014 and two more in 2015, including Heidi Nelson, 21, an education major who’ll teach English in Argentina. She studied in Costa Rica and Peru. “They’ll do anything to support us with our international goals,” she said. “When I had questions on my applications and on my Fulbright, I knew I could go in there any time and they’d stop what they were doing. It’s always an open door.” 

Marie Butnariu had a remarkably global upbringing in Tivoli, Italy, and Chicago. She got U.S. citizenship by virtue of being born on a New York–bound flight from Italy. She spent her first December term studying in France and the second in Israel and Palestine, then took a full semester at the University of Glasgow. The 20-year-old sees international work in her future. “You don’t just get an education here, you build character. It’s special.”

North Central’s enrollment has risen 20 percent over a decade. It opened a $30 million concert hall in 2008 and broke ground in May on a $60 million science center. When Hammond became president in 2013, he recalled a bit of wisdom he heard from his days as a business consultant in New Zealand: for that small, island nation to prosper in the global economy, it had to “punch above its weight.” That strategy is evident in North Central College’s international programs.

When Mary Lyon opened the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in western Massachusetts in 1837, the United States had 120 colleges for men and none for women. FDR’s path-breaking labor secretary Frances Perkins, obstetrical anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar, and playwright Wendy Wasserstein passed through its Gothic halls and strolled the campus landscaped by the son of Frederick Law Olmsted. Even 16-year-old Emily Dickinson, the poet and “Belle” of nearby Amherst, attended classes for a year.

Following in their footsteps today are more than 600 international students, over a quarter of the student body. “You walk through a mini-U.N. on campus,” said Eva Paus, director of the McCulloch Center for Global Initiatives. President Lynn Pasquerella calls it “a microcosm of the world.” It is the second largest concentration of international students at any four-year college. International and domestic students alike are drawn to the country’s oldest college for women with a longstanding commitment to admit young women of talent with little regard to their ability to pay.

Mount Holyoke is not a newcomer to internationalization. The first international student, a Canadian, arrived two years after Lyon opened the doors to a college offering advanced instruction in “science, literature, and refinement” for the good of “our country and for the world.” Mary Woolley, a storied successor and the only female U.S. delegate to a League of Nations disarmament conference in 1932, wrote, “Internationalism has been woven into the very warp and woof of this institution from the beginning.” Today’s mission statement speaks of providing “an intellectually adventurous education in the liberal arts and sciences” to prepare students “for lives of thoughtful, effective, and purposeful engagement in the world.”

Steering a Distinctly International Course

But it is in this century that Mount Holyoke has steered its distinctly international course. A 2003 strategic plan laid the groundwork for the McCulloch Center. By 2007 admiring accreditors were saying that “with little fanfare” Mount Holyoke had created “a veritable world college” in the Connecticut River Valley. While faculty and administrators across the campus share that responsibility, Paus and her five-person staff make it happen. The McCulloch Center has a $12 million endowment of its own and, all told, the college has raised $30 million in endowed funds supporting international studies, teaching, research, and other activities, with more than half generating scholarships for international students.

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The McCulloch Center runs study abroad, develops curated international internships, and provides international student services. It also serves as the fulcrum for activities such as bringing a global scholar to campus each fall (former Norwegian President Gro Harlem Brundtland and Liberia’s Leymah Gbowee, the 2011 Nobel Peace Laureate and parent of a Mount Holyoke student, among them) and organizing biennial Global Challenges Conferences. Paus, a development economist, said the center’s overriding purpose is “to bring greater cohesion and visibility to global learning and to deepen it through new cross-disciplinary initiatives.”

Prizing the Contributions of International Students

Faculty, a quarter of them foreign-born, relish the diversity in their classrooms. When Jon Western, a professor of international relations, needed assistants for a foundation-funded project tracking civilian deaths in Syria, three of the eight students he hired spoke Arabic. “If I talk in my human rights class about Islam, I’ll have Sunni and Shia students who can elaborate on distinctions,” he said.

Politics professor and alumna Kavita Khory, originally from Karachi, Pakistan, said international students often “are much more politically engaged and aware” than U.S. classmates, but the latter “love that we present ourselves as an international college in so many ways.”

“Mount Holyoke is a fantastic place to teach the history of global inequality,” said Holly Hanson, a Uganda expert who as a teen volunteered in Africa for a year on her mother’s advice to “do something useful for the human race” before starting college. “I had this very profound African experience. The classes that I’m teaching 40 years later are answering the question (about inequality) that was formulated for me as a teenager.”

Mount Holyoke relies on tuition for over half its budget. Nearly 80 percent of students receive aid, but the college also looks for students whose families can pay. “We have expensive values… but we have to bring in a class that we can afford,” said Sonya Stephens, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.

Nearly two-thirds of international students come from China, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, and South Korea. Pasquerella said the college decided last year to recruit and admit more students from the Middle East, Africa, and South America because “if you want to be truly multicultural and international, it can’t be all Asian students.”

Paying for Internships at Home or Abroad

Although it might be assumed that a college with a $700 million endowment was well insulated from the financial pressures felt by other private liberal arts colleges, it is not. That made all the bolder the college’s decision in 2014 to fund with its own dollars summer internships for sophomores or juniors. They are guaranteed $3,000 if they land an unpaid U.S. internship or $3,600 to work internationally. 

A third of the 400 students who took the college up on the offer in 2014 landed international placements in 52 countries. Their contributions ranged from participating in community outreach for an archaeological project on Easter Island to advising Fulbright applicants in Brussels to teaching poor farmers in India to become beekeepers.

Alumnae abroad help the students find openings and often directly super vise and mentor them. “Mentorship is really important because we see the internship not just as a preprofessional experience, but a cocurricular experience,” said Kirk Lange, director of international experiential learning. Students must show how the internships fit their learning goals “and both the host organization and the student’s faculty adviser must sign off on them.” 

Maggie Jacobi, a senior majoring in economics, worked as an AIDS educator in Gulu, Uganda, and said she “only had to pay $10 out of pocket for the entire summer. This is a good environment to have really big dreams.”

Schuyler Cowan, an Italian and politics major from Lake Placid, New York, spent her internship in Venice translating documents for the website of Ca’ Foscari University. She believes it helped her win a Fulbright, as four other seniors did this year. Cowan will teach English in Germany.

When Jenny Watermill was hired by the Career Development Center in 2008 to coordinate internships, two others did similar work. Now there are four full-time staff and a dozen others who also spend time on internships.

“The wonderful thing is students are no longer evaluated for internship (grants); if you’re a student, you get it. What we evaluate are the quality of the internships,” said Eleanor Townsley, associate dean of the faculty. 

The guaranteed funding for an internship is part of the college’s Lynk Initiative to connect academic work with practical applications of the liberal arts. The college emphasizes course work and skill-building in preparation for the summer intern ships and research. Back on campus afterwards, many make presentations at a student showcase on their experiences.

Supplementing, Not Supplanting, Study Abroad

The internships are intended to supplement, not supplant, study abroad. “The most important thing for us, actually, is the blend of international internships and study abroad opportunities,” said Stephens. Students who enroll in classes abroad pay the tuition and fees charged by the program or host university.

Students who are on financial aid receive Laurel Fellowships to help pay for Mount Holyoke’s own study abroad programs in Montpellier, France; Shanghai, China; and Monteverde, Costa Rica, or other preferred programs and exchanges. When Sinafik Gebru, a biology major from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, told her father she had won a Laurel Fellowship to study environmental challenges in Costa Rica, he asked, “Aren’t you already studying abroad?” International students cannot use Laurel Fellowships to study in their home country.

Students’ past preference for spring study abroad “created difficulties on campus. We had overcrowding in the fall and empty beds in the spring,” said Joanne Picard, dean of international studies. It righted the imbalance by waiving a $900 administrative fee for studying abroad in the fall.

Bringing International Experts to Class Remotely

Most faculty research grants in recent years have supported work done in other countries or with global partners. Many collaborations cross disciplines. International relations professor Western and Spanish professor Rogelio Miñana team-teach a course that combines human rights law and new media in Latin America. The students’ main assignment is to build a bilingual website for a mock human rights organization and to mount a media campaign aimed at local Latino communities. “Students love the connection between the foreign and local aspects,” said Miñana, an authority on Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the seventeenth century character’s enduring cultural impacts.  

With guidance from a nine-member Faculty Advisory Board, the McCulloch Center keeps a hand in numerous projects aimed at internationalizing the curriculum. In 2011, working with Library, Information and Technology Services, it induced faculty to bring expert voices from around the world into their classes. 

A dozen faculty took a seminar on the pedagogy, techniques, and logistics of videoconferencing, from simply using Skype and Adobe Connect to relying on high-end equipment in designated classrooms. More than 50 faculty have participated and the project, dubbed VP-50, won an award in 2014 from the American Council on Education and the SUNY Center for Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL).

The McCulloch Center offered a carrot to encourage faculty and their international guests to participate in the hook-ups. Faculty members get $150 the first time they arrange an international speaker, and the guest receives a $100 stipend. “It’s just a little gesture, but videoconferencing is a wonderful, economical way of bringing in international perspectives,” said Paus.

Language professors connected classes with universities in France, Italy, and Russia, and an Asian studies class on Chinese opera heard from a renowned performer of traditional Yue opera in Beijing.

Making the Case for Women’s Colleges

Senior Jelena Jezdimirovic from Uzice, Serbia, researched the history of international students at Mount Holyoke while working in the college’s Archives and Special Collections. The economics and critical social thought major catalogued 5,000 alumnae from other countries, including the first from the Balkans nine decades ago. “I couldn’t believe it. People still wonder how I found Mount Holyoke. How did someone in 1924 find out about it?” she asked.

Graduates include the first female editor of the Bombay edition of the Times of India, a spokeswoman for the government of Ethiopia, novelists, and diplomats. “It’s important for students to see that there’s a legacy. Tradition is very important to Mount Holyoke. We’ve always done some things that other schools haven’t done,”  Jezdimirovic said

Half a century ago there were 200 U.S. colleges for women. Today there are barely 40. “In the landscape of higher education, being a women’s college is not the norm. That’s OK with us. Mount Holyoke was an anomaly in 1837, and we have remained a women’s college by choice,” the Mount Holyoke website says. “We know that women thrive in an environment where all the resources are designed for and dedicated to them.”

Professors attest to that. Western, who also teaches international relations at the other members of the Five College Consortium— Amherst, Smith, Hampshire, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (students have reciprocal rights to take classes at the other campuses)— calls the classroom atmosphere at Mount Holyoke “profoundly different.” Paus said that in coed settings, male students often speak out “whether or not they have something to say while women wait to have the perfect answer.”

“The cooperativeness of the way the students interact in classes is really striking,” said Darby Dyar, an astronomy professor who conducts lunar and solar system research for NASA and the National Science Foundation. Dyar is an alumna of Wellesley College, another of the Seven Sister schools.

At a time of great financial pressure on private colleges, staying single-sex comes at the price of cutting off half the potential pool of applicants. “It’s a question that we’ve asked ourselves,” Pasquerella said. “We looked in our most recent strategic plan at coeducation and reaffirmed our commitment to women’s education, believing that it is more important than ever before. It’s a tough sell, but we have so much to offer.” Referring to the attempted assassination of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenage advocate for girls’ education, Pasquerella said, “If women are still dying around the world to get an education, then Mary Lyon’s historic mission hasn’t been fulfilled.”

Khory, the politics professor, said faculty share a conviction that Mount Holyoke is doing the right thing in making internationalization its calling card. “That’s really what we see as our past, present, and future.”

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s (UNC-Chapel Hill) relationship with the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) in Ecuador started in an Amazonian jungle. Biology Professor Stephen Walsh first met Carlos Mena, who would become his PhD student and then later join USFQ as a professor, during a research trip to Ecuador in the late 1990s. Their personal relationship paved the way for a comprehensive partnership between their two institutions that culminated in the establishment of the Galápagos Science Center in 2011. UNC-Chapel Hill’s relationship with USFQ has subsequently expanded to include interdisciplinary research, student and faculty exchange, and community engagement, much of it focused on developing local capacity in the Galápagos Islands.

Building Strategic Partnerships

UNC-Chapel Hill’s collaboration with USFQ is characteristic of its larger approach to internationalization. According to Katie Bowler Young, director of global relations, UNC-Chapel Hill has chosen to focus on creating deep relationships that span multiple disciplines and ultimately result in engagement with local communities.

“Our key partnerships were established through faculty-to-faculty connections. Partnerships grow to include additional faculty, departments, and areas of study. Our team from UNC-Chapel Hill Global then helps develop partnerships, trying to extend them into new areas,” she says.

UNC-Chapel Hill’s long-term engagement in Ecuador was born out of Walsh’s and Mena’s joint research in the Galápagos, which Walsh first visited in 2006 as part of a project with the Galápagos National Park and the Nature Conservancy. “I continued to go back and forth to the Galápagos trying to understand their local needs, but to also begin to develop a UNC vision of what a long-term commitment in the Galápagos might look like,” Walsh says.

USFQ was interested in trying to identify a partner in the Galápagos to expand from undergraduate teaching to a more comprehensive research mission. “For us, we needed to make our presence in [the] Galápagos stronger. We needed an ally for that,” Mena says.

Infrastructure as Key to Sustainable Research

According to Walsh, the two institutions jointly identified infrastructure development as key to creating a sustainable research program in the Galápagos, which he says often suffers from a “one-and-done mentality where people go, gather data, write papers, and go home.”

“What we wanted to do is break this traditional approach to research and create something that is more connected to the needs of the Galápagos. Usually, research is done by foreign scientists who come to the Galápagos, and take their results with them when they leave. We wanted to change from that to something that is growing up from the community,” Mena adds.

In addition to discussing student mobility, they decided that there was a need to build a physical structure as the core of the collaboration between the two institutions.

“If we could build the Galápagos Science Center (GSC) and equip it with needed laboratories, providing unique capacity for science and education in the Galápagos, that would be the basis for an important increase into understanding the social, terrestrial, and marine subsystems in the Galápagos,” Walsh says.

It took almost five years from the time when UNCChapel Hill and USFQ first signed a general memorandum of understanding in 2007 to when the center opened its doors in 2011. Although UNC-Chapel Hill cannot legally own property in the Galápagos due to Ecuadorian law, the funding and construction were equally shared between the two institutions. More than 50 faculty members have subsequently been involved in the partnership.

Having a local base has made research easier for visiting faculty. Diego Riveros-Iregui is a physical geographer in the emerging field of ecohydrology—  “where life and water intersect,” as he puts it. He has spent time at the Galápagos Science Center studying the relationship between water, plants, and soils in tropical regions.

“I have been working in the tropics for several years and have run into many of the same challenges that everyone faces: customs, permits, maintenance of equipment, data collection, sample preservation, etc. When the opportunity to work in the Galápagos came up, working with the staff at the GSC facilitated many of the aforementioned challenges, giving me time to focus on research,” Riveros-Iregui says.

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Human and Ecological Systems Meet in the Galápagos

Mena says that scientific research in the Galápagos has traditionally been focused on hard science in areas such as botany, zoology, and evolution. From the beginning, they wanted to position the Galápagos Science Center as an interdisciplinary hub.

“The Galápagos are oftentimes thought of as Darwin’s paradise. But when you’re there, you can’t help but understand that the environment is changing and interacting with people, and shaping their behaviors,” Walsh says.

He adds that it was evident they needed to involve social sciences: “Two hundred twenty-five thousand tourists came to the Galápagos in 2015. About 30,000 residents live in the Galápagos Islands on four populated islands. It’s clear that it’s not just about ecology. It’s about the connection of people and ecology.”

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Maya Weinberg is a Latin American studies and political science major who took a gap year from UNC-Chapel Hill to do an internship at the GSC. She worked with Walsh on a project using global information software (GIS) to map out human development on San Cristóbal. She was involved with mapping buildings and putting together a report on infrastructure development.

She says that the interdisciplinary nature of the work at the GSC—and the opportunity to be involved in multiple projects in multiple fields—allowed her to make connections she wouldn’t otherwise have made: “With my experience working with human development, conservation, as well as geography I have become increasingly interested in policy and politics, as these are the disciplines that connect all three.”

The Importance of Engaging with the Local Community

Mena says that they built the center with the goal of providing more information to local communities and politicians to make informed decisions on issues such as health, tourism, infrastructure, and economic development.

He says that members of the local community are included in the research process. They work with a community board that keeps the GSC informed of local interests, and have close partnerships with Galápagos National Park and the local government council in order to find better ways to protect the islands.

UNC-Chapel Hill is currently engaging the community in the area of health. A new hospital was recently built on San Cristóbal, and representatives of both UNC and USFQ met with the director of the hospital and the ministry of health for the Galápagos. In 2016 the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Nursing sent a delegation to USFQ in Quito and to the Galápagos to visit the new hospital.

GSC also keeps the community informed about the results of its ongoing research. Kelly Houck is a biological anthropologist and UNC PhD candidate who studies human health. As part of her fieldwork on San Cristóbal, she collected samples of tap water to test for contamination as well as took blood, urine, and fecal samples from local residents to measure different health impacts.

“The water samples needed to be tested within 24 hours of collection and because of GSC infrastructure, we were able to give the results back immediately to the households and provide suggestions for treating contaminated water, such as boiling or using bottled water for drinking,” she says.

“In addition, we were able to provide them with preliminary results from their blood and urine test for indicators of infections, and advise them to seek further free testing at the hospital on San Cristóbal,” she adds.

Young adds that it is not only the local community in the Galápagos that benefits from the partnership. UNC-Chapel Hill’s undergraduate students have also been able to participate in opportunities through the partnership. In addition to semester or year-long exchanges to USFQ, undergraduates can also take advantage of faculty-led summer programs.

Billy Gerhard graduated in 2014 with a bachelor’s in biology and then earned a master’s of science in public health in environmental sciences and engineering. As an undergraduate, he did a summer program at the GSC in 2012. The next summer he returned as a winner of the Vimy award, a grant of up to $15,000 given annually to an interdisciplinary team of students working collaboratively to pursue research or service projects outside the United States. He is currently pursuing a PhD in environmental engineering at Duke University.

“The project definitely impacted my career trajectory. Working abroad required me to plan ahead, anticipate problems, organize contingencies, and communicate effectively. These skills are useful in any career and the opportunity to practice them was invaluable,” he says.

“I am currently writing the results of my research on drinking water in San Cristobal for publication,” he adds.

UNC has also sent local K–12 and community college educators to the Galápagos through its World View program, which strives to help teachers give their own students global competency. “We’ve seen this partnership benefit those beyond our campus as well,” she says.

Young says that having faculty members who are deeply committed to the local community has been key from a partnership development standpoint.

“It couldn’t have happened without two institutions that wanted it to happen, and two leaders, Carlos and I, who saw a vision, transmitted it to other faculty and students, and moved forward with a program that would be committed to community outreach, education, and research at a marvelous place,” Walsh adds.

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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Read more about University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

As Boston’s only public research institution, University of Massachusetts Boston (UMass Boston) sets itself apart in a number of ways, including the composition of its student body. The diversity of UMass Boston, with minority students making up 48 percent of its more than 17,000-student population, means that the global truly starts at home.

Chancellor J. Keith Motley says the university’s current mission goes far beyond its original mandate from 1974: “While we are an institution that began as one that was born to serve the citizens of Boston, we realized that in doing that we also serve the citizens of the world because this campus has transformed into one with over 90 different languages spoken on campus and 150 different countries represented.”

Designated as an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-serving institution (AANAPISI), UMass Boston is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a minority-serving institution. Many students are first-generation college students who come from immigrant backgrounds.

Senior anthropology major Michelle Chouinard says she has benefitted from opportunities to travel abroad as well as the global composition of the student population: “Our student population is so diverse. As someone who grew up in suburbia, it’s altered the way that I look at my own backyard.”

Embracing the Urban Context

Chancellor Motley and Provost Winston E. Langley view UMass Boston’s profile as an urban public research institution as central to its global vision. The university’s mission statement, which was revised in 2010 as part of its strategic plan, explicitly links the urban and the global: “The University of Massachusetts Boston is a public research university with a dynamic culture of teaching and learning, and a special commitment to urban and global engagement.”

According to Langley, the goal is to make UMass Boston the most cosmopolitan public urban research university in the United States. “By cosmopolitan, we mean that our students upon graduating should be able to live, thrive, and establish their social wellbeing any place on earth and do so with cultural ease. If our students are going to be citizens, not just occupants, of that society, they must be actively engaged and must be capable of crossing cultural cleavages and borders with facility,” he says.

A Systems Approach to Internationalization

One of the first things Langley did when he became provost in 2009, after more than two decades serving UMass Boston in a variety of other academic and administrative positions, was to establish the Office of Global Programs. Global Programs currently manages all internationalization efforts at UMass Boston under the leadership of Schuyler S. Korban, who came on board in 2013.

The Office of Global Programs has become the campus’s internationalization hub under Korban’s leadership as vice provost. Global Programs oversees a wide portfolio, including international student and scholar services, education abroad, exchange partnerships, an international visiting scholar academy, international internships, and a Confucius Institute, among others.

Robyn Hannigan, dean of the School for the Environment, has seen a huge change in terms of internationalization at UMass Boston in the seven years she’s been at the institution: “Since Schuyler has come on board, there has been a culture shift where what the faculty are doing (with international opportunities) is not only appreciated, but it’s expected and it’s merited. Our provost and our chancellor are fully aware when we’ve travelled abroad.”

Korban says he draws on his academic background as a molecular biologist in his approach to internationalization. “We think in terms of systems, so I look at internationalization as a system. I’m interested in expanding our network and along with the expansion of that network, identifying nodes of strength in terms of our partnerships overseas,” he explains.

One example of a “node of strength” is the Center for Governance and Sustainability (CGS). Under the leadership of Robyn Hannigan and Maria Ivanova, codirector of CGS, UMass Boston has received an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) grant from the National Science Foundation for its transdisciplinary program, Coasts and Communities. This grant, focusing on international research in the Horn of Africa, has helped shape internal campus development by promoting collaborations among the McCormack Graduate School for Policy and Global Studies, the College of Science and Mathematics, the School for the Environment, the College of Management, and the College of Liberal Arts.

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Ivanova approached Korban about offering a short course in Ethiopia. “I said, ‘Think about it in the bigger context. Let’s think about it as an opportunity to create something sustainable,’” Korban says.

He gave Ivanova funding to establish a regional environmental diplomacy institute that brought together representatives of the Ethiopian ministries of foreign affairs and environment with parliamentarians, academics, and nongovernmental organizations. “We shared our research findings about how countries are implementing their obligations under international environmental conventions,” Ivanova says.

Seed Funding to Increase International Engagement

One of Korban’s first initiatives as vice provost of global programs was to launch a competitive seed grant program that supports internationalization of teaching, research, and outreach. In total, the Office of Global Programs has dedicated $150,000 to the initiative.

“The idea is to support faculty who are interested in internationalizing education, research, and service. As a result, our faculty-led programs have increased. Then, in turn, they develop these new courses that end up impacting our study abroad programs,” Korban says.

Last year, Felicia L. Wilczenski, associate dean of the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development, received a $5,000 seed grant to bring in representatives from John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin in Poland for an international conference, Building Inclusive Communities, in December 2015. She also used the funding to help take a group of UMass students to Poland for a course and study tour titled Focus on Inclusive Policy, Practice, and Educational Reforms in Poland.

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“The funds helped me to enact parts of the MOU that UMass Boston previously executed with the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL) in Poland. These two activities helped to deepen the partnership between our two institutions. We also have a joint research collaboration in the planning stages,” Wilczenski says.

Since 2014 the Office of Global Programs has also committed $50,000 annually to incentivize faculty to internationalize their curricula for both undergraduate and graduate programs. Faculty and teaching staff can receive up to $1,500 for curricular enhancements, the creation of online modules, or travel abroad.

Student Mobility Through Exchange and Short-Term Programs

The Office of Global Programs has focused on developing short-term and exchange programs, largely due to the makeup of the student body. “With the demographics that we have, we have been focusing on short term as opposed to semester or year-long programs,” Korban says.

Over the last five years, the number of UMass Boston students studying abroad has increased from 75 students in 2009–10 to 466 in 2014–15, according to Ksenija Borojevic, assistant director for study abroad.

The Office of Global Programs has also focused on the development of reciprocal exchange agreements. UMass Boston currently offers its students more than 35 exchange options, which also help boost the number of international students on campus. In 2014–2015, 78 exchange students enrolled at UMass Boston.

Natalia Pisklak, a senior biology major, spent last summer at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. She worked one-on-one with a professor to study neurophysiology.

“It made me gain confidence in talking with professors about science. I was always scared of talking about a field that they know so much about, but now I am so much more comfortable,” she says.

Lurlene Van Buren, coordinator of student exchange, says that undergraduate exchange programs also serve as a recruiting tool to attract international students to UMass Boston graduate programs. Marco Bellin, an Italian MBA student, was such an exchange student in 2009–2010.

“I felt from my exchange program here seven years ago that this was a place I could call home. I saw UMass Boston as a good value for money option where I could get a top notch MBA at the fraction of a cost of other institutions,” Bellin says.

UMass Boston also offers 25 faculty-led programs, which have helped contribute to significant increases in students studying abroad. The number of students participating in these programs jumped from 132 in 2011–12 to 219 in 2014–15.

The Honors College offers one such program, a year-long seminar called International Epidemics. In between the two semesters, students participate in a 12-day field experience over winter break to South Africa led by Rajini Srikanth, dean of the Honors College, and Louise Penner, associate professor in English. Last year, Srikanth and Penner also took students to India for the first time.

Penner says that the discussion in the classroom is much richer the second semester after students have returned from their field experience. “The spring semester is very gratifying in some ways, because students make complex associations and analyses, and conversations become very far ranging. That’s why we are both always surprised at the kind of impact that 12 days has on them,” she says.

An Entrepreneurial College Working Across the University

Most of UMass Boston’s faculty-led programs are run through the College of Advancing and Professional Studies (CAPS), which collaborates with all academic departments and the Office of Global Programs. In addition to administering faculty-led programs, CAPS oversees an English as a Second Language (ESL) program, online learning, and a number of certificate and degree programs.

Dean Philip DiSalvio describes CAPS as “the entrepreneurial arm of the university.” However, he stresses that the aim of CAPS, as a self-sustaining unit, is not to generate profit but to contribute to the intellectual life of the campus. DiSalvio’s team works hard to make study abroad affordable to as many students as possible, with programs generally operating at cost.

CAPS often builds on relationships that professors bring with them to UMass Boston. One recent program was Conflict Transformation Across Borders in Quito, Ecuador.

Building on his affiliation as a Fulbright fellow to the Department of International Studies and Communication at FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) Ecuador, Assistant Professor Jeff Pugh wanted to continue running study abroad programs in Ecuador when he joined UMass Boston. During the three-week summer course, students learn about conflict resolution, and acquire skills such as negotiation and proposal writing. They also visit indigenous communities along the border between Ecuador and Colombia. “We talked about how the refugee issue has been affecting their identity as a border community where a lot of people have family on both sides of the border,” says Pugh.

Abdul Aziz, a master’s student in conflict resolution and Fulbright scholar, was one of 14 participants in the program. He was able to find parallels to his own experiences in his native Indonesia. “I didn’t expect to be able to relate my own stories with those of the refugees that I met. It feels very similar with what happens at home in Indonesia with all the identitybased conflict,” he says.

International Exposure for First-Year Students

Within the College of Science and Math, Dean Andrew Grosovsky has helped establish the Scotland Exchange Program in partnership with Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU), an urban university in Scotland. UMass Boston freshmen majoring in science and mathematics engage in the exchange as part of their participation in a freshman success community.

Since 2011 UMass Boston and GCU each send six freshmen to the other institution for a week-long exchange. At UMass Boston, each of three freshman success communities within the College of Science and Math nominate two student ambassadors to travel to Glasgow for a week during the fall semester. Other members of the freshman success communities are responsible for hosting the visiting Scottish students.

Grosovsky says that the larger goal of the exchange is to strengthen and better integrate the three freshman learning communities, which are made up of around 70 students in total. They benefit from working together to host the Scottish students, and at the same time, gain exposure to another culture.

“Sometimes people say that six students for one week doesn’t sound like a lot, but we have had more than 10 times that number who are participating. They are all interacting closely with the Scottish students and are experiencing the value of the exchange,” Grosovsky says.

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Megan Fung is a freshman biochemistry major who traveled to Glasgow as an ambassador. “There’s a lot more to the exchange than people understand. A lot of it is about networking and developing relationships not only with the Glasgow Caledonian students, but also with each other,” she says.

The School for the Environment also offers its freshmen an early international experience. In fact it is the only academic unit on campus that requires students to have an international experience before graduation. As part of the freshman seminar for environmental science, 15 freshmen traveled to the Azores islands in Portugal to learn about geology, ecology, and land-use practices.

Erika Welch, a sophomore environmental science major, said that having an international experience so early in her college career made her want to study abroad again. During summer 2016, she spent three weeks in Brazil in another program piloted through the School for the Environment.

Global Engagement Outside the Classroom

Kim Montoni, director of international education, organizes a number of programs geared toward engaging the larger campus community in global affairs. Her flagship initiative is Global Ambassadors, a leadership program that requires students to commit to working with international programming for an academic year.

Five to 10 students are selected each year to serve as global ambassadors. Throughout the year, they participate in workshops and professional development opportunities. They are also responsible for organizing activities for international students on campus, and they assist Montoni with international student orientation and with the U.S. Department of State’s International Education Week.

“Our job as global student ambassadors is not only to be a bridge, but also to create a very strong community,” says Aroma Kazmi, a psychology major from India.

The students traveled with Montoni to New York City, where they visited the United Nations (UN) headquarters. Last year, global ambassadors also attended the NAFSA 2015 Annual Conference & Expo in Boston.

Montoni collaborates with other offices on campus, offering predeparture orientations and health and safety support for non-credit-bearing servicelearning trips offered through the Office of Student Leadership and Community Engagement. She also works closely with the Division of Student Affairs, whose activities often dovetail with those of the global ambassadors.

Growth Through Strategic Recruitment

The last five years have seen a remarkable increase in the number of international students on the UMass Boston campus, from 675 in 2009–10 to nearly 2,500 in 2015–16, currently making up approximately 12 percent of the entire student body. The boost in international student enrollment has largely been a combination of an active recruitment strategy abroad and pathway programs such as the Navitas at UMass Boston Undergraduate Pathway Program. UMass Boston has focused on the development of pathway programs that allow students to work on language skills prior to pursuing a bachelor’s degree.

According to Michael Todorsky, manager of international partnerships, UMass Boston’s first pathway program began 14 years ago with four students from one program with Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Since then, it has expanded to Vietnam and South Korea. UMass Boston has also established a residential ESL program at the Massachusetts International Academy in Marlborough that currently serves around 300 students.

Lisa Johnson, vice chancellor for enrollment management, would like to increase the share of international students from its current 12 percent. However, the challenge lies in continued growth in domestic enrollment.

The freshman class of fall 2015 was the largest in the history of UMass Boston, with nearly 3,400 new students—and even more growth is projected in upcoming years. To accommodate the expected growth, the campus has been under construction with two new buildings completed in 2015 and 2016, with an investment of more than $700 million. In 2018 the university will open its first residence hall to provide housing for 1,000 students.

Johnson is excited about the prospect of on-campus housing to boost international student enrollment: “We just opened these two academic buildings. We’re building another. The residence halls are going to be beautiful. When all of these dirt piles are gone, you can get back to driving around this peninsula. Who would not want to come here from another country?”
 

With seven campuses in four countries, New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) gives “global” an entirely new meaning. In addition to its presence around the world, NYIT boasts an exceptionally diverse student body, with nearly 20 percent of its students coming from more than 100 countries. The global perspective, as President Edward Guiliano is fond of saying, is infused into the institutional DNA.

NYIT’s high-tech environment also means that its global campuses in Nanjing, Beijing, Vancouver, and Abu Dhabi are just a few clicks away through state-of-the-art video conferencing that allows students to create and collaborate with their counterparts on the other NYIT campuses.

Developing a Global Network

Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Rahmat Shoureshi describes NYIT as a high-tech global network. “We have live connections in all of these places, and our students, as well as faculty, can benefit from all of the expertise we have distributed around our network,” he says.

Eschewing the branch campus model, NYIT campuses worldwide follow the same curriculum and are held to the same academic standards. All admissions decisions also go through the Old Westbury campus on Long Island. As Guiliano puts it, “We are one university and offer one curriculum and one degree.”

NYIT also encourages student and faculty mobility between campuses. Students from NYIT-Nanjing, for example, spend their senior year in New York. Shoureshi’s office will also provide travel scholarships for any NYIT student who wants to spend a semester at one of the global campuses. Faculty who propose research that requires collaboration with other campuses receive priority in allocation of research grants.

The first NYIT global program began in China in 1998; the oldest global campus, NYIT-Abu Dhabi, was founded in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2005 as the first licensed and accredited American university in the UAE capital. NYIT-Nanjing opened its doors two years later, followed by NYIT-Vancouver in 2009. Most recently, NYIT opened a second campus in China in collaboration with the Communication University of China (CUC) in Beijing. NYIT has also just opened a new medical school campus on the grounds of Arkansas State University, in a region of the United States where many people lack access to healthcare.

NYIT also offers a number of dual-degree bachelor’s and master’s programs. With Centro Universitário da FEI in São Paulo, Brazilian students in engineering spend two and a half years at FEI, then come to New York for one and a half years, and then return to Brazil for their final year. NYIT also has degree partnerships with more than half a dozen Chinese universities, as well as with institutions in Brazil, France, India, Mexico, Taiwan, and Turkey.

Creating a Positive Experience for International Students

The presence of more than 2,500 international students on the main New York campuses in Manhattan and at Old Westbury on Long Island helps bring the world to NYIT.

Amanjeet Singh, an engineering major from India, feels like NYIT effectively bridges the gap between domestic and international students. He has done his part to help international students integrate into life at NYIT as an international student ambassador, a program managed by the Office of International Education.

“I take care of the freshmen students that come from India or other parts of the world. We have different events and programs so that people can get involved,” he says.

To ensure a positive experience for all international students, the institution convened an international student task force consisting of around 30 faculty and staff in Manhattan and Long Island in 2014–2015. They explored four areas: education, housing and food, jobs and career services, and customer service.

As a result, NYIT created workshops to help faculty and staff understand the challenges international students face, added a range of cultural foods in the dining halls, created on-campus job opportunities, and worked with units across the institution to improve customer service to international students.

The Office of Campus Life also collaborates with the counseling and wellness services offices. For example, it invited in therapists who spoke other languages to help international students understand what counseling entailed, and subsequently saw an uptick in the number of international students seeking counseling services.

Student service, according to Ann Marie Klotz, dean of campus life for Manhattan, is the heart of the NYIT experience. “If I can’t help you, I’m literally going to walk with you to the next office and make sure you have what you need. I think that is the difference maker for a lot of our students,” she explains.

“This is a very special kind of place if you allow yourself to get immersed in the life of students. It doesn’t feel overwhelming. It feels like an overwhelming privilege.”

Preparing Global Professionals

One of the core elements of an NYIT education is to prepare students to enter the job market upon graduation. President Guiliano says that NYIT fosters global competency by providing students with real-world experience and exposure to industry as well as opportunities to work with teams around the world. “Global competency means that work experience, connectivity, and collaboration are really part of what we do in the curriculum.”

Under the rubric of career services, Amy Bravo, assistant dean, oversees experiential education, internships, and service learning. Her office also coordinates job fairs and organizes mock interviews and networking opportunities.

They take special care to ensure that international students are also able to take advantage of opportunities to gain professional skills while still complying with immigration requirements.

Bravo created a number of alternative opportunities for international students to get practical experience. One such initiative is Consultants for the Public Good, which allows all students to work together on projects such as designing a multimedia art gallery for a school cafeteria.

“The idea is to get students to work in teams on community-based projects as opposed to signing up for a volunteer opportunity one time,” Bravo says.

Her office also oversees on-campus employment for both New York campuses. A few years ago, it created a job lottery for student employment, and several positions were earmarked specifically to international students, she says.

Localizing a Global Curriculum

The curriculum remains the same at each campus, but the content of courses can be adapted to the local context. “If students are taking a course in finance in New York, maybe the examples or the case studies are more focused on the types of investments, stocks, and so forth. The same class in Abu Dhabi follows the same curriculum. But the case studies will be on Islamic finance rather than on the stock market,” Shoureshi says.

Harriet Arnone, vice president for planning and assessment, explains it in terms of learning outcomes: “We have to guarantee consistency in learning outcomes across campuses....However, to be relevant to different cultures, particularly as we are so career-oriented, we allow faculty at different locations to add learning outcomes to courses… that reflect the environment...in which graduates will be working.”

NYIT is in the process of developing an occupational therapy program in Vancouver, British Columbia, which must be approved by the Canadian National Organization of Occupational Therapists. Jerry Balentine, DO, vice president for medical affairs and global health, says that as a result, students in the occupational health program in New York will be exposed to more information about the Canadian health care system.

Boosting Student Mobility

Education abroad at NYIT is housed in the Center for Global Academic Exchange, headed by Julie Fratrik. In addition to coordinating services for inbound international students coming to New York from exchanges or other NYIT campuses, her office also offers education abroad advising for outbound domestic students. In 2014–2015, 183 NYIT students participated in education abroad.

Kayla Ho, an American electrical and computer engineering major, spent spring 2015 at NYIT-Nanjing. Her family roots are in China, and she says the experience allowed her to learn more about her heritage as well as about her field of study.

“The chance to go to Nanjing was incredible.... Since it opened its doors, China has been developing technology at an astounding rate; there are new technologies and technology companies being created every day,” she says.

Eriana Burdan, a junior communication arts major, attended one of NYIT’s summer programs with its partner in Paris, École des Nouveaux Métiers de la Communication (EFAP). She took a course in documentary filmmaking that gave her a new perspective on her future media career.

She says it made her think about other career options in her field: “It made me realize that I was pigeonholing myself. There are so many more opportunities in and outside of the United States. It expanded the scope of what I could do with my major.”

Creating Alternative Opportunities to Travel the World

Beyond traditional study abroad, NYIT offers a number of noncredit opportunities for students to travel. Since 2014, President Guiliano has spearheaded Presidential Global Fellowships, which offers awards for NYIT students to engage in research projects, attend global conferences and symposiums, study abroad at another university, or do an internship at international nonprofit organizations.

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Guiliano says the goal is to help students have “transformational experiences” at least 200 miles from students’ home campuses. Since the program’s inception, more than 50 students have received awards.

Usman Aslam is a second-year medical student who received a Presidential Global Fellowship in 2015 to travel to Guayaquil, Ecuador, to spend a week working at a mobile cataract surgery clinic, where he was part of a team that performed 128 cataract surgeries. He received $2,500 to cover the cost of his airfare and lodging.

Aslam says that the fellowship was instrumental in his ability to travel. “A grant like this allows us to expand our training, our experiences, and helps mold our understanding of what we want to go into. The fellowship provided me with funding to broaden my perspective on medicine,” he says.

In addition to providing funding for students to create their own “transformative experiences,” NYIT also offers a number of service-learning opportunities abroad. For example, the Office of Career Services organizes an alternative spring break that enabled junior Anthony Holloway to travel to Rivas, Nicaragua, with nine other students to work on a project aimed at improving water quality in the community.

“I had never left the country before,” says Holloway, an interdisciplinary studies major.

Internationalizing the Disciplines

At its New York campuses, NYIT has seven schools and colleges with more than 90 undergraduate, graduate, and professional degree programs. Schools have a variety of faculty-led programs abroad, opportunities to engage with international issues in the classroom, and programs for international students.

The School of Management, for instance, offers four study abroad programs to Costa Rica, India, the Netherlands, and Germany. Students can also do summer internships at destinations around the world.

Every summer, Associate Dean Robert Koenig runs a 27-day business program in New York for 20 students from Hallym University in South Korea. Students take English language and business leadership courses in the morning, and spend afternoons touring business and cultural sites in New York City.

Koenig received the 2015 President’s Award for Student Engagement in Global Education, given to faculty and staff who have made major contributions in the area of global education. His Korea program has been so successful that the School of Management will be launching a similar program next summer with the Tourism College of Zhejiang in Hangzhou, China.

The School of Architecture and Design also has a wide variety of study abroad options for its students. It runs three to four short-term study abroad programs every year, usually in the summer. Approximately 24–40 students participate in these programs per year.

Assistant Professor Farzana Gandhi has worked with a group of students to redesign beach architecture in Puerto Rico and led a program to India that examined the need for affordable mass housing. Many of her courses are focused on social impact design and seek socially and environmentally conscious solutions to global problems such as mass migration, disaster relief, and climate change.

Gandhi says that study abroad has helped her students see their professional practice in a new light: “They have an appreciation for the end user in a much more thorough way.”

From 2012–2014, Gandhi’s students were involved in the Home2O Project, research that led to the development of a roofing system made of recycled plastic bottles and shipping pallets, which has subsequently been patented. Starting with locations like Haiti, they were seeking to develop a kit-of-parts system that could be deployed very quickly at disaster sites in subtropical climates.

NYIT has also provided support for faculty to pursue international research. School of Architecture and Design Associate Professor Charles Matz, who is also director of NYIT’s Center for Data Visualization, received an institutional grant that allowed him to work with the Ethiopian government and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to laser scan heritage sites.

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He has also worked on a number of joint programs with international partners in countries such as Egypt, the United Kingdom, and Iceland. Matz says that international programs allow students to understand the global standard for the architecture profession.

“Students realize that what they’re doing here is exactly what other people in their situation are dealing with abroad. Their work and its seriousness ramps up because they realize they’re dealing with global issues,” he says.

As vice president for medical affairs and global health, Balentine directs NYIT’s Center for Global Health. “The Center for Global Health really teaches our students about other countries and health care needs there and how to deliver it,” he says.

Through the Center for Global Health, medical students and students in the health professions can pursue a global health certificate. In addition to core courses, students do global health fieldwork, a 2–4 week program where students deliver health care services in countries such as Haiti and Ghana. They also complete an independent research project on global health under faculty supervision.

Balentine says the goal of the certificate is much broader than just getting students to go abroad. “From a teacher’s point of view, the real value is that even if these students never again leave the U.S. to practice medicine, the experience, the difference in health care that they see, the difference in living, the difference in cultures that they see, makes them better physicians back home,” he explains.

NYIT’s College of Osteopathic Medicine also offers a unique Émigré Physicians Program, which each year enrolls approximately 30 students who were trained physicians in their home countries. It’s one of the few programs of its kind in the United States.

Paving the Way to the Future

In 2015 the institution launched a new long-term strategic plan, known as NYIT 2030 version 2.0. According to Arnone, “When the plan was first published in 2006 the emphasis was on NYIT’s footprint and its additional locations overseas. In the revised plan, the language of the relevant goal now focuses on the global impact of an NYIT education; correspondingly, the priority initiative in support of this goal focuses on increasing opportunities for deep engagement across cultures.”
 

The College of William & Mary (W&M) in Williamsburg, Virginia, carries on an educational tradition that traces back more than three centuries. As the second-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, William & Mary was founded by King William III and Queen Mary II of England. As current President Taylor Reveley puts it, “We were born global in 1693.”

William & Mary sponsored its first study abroad programs in 1924, and today the university boasts the highest percentage of undergraduates participating in study abroad programs among all public universities in the United States. As of 2016, more than 50 percent of William & Mary undergraduates study abroad before graduation;1 according to Reveley, W&M aims to increase that number to 60 percent by 2018.

Drawing on its historical commitment to innovative teaching and learning, today William & Mary has emerged as a leader in international education with opportunities such as undergraduate research on crucial global problems and a strong ethos of public service. For example, W&M is currently one of the top producers of Peace Corps volunteers among institutions of its size.

“The students who come here want to come to a university that not only has study abroad opportunities, but that also gives them the tools to involve themselves in tackling problems in the developing world or global issues ranging from climate change to health,“ says Stephen Hanson, vice provost for international affairs.

Creating a University-Wide Internationalization Hub

At the forefront of all things international at William & Mary is the Reves Center for International Studies, established in 1989 with a mission “to support and promote the internationalization of learning, teaching, research and community involvement at William & Mary.”

The Reves Center provides support for international initiatives at W&M’s five academic schools—the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Raymond A. Mason School of Business, the School of Education, the School of Law, and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS). In addition to managing study abroad, offering support for international students and scholars, and providing travel safety advice, the Reves Center promotes and supports international research and organizes on-campus events for the wider campus—and Williamsburg—community.

Since Hanson became director in 2011, he has broken down institutional barriers and worked with offices and academic units across the campus. “We just made it really clear that this is a universitywide internationalization hub,” he says.

Global Engagement Through Outreach and Assessment

The Reves Center is divided into three offices: Global Education; International Students, Scholars, and Programs; and Global Engagement. During his tenure at the Reves Center, Hanson has very intentionally built out the global engagement team, which works with internationalization more generally.

Kate Hoving, public relations manager, oversees the Reves Center’s outreach efforts. She says her job is important to building an internationally minded community. “It’s important to nurture a sense of connection with students and faculty who have come through Reves—whether through study abroad or as international students, scholars, and families,” she says.

Another recent addition to the global engagement team is Nick Vasquez, international travel and security manager. Vasquez, who previously worked for the U.S. State Department, assesses risk for students, faculty, and staff who go abroad on university-sponsored travel. Vasquez, who is a member of the university’s Emergency Management Team, says that being aware of the potential risks associated with international travel is an important aspect of running a safe program. In that capacity, Reves serves as a clearinghouse for the entire campus.

Growing Education Abroad with University-Wide Support

The first stop for the more than 800 W&M students who go abroad each year is the Global Education Office, overseen by director Sylvia Mitterndorfer. In addition to the resources available through financial aid, W&M provides more than $400,000 a year in education abroad scholarships. Students can choose from among W&M’s 45 faculty-led programs, 17 semester-long exchange programs, or options through third-party providers.

One of the newest faculty-led programs is an interdisciplinary course, affectionately dubbed “Rock Music Oman,” developed by geologist Chuck Bailey and ethnomusicologist Anne Rasmussen. Students spent two weeks in January 2016 exploring the natural landscape and geological formations of the Omani desert and coastal regions and the vibrant arts scene in the capital of Muscat.

William & Mary also strives to create programs, many with a research component, that make study abroad available to all majors. Senior Alpha Mansaray, a double major in public health and kinesiology, participated in a summer program in Antigua.

“For science majors, it’s hard to fit study abroad into your curriculum. When I heard about this program, I got so excited because I didn’t think I could study abroad. As part of the trip, we also visited hospitals and learned about a different medical system,” Mansaray says.

Comprehensive Services for International Students, Scholars, and Their Families

In addition to sending 800 undergraduates abroad each year, William & Mary also hosts nearly the same number of international students and scholars. Stephen Sechrist is the resident expert on immigration regulation as the director of the International Students, Scholars, and Programs Office (ISSP). According to Sechrist, ISSP operates in three core areas: immigration and visa services; programming, advocacy, and outreach; and English language programs.

Sechrist and his staff try to build relationships with students and their families before they even set foot on campus. Recently, they have partnered with the Dean of Students Office to offer admitted students days abroad, starting in Beijing and expanding to Seoul, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo. “For a lot of our international students abroad, it’s just not feasible to fly over for a one day event,” Sechrist says.

W&M will be launching its first intensive English program this summer. Students will start online in their home countries and then do a residential week at W&M prior to the regular international student orientation.

Staff also find other ways to help new international students connect to the W&M community before they arrive on campus. Through the virtual conversation partner program, which was designed by W&M School of Education alumna Jingzhu Zhang to help international students feel connected to campus and practice their English, April Yuezhong Zheng, a senior history major from China, was paired with a U.S. student. “I started talking with my partner Connor over Skype. We started in late May and then we basically did it at least two to three times a month until I arrived. He even picked me up at the airport,” she says.

In addition to serving international students, ISSP also tries to provide support to the families of its approximately 100 international scholars.

Ettore Vitali is a postdoc from Italy who studies theoretical environmental physics. His wife, Gabriella Lettini, accompanied him to Williamsburg. She has been able to take English classes as well as find ways to get involved in the community through volunteering at a local animal shelter. “It is very helpful for me to improve my English and also to meet other people,” she says.

“We have a very thriving international family network to support the families of our international students, scholars, and faculty,” Sechrist adds.

At the graduate level, the law and business schools have more active recruitment strategies for their LLM and MBA programs. Amanda Barth, director of MBA admissions for the Mason School of Business, says that approximately 40 percent of the 110 students in each MBA cohort are international.

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Deep Connections Abroad with International Partners

Since 2011 W&M has offered a unique joint degree program with the University of St Andrews in Scotland that grew out of a 25-year study abroad and exchange relationship. The program currently has four tracks: economics, English, history, and international relations; new tracks in classics and film studies have also just been approved.

According to Associate Professor and Program Director Colleen Kennedy, the program recruits approximately five students in each major at each school, for a total of 40 students per cohort, the first of which graduated in 2015. In total, students complete two years at each institution.

History major Jui Kothare says one of the reasons she chose the program was the history of the two institutions. She began her freshman year at St Andrews before moving to W&M her sophomore year. “The second year is really tough just because you have to be a freshman again and make the same connections all over again,” she explains.

To help students make the transition, Kennedy created a peer advising program. “Our job is basically to help the first and second years come over here, and integrate into the community,” says economics major Cooper Nelson.

Nelson says the program’s uniqueness helped him secure a position at a consulting firm in Washington, D.C., after he graduates: “The program provides such a great talking point. It’s provided an easy way to connect with employers. They have to question: ‘why did you go to two different schools at the exact same time?’”

Bringing International Partnerships to Campus

Established in 2011, the William & Mary Confucius Institute (WMCI) is a joint program with Beijing Normal University in China, sponsored by Hanban, a nonprofit organization under the Chinese Ministry of Education. “Our mission here is to promote Chinese language learning and Chinese language culture, on campus and also in the neighboring community,” says Lei Ma, Chinese director.

Ma says the institute has collaborated with various departments, including the Chinese Studies department, to organize events and lectures. It also assists the Reves Center in predeparture orientations for study abroad to China and helps host a summer program for 40 undergraduate students from Beijing Normal University.

“We also do quite a bit of community outreach here. For example, we collaborate with local K–12 schools,” adds Ying Liu, WMCI assistant director.

Another flagship program overseen by the Reves Center is the William & Mary Cross-Cultural Collaboration with Keio University in Japan. Each summer, W&M hosts 40 Japanese students for a three-week program that allows them to study U.S. culture and society alongside William & Mary students.

William & Mary also participates in the Presidential Precinct, a nonprofit organization operated in collaboration with the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, James Madison’s Montpelier, James Monroe’s Highland, and William Short’s Morven. The consortium hosts 25 young African fellows through the Mandela Washington Fellowship, the flagship program of President Obama’s Young African Leaders Initiative, for a six-week program every summer. 

A Longstanding Commitment to Undergraduate Research

William & Mary has been described by Dan Cristol, a biology professor, as having “the heart of a liberal arts college with the brains of a research university.” Nowhere is this more evident than in the university’s commitment to undergraduate research opportunities.

“What makes undergraduate education here great is the way the faculty teach. A lot of them increasingly teach through research. I publish articles with my students,” says Sue Peterson, government professor and director of the international relations program.

In fact, approximately 70 percent of William & Mary undergraduates participate in mentored research with a faculty member or take a course in which research is a primary component.

Senior Hispanic studies major Stephanie Heredia participated in a five-week summer study abroad program to Cádiz, Spain, where she researched Spanish pop culture as part of her capstone project: “At the end of the project, we had to do a 15-page paper and a presentation all in Spanish. This experience really helped me get acquainted with the culture and field research practices.”

W&M offers incentives for faculty to collaborate with students on research projects. Through its faculty fellows program, Reves offers grants of $5,000–$10,000 for “projects that involve students either through student-faculty collaborations on an international research project, or that involve research, teaching, and learning through community-based engagement.”

In 2012 Francis Tanglao-Aguas, professor of dance and theater, received a $10,000 grant to travel to Bali, Indonesia, with a fellow faculty member and five students. As a result of the trip, he produced the Sitayana (Sita’s Journey), an original dance theater epic inspired by the story of the wife of a Hindu poet. The five students who traveled with him assisted with training the other students who took part in the production.

“The fellowship led to the creation of an original piece. It was a major component of my body of work with students. I took five students, but when you count the more than 150 students who were part of that project afterwards and the 1,000 students who saw the show, it was a worthy investment,” Tanglao-Aguas says.

A Campus Hub for Student-Faculty Collaboration on Policy-Relevant Research

A hub for interdisciplinary undergraduate research on campus is the Institute for the Theory & Practice of International Relations (ITPIR), headed by Director Michael Tierney.

ITPIR’s mission is “to produce innovative and policyrelevant research; to provide students with research skills and experiences; and to make a difference in the world.” There are currently more than 20 faculty and 250 undergraduates involved with ITPIR in various ways.

ITPIR has projects on topics ranging from the impact of cell phone technology on women’s empowerment and development in Africa to using computer algorithms to forecast political violence. Other programs include an undergraduate think tank in international peace and security and a summer program in Bosnia during which W&M students run an English immersion camp for kids.

AidData is a W&M research and innovation lab affiliated with ITPIR that focuses on international development finance. According to Carey Glenn, junior program manager, around 120 student researchers work on aid tracking programs. AidData sends 15–20 of these student researchers abroad for 10 weeks through its summer fellows program.

Breanna Cattelino, a senior public policy major, spent last summer in Uganda to train local organizations in global information systems (GIS). “It was a lot of actual on-the-ground work,” she says.

Curriculum Reform to Provide International Experiences for Everyone

According to Provost Michael Halleran, William & Mary’s goals in the next several years are to “become even more international, interdisciplinary, and engaged with student research in the coming years.” A big step toward achieving these aims is the implementation of a new undergraduate general education curriculum in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences this year.

The new curriculum replaces the previous “breadth requirements” with an integrated series of courses. Freshmen take courses that introduce them to “big ideas,” followed by courses rooted in natural science, social science, and humanities that nevertheless take an interdisciplinary approach their sophomore year. Their junior year, students take “COLL 300,” which requires a global or cross-cultural experience. Students then complete a capstone project during their final year.

“One of the things that we are trying to do in the new curriculum is put a greater emphasis on things international and global and be sure that everybody one way or another gets involved,” says President Reveley.

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Hanson says COLL 300 is the “internationalization pillar” of the new curriculum. Most students will meet the COLL 300 requirement through study abroad. Students can also meet the cross-cultural requirement through study away in the United States or through specific on-campus courses with a global focus.

Halleran adds that COLL 300 was designed from a perspective of “opportunities more than requirements. I’m very pleased with how the faculty addressed a broader international piece in the curriculum,” he says.

Faculty members are equally as pleased with the new curriculum. “All the initiatives with COLL 300 are really to institutionalize what a lot of us have already been doing,” says ethnomusicologist Anne Rasmussen.
 

In May 2018, a delegation of senior administrators led by Lawrence Schovanec, president of Texas Tech University (TTU), arrived in Costa Rica with scissors in hand. They were there for the ribbon cutting ceremony at TTU’s first international degree-granting campus, Texas Tech University at Costa Rica (TTU-CR). The new campus, a public-private partnership between TTU and Costa Rican financial group Promerica Group, is one of the most visible examples of the ways in which TTU has expanded its portfolio beyond its main campus in Lubbock, Texas.

In the last 2 decades, TTU has transformed from a regional institution in west Texas to a top research institution with a global reach spanning from Costa Rica to Spain. TTU’s robust research portfolio and its international partnerships have helped propel the university’s recent Carnegie designation as one of 115 top tier research institutions—of which 81 are public institutions—in the United States. TTU’s research strengths include areas such as climate change; the interconnections of water, land, food, and fiber; computational and theoretical sciences; and energy. 

In addition to its physical presence around the world, the university currently serves 37,000 students—more than 3,000 of whom come from abroad—on its main campus. Internationalization has gone hand in hand with TTU’s quest to become, in the words of its first president Paul Whitfield Horn, an institution that thinks in “worldwide terms.”

“We’ve created a culture at Tech that covers the full gamut of international activities and initiatives,” Schovanec says. “It’s not just a matter of raising international student enrollment; it’s creating a community here on campus that’s supportive and appreciative of comprehensive internationalization of our education enterprise. It relates to research funding opportunities that have an international focus and opportunities for students to be involved in study abroad.”

Advancing TTU’s Global Vision With Strategy

The Office of International Affairs (OIA) is at the helm of TTU’s internationalization efforts. Under the leadership of Vice Provost for International Affairs Sukant Misra, OIA’s mission is to advance “the global vision of Texas Tech University by promoting international leadership, awareness, education, scholarship, and outreach for the university and the broader community.”

The unit oversees international recruitment, international undergraduate admissions, international student and scholar services, and study abroad. OIA is also responsible for international partnerships, research collaborations, and grants administration. The K–12 Global Education Outreach (K–12 GEO) initiative, which is part of OIA, won a NAFSA Senator Paul Simon Spotlight Award for its outreach efforts in 2016. K–12 GEO works with local schools and classrooms to foster global awareness in the wider Lubbock community. OIA continues to find new ways to move the university’s internationalization strategy forward on and off campus.  After 25 years at TTU, in various positions, Misra became vice provost and senior international officer in January 2018. Prior to this role, he served for 4 years as associate vice provost of international programs under Tibor Nagy, a former ambassador to Ethiopia and Guinea who retired from TTU at the end of 2017 after a 14-year tenure. 

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As associate vice provost, Misra spearheaded the development of the 2015–2020 OIA Strategic Plan and preparation of annual strategic plan assessments, which fed into the university’s new strategic plan, “A Pathway to 2025.” The strategic planning process led to several university-wide goals, such as integrating global perspectives into the curriculum and furthering intercultural understanding in the community at large.  

TTU also launched a new quality enhancement plan (QEP) as part of its 2015 reaccreditation with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). The QEP, “Communicating in a Global Society,” focuses university-wide efforts on global communication and awareness. Led by the Office of the Provost, the QEP has provided additional funding to enhance undergraduate education in global communications through programing, educational activities, and scholarships.

Building a Globally Engaged Student Community

An area of strategic aim for TTU has been creating a globally engaged student community by recruiting, admitting, retaining, and graduating more international students. One of the first things Misra did as associate vice provost was to help transition international undergraduate admissions from the Graduate School to OIA, which has led to a more streamlined admissions process. 

TTU has always had a large international graduate student population, so many of the university’s recruitment efforts in the last few years have been centered on international undergraduates. The efforts have been fruitful; in the last 5 years, the number of international undergraduate students on the TTU campus has grown by more than 80 percent. According to President Schovanec, the number of international undergraduate students on campus exceeded the number of international graduate students for the first time in fall 2017. 

“We set out on the path to increase our [international] undergraduate enrollment very intentionally,” says Provost Michael Galyean. “We provided the appropriate staffing and defined what kinds of services we needed to offer. We made a commitment to serve those students once they got on campus.”

At the same time, the international graduate population grew by 18 percent. Now, more than one-quarter of all graduate students on campus are international.  

International students are primarily served by the International Student Life unit within OIA. This unit organizes orientation, welcome week events, and cultural programs, among other activities. Beth Mora, international student life coordinator, manages TTU’s international student orientation and other events throughout the academic year. “We help connect them to the Lubbock community, help connect them to the university, and help connect them to each other,” she says.

To help ease incoming international students’ transition to campus life, OIA partners with off-campus student apartments to provide incoming international students with a place to stay if they arrive in Lubbock before the campus residence halls open. Students are able to pay $5 per day for a “three-day stay.” “Many of our international students take advantage of both airport pickup and the three-day stay,” says Mora. 

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Dhanraj Apte, a graduate student from India studying industrial engineering, says he did not realize how much effort TTU puts into helping international students transition to life in Lubbock until he started working as a graduate assistant for OIA. “They have recognized the need to offer help and create[d] different resources for international students to make sure that we’re not having difficulties adjusting to U.S. culture,” he says. 

Promoting International Research to Advance Internationalization

Misra has also helped provide a renewed emphasis on international research and partnerships with the establishment of the International Research and Development (IRD) division of OIA in 2014. The unit, with support from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Office of Research Services, assists faculty from across campus to engage in international research and development activities. In addition to sending a monthly email that provides information about internal and external funding opportunities, IRD assists faculty with putting together grant proposals. 

“We have really ramped up our support for international research,” says Provost Galyean. “In the last 4 years, we’ve had a significant increase in not only the amount of funding we received, but also the number of proposals related to international research going out the door.” 

Biology professor Gad Perry, who also serves as senior director for international research and development, says his job is to help make international research collaboration as easy as possible for faculty by helping them identify funding opportunities and potential collaborators abroad. “We provide resources, information, and connections,” he says. “In doing so, hopefully we enhance the chance that they’ll do international research.”

Reagan Ribordy, director of international programs, says the IRD unit oversees a budget of $25,000 for international research seed grants. Approximately 10 faculty receive $2,000 grants per year to cover travel or other start-up costs, with the goal of eventually gaining external funding. Recent projects have included an investigation of young people’s communication via social media in Thailand and a pilot study on the antidiabetic properties of a medicinal plant found in Belize. 

According to Ribordy, TTU faculty have submitted more than $50 million worth of proposals since the IRD unit was established in 2014. Since then, the university has received approximately $4.8 million in external funding for international initiatives. These funds include a grant from the U.S. Department of State, which selected TTU to host 25 young African leaders through the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders in summer 2017. 

TTU is also developing strong relationships with partner institutions in countries such as Ethiopia and Brazil. For instance, Stephen Ekwaro-Osire, former associate dean of research and graduate programs in the Whitacre College of Engineering, is the principal investigator for a $1.1 million grant that supports the design and development of curriculum for four graduate programs in civil engineering and construction technology at Jimma University in southeastern Ethiopia. Additionally, the TTU Department of Human Development and Family Studies has collaborated with Jigjiga University in eastern Ethiopia to develop programs in nutrition and early childhood education. 

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In Brazil, TTU has partnered with the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) since 2014 to fund joint research projects. TTU and FAPESP have successfully cosponsored three rounds of research proposals, with teams winning support for the exchange of faculty and postdoctoral researchers in each cycle. For example, two TTU faculty members, along with a researcher from the Federal University of São Paulo, received funding to examine the effects of toxic stress on children’s brain development using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology. 

Another TTU initiative that promotes international undergraduate research is Research Study Abroad, a new program piloted by professor David Weindorf, a research faculty fellow in the Office of the Vice President for Research. Weindorf used funding from his endowed chair, the BL Allen Endowed Chair of Pedology, in the Department of Plant and Soil Science to fund student travel to countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe. He is hoping to encourage other faculty to replicate the program.

Engaging in Community Outreach to Foster Individual Understanding

TTU views community outreach through its K–12 GEO program as a central pillar to its campus internationalization strategy, with a mission to “build a globally engaged community of learners through outreach opportunities that foster intercultural understanding and exchange while enriching the quality of life for both the universities and local communities across west Texas.”

Founded in 1997, K–12 GEO creates opportunities for more than 20,000 local students, teachers, and community members to learn about the world each year. By visiting local classrooms and inviting local students to the TTU campus, TTU faculty and staff help boost students’ awareness of other countries and cultures within a community where many young people do not have the opportunity to travel. K–12 GEO programs include an Ellis Island experience, workshops on holidays such as Chinese Lunar New Year and Mexico’s Day of the Dead, and activities celebrating the history of Ireland’s music and dance culture.  

In addition to the programming provided to local K–12 students, OIA hosts eight to 10 events featuring internationally recognized speakers and culturally diverse educational programs that are open to the larger Lubbock community. Particularly noteworthy is the annual Texas Tech Ambassadors Forum, which features a panel discussion by diplomatic and foreign policy experts. Other events include an annual German Christmas celebration called Weihnachten and Culture Fest 2017. In 2017, OIA worked with 17 international student groups to put on an outdoor festival that showcased cultural performers from the Texas Commission on the Arts.

“Today’s complex world requires international cooperation on multiple levels. TTU is committed to graduating a diverse and globally competent group of students who are prepared to face these challenges. Community outreach continues to play an integral part of this mission,” says Kelley Coleman, director of international enrollment development and outreach.

Growing Study Abroad and Extending Opportunities to Underrepresented Students

As part of the university’s internationalization strategy, TTU has recently focused on expanding the number of students who study abroad. In 2016–17, approximately 1,300 TTU students participated in credit-bearing programs abroad. The College of Architecture highly encourages, and the College of Engineering requires, an international experience for graduation, with other departments considering adding this requirement as well. The College of Arts and Sciences has a foursemester foreign language requirement, which many students fulfill abroad. The TTU Spanish program is especially popular. 

 With more than 27 percent of enrolled students identifying as Hispanic, TTU was recently awarded the designation of a Hispanic-serving institution by the U.S. Department of Education. In response, study abroad staff are currently reviewing their programs and approaches to determine how to ensure that the demographics of the study abroad population reflect the larger student body. OIA often works with other offices on campus that serve underrepresented students, first-generation students, and students with disabilities to promote study abroad opportunities. One of OIA’s most frequent collaborators is the First Generation Transition & Mentoring Programs office. 

“Specifically in collaboration with the first-generation office, we copresent with the financial aid office at the beginning of each academic year,” says Whitney Longnecker, director of study abroad. “The presentation [to students] discusses the basics of study abroad but also covers the specifics of how to apply financial aid and scholarships to a study abroad experience.”

The presentation helps make sure first-generation and other underrepresented students are aware of the funding opportunities available for education abroad. Funded by a $4 education abroad fee that every enrolled student pays each semester, OIA administers a scholarship program that offers more than $350,000 each year to support study abroad. 

OIA makes an effort to reach out to underrepresented students throughout the year. “We also hold remote advising hours in the first generation programs office, which is a good way to meet with first-generation students in a space in which they are already comfortable,” Longnecker says. OIA continues to offer students similar levels of outreach and support once they go abroad.

Cesar Rocha, a senior studying mechanical engineering, spent fall 2017 at TTU’s study abroad center in Seville, Spain. He was able to take engineering courses as well as an upper-level Spanish class. As a first-generation student, he says he had never considered studying abroad before enrolling at TTU. “I was just trying to get to college and finish,” he says. 

Rocha adds that the program in Seville not only allowed him to keep up with his engineering curriculum, it also offered him a lot of first-time experiences. Although he is fluent in Spanish, it was the first time he had ever taken a formal Spanish class. Traveling to Spain was also the first time he had flown on an airplane. “It totally pushed me out of my comfort zone,” Rocha says. 

Rocha is one of many TTU students who have spent time at TTU’s study abroad center in Spain. Since 2000, the center has served more than 4,600 TTU students from all academic disciplines in both summer and semester-long programs—representing more than 40 percent of all TTU students who study abroad. The center also provides an opportunity for many TTU faculty and graduate teaching assistants to spend a semester abroad. 

Additionally, each semester, the TTU center in Seville hosts six to eight interns from the University of Seville who assist center staff with administrative tasks as well as interact with TTU students to improve their Spanish language skills. This relationship has served as an indirect recruitment pipeline to TTU’s graduate programs. 

Myriam Rubio, who earned her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Seville, began working at the center as a linguistic assistant. She learned about TTU’s master’s program in Spanish through her interactions with the TTU faculty and graduate teaching assistants who came to Seville to teach. Rubio is thriving in her graduate program at TTU. “I’m loving every minute of my stay on the campus in Lubbock. My experience as a master’s student is not only improving my performance as a [Spanish] instructor, but it is also allowing me to grow both professionally and personally,” she says.

Offering a U.S. Education in Costa Rica

Building on its experience managing a physical presence overseas in Spain, TTU’s most recent international venture is the new campus in San José, Costa Rica. Promerica Group approached TTU in 2014 with the idea of offering a U.S. education in Costa Rica. According to Jack Bimrose, former director of EDULINK, a subsidiary of Promerica Group, U.S. higher education is cost prohibitive for large segments of the Central American population. The concept is to make academic programs related to strategic areas of development in the region more accessible to local students. 

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The first group of students began their studies at TTU-CR in August 2018 in five academic programs: electrical engineering, industrial engineering, computer science, mathematics, and restaurant and hotel management.

The campus, which has been accredited by SACS, will offer the same curriculum in English as the main campus in Lubbock. TTU faculty will teach on the Costa Rica campus, which has been built to the specifications of the departments at TTU. The hope is that TTU-CR will eventually host U.S. students who are studying abroad. 

“This is a unique model of engagement with industrial partners who want to provide the quality of a U.S. college education to Costa Rican students,” President Schovanec says. “We want the Costa Rica campus to become a nexus for postsecondary education in Central America.” 

As one of the nation’s premier public research institutions, West Virginia University (WVU) serves as an economic driver and knowledge base in a region of the United States where industry and population are declining. WVU has leveraged its strengths in areas such as public health, natural gas, and petroleum engineering to develop partnerships that aim to solve both local and global problems.

When the state of West Virginia was hit by a major flash flood in June 2016, WVU students, staff, and faculty came together to offer support to the devastated communities. “Within a few hours of knowing the flooding was occurring, our entire campus joined together and we turned one of our big empty spaces into a warehouse where we could [put] supplies,” says former provost Joyce McConnell. 

The largest group in the warehouse lending support were Engineers Without Borders students from India, she says. The students quickly jumped in to help organize supplies and coordinate relief efforts, drawing on their own experience with flooding in their native country. “It was this incredible moment to see what it means to have international students bring their expertise to a crisis in a place like West Virginia,” McConnell explains. 

Each year, WVU welcomes around 2,200 international students who contribute to the student body of nearly 30,000 across the three campuses. Most international students study at WVU’s main campus in Morgantown, a city of rolling hills situated along the banks of the Monongahela River. 

In a state with a dwindling college-aged population, WVU has looked to international and domestic nonresident students to bolster its student body. According to Stephen Lee, associate vice president for enrollment management, more than half of the freshman class come from abroad or out of state. “Everything we do relies on this unique enrollment profile in terms of who we recruit and how we recruit,” he says. “International is a key component of that.”

The presence of international and out-of-state students helps bring diverse backgrounds and perspectives to a state that is largely homogeneous demographically. According to President E. Gordon Gee, West Virginians who enroll at WVU can essentially “study abroad by staying here” because of the cross-cultural exchanges they can have with international students arriving from 150 different countries. “Because many of our students come from very small towns in Appalachia, the notion of going to the university, let alone overseas, is a big step,” he says. “The international component of this institution is about what we do on campus, as well as what we do internationally.”

Centralizing International Engagement Efforts

WVU has a long history of international engagement— particularly in the Middle East due to the institution’s expertise in the petroleum industry—but many of its activities were decentralized until relatively recently. That was a trend that McConnell wanted to reverse when she became provost in 2014. “When I first came here in 1995, there was just this loose organization of people doing their own thing,” she says. “You could go to any college on campus and you would find all of these very interesting international collaborations going on, but the only thing that was centralized at all was the processing of visas.”

Support from Gordon Gee and McConnell fueled the push to consolidate WVU’s international activities under the Office of Global Affairs (OGA) in 2016. William Brustein, who had previously worked with Gordon Gee at The Ohio State University, was brought on as vice president for global strategies and international affairs to lead the newly minted OGA. The office now oversees education abroad, international student and scholar services, intensive English programs, sponsored student services, and the Health Sciences Center Global Engagement Office. 

Under the direction of the OGA, WVU has prioritized two key approaches to internationalization: leveraging the institution’s strengths and building strong international partnerships. “We need to constantly remind ourselves of who we are and why we’re doing what we’re doing,” Gordon Gee says.

Brustein adds that drawing on WVU’s expertise in areas such as energy and medicine abroad is crucial to its land-grant mission. “Our faculty are developing research collaborations all around the world. We believe the international aspects of this research, whether it’s in health, energy, or forensics, can not only help people overseas, but will also help the people of the state of West Virginia and the future prosperity of the state,” Brustein says.

Strengthening Ties with Bahrain

One of WVU’s most successful international partnerships is with the Royal University for Women (RUW) in Bahrain. Founded in 2005 by four brothers who graduated from West Virginia University, RUW is the kingdom’s first private university for women. WVU has collaborated with RUW since 2009 to create student exchanges and faculty research opportunities. Faculty members from both universities have engaged in research collaborations in the fields of energy, water resources, health care, and women and gender studies. 

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In 2019, business and economics professor Susan Jennings Lantz took a group of 10 female students for a one-credit study abroad and cultural exchange trip to RUW over spring break. “Our students are able to get behind the scenes because they are staying in the residence hall,” Jennings Lantz says. “It’s a heavily gendered experience, but it’s unlike anything that our students have experienced.”

While she was in Bahrain, pre-med major Garima Agarwal says she realized just how different the economic and social landscape is between the Gulf Coast and Appalachia. “Here in West Virginia, we’re not used to that kind of glamor,” she says. “It was also my first time attending a mosque and learning about Islam.” Agarwal had the chance to participate in a debate about feminism with RUW students as well. “They have a very different approach to feminism than we do in the Western world,” she says. 

Agarwal, who graduated in May 2019, says that the experience will help inform her practice as a future doctor. “I understand their culture more closely now,” she explains. “As I see patients from that side of the world, I can take a more holistic approach to their care.”

The WVU-RUW partnership features other areas of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) domain. RUW hosts a WVU civil and environmental engineering program, which launched in 2017. The program is WVU’s first full degree program offered abroad and has served as a model for the development of dual-degree programs in other countries such as China. RUW students take the same courses that are offered in Morgantown and have the option to study abroad in West Virginia for a semester or more, allowing for additional global learning and connections. The creation of such dual-degree programs involves continued support and input from stakeholders throughout the institutions.

The partnership extends to the highest levels of university leadership. President Gordon Gee serves on the Royal University for Women’s Board of Trustees, and other WVU administrators have offered their insights and support as RUW continues to grow. In 2018, David Stewart took a leave of absence from his position as associate vice president for global strategy and international affairs at WVU to serve as president of the Royal University for Women.

“I’m ‘on loan’ here for 2 years,” Stewart explains. “We did that to really cement the relationship between the two universities and to speed up the development of WVU offering other kinds of programs in the Middle East.”

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Investing in a Presence Abroad Through Global Portals

WVU’s partnership with the Royal University for Women has been the foundation of its engagement in the Middle East and has been a prototype for the development of its global portals strategy in other parts of the world. Brustein describes the global portals as “academic embassies” where WVU maintains a physical presence in the region. The portals facilitate student exchange and education abroad, faculty exchange and research collaboration, alumni engagement, and industry and state partnerships. Additionally, the portals allow WVU to offer development and training opportunities in areas such as energy and medicine. 

In November 2016, Bahrain became the site of WVU's first global portal. The WVU Health Sciences Center uses the portal to provide on-site training and certification for medical health professionals from the Middle East. Because it can be very expensive to send faculty and students to the United States and increasingly difficult to obtain visas, WVU has made training and services more accessible by offering them at RUW. An example is an advanced certificate in occupational medicine that is certified by the American Medical Association. The second global portal was launched in Shanghai, China, in July 2018 and is directed by a WVU alumnus from China. WVU is currently working with partners in South America to develop another portal representing Latin America and also plans to eventually establish a presence in Southeast Asia. 

Addressing the Barriers to Study Abroad

Approximately 750 domestic students study abroad every year through credit-bearing programs. Because nearly one-quarter of all WVU students are Pell-eligible, the institution has focused on making its education abroad programs as affordable as possible. Several years ago, the WVU Board of Governors approved a tuition waiver for faculty-led programs. “Instead of charging the standard university and college tuition fees, we only charge $50 per credit hour,” says Vanessa Yerkovich, director of education abroad.

She adds that for out-of-state students, participating in a faculty-led program can often be more affordable than taking a summer course on campus. The ASPIRE Office, which helps WVU students apply for fellowships and graduate school, also works with Pell-eligible students to apply for Gilman Scholarships. Since 2004 when the Gilman program launched, 63 WVU students have been awarded Gilman Scholarships. 

Another way in which WVU has strived to make education abroad a reality for students is by providing its own scholarships. The John Chambers College of Business and Economics offers dedicated scholarships from a donor to support students who study in Brazil, China, India, or the United Arab Emirates. According to professor Li Wang, those scholarships are specifically targeted at non-European destinations. “We want to make sure students really expand their vision and get to know these emerging markets,” she says. 

Wang designed a faculty-led program to China that includes visits to both Chinese businesses and U.S. companies operating in China. Kristin Moro, who graduated in 2018 with a degree in business administration and information systems management, caught the study abroad bug after traveling with Wang to China. Her second study abroad program to India helped solidify her desire to work in the technology industry. “The first city we went to was Bangalore, …also known as the Silicon Valley of India,” Moro says. “India is a technology hub, and it was so interesting to me as someone interested in tech to see how other parts of the world conduct the same types of business.”

Beyond the financial factor, WVU’s study abroad team and faculty members work to help dispel some of the assumptions and cultural barriers discouraging students from going abroad. Professor Lisa Di Bartolomeo says that for many Appalachian students, it can be a huge leap just to attend WVU. “People throughout the state of West Virginia see Morgantown as the big city,” she says. “If you come from a place where your high school graduated 200 people, just coming here is a huge, scary step.”

To help mitigate students’ apprehension over the unknown, WVU’s orientation places focus on the transition of place and emphasizes the importance of diverse environments. Additionally, the Global Living-Learning Community (LLC) provides the setting for domestic and international students to interact and connect over lived experiences. Open to all students who are interested in learning about other cultures, the Global LLC can often spark a desire to go abroad. 

Elevating Intercultural Knowledge with Global Mountaineers

WVU also recently established Global Mountaineers, a curricular certificate that encourages students to take advantage of global opportunities on campus and abroad. Di Bartolomeo, who coordinates the certificate, began by garnering the support of deans and other stakeholders across campus. Students complete an introductory and capstone global competence course, take approved core courses, meet a language requirement, and study abroad or do an international internship.

The goal of the certificate program is to add value without increasing time to degree. “I was really careful to include courses that either count for the general education or that will count toward majors where students are likely to find an interest,” Di Bartolomeo says. The certificate was launched in fall 2018, and graduate Courtney Watson was the first WVU student to earn it. “It feels very rewarding to be the first person to graduate with a Global Mountaineer Certificate because WVU is such a big school with a rich history and a lot of students, and because in today’s world, global awareness is a critical skill to have,” she says. 

Di Bartolomeo approached Watson about earning the certificate because she had already met most of the requirements as a Russian minor and three-time study abroad student. “We both agreed that it would strengthen [my] global education because it would combine my education abroad experiences, my Russian language skills, and my research skills into a nice certification, which helped when I was applying to jobs,” Watson says. 

Providing a Productive Environment for International Students

Along with expanding and promoting its internationalization portfolio, WVU has recharged its international student recruitment strategy over the last decade to offset declining enrollment from in-state students, diversify its student body, and promote cross-cultural understanding. In particular, the institution has been able to leverage its expertise in areas such as petroleum and natural gas engineering to attract students from around the world. West Virginia University offers one of only four ABET-accredited programs encompassing both petroleum and natural gas engineering in the country. 

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WVU’s international student recruitment efforts have seen an increase in enrollment from around 1,200 students in 2007–08 to approximately 2,300 in 2017–18. The top sending countries are Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, China, India, and Oman. 

Located within the Office of Global Affairs, International Students & Scholars Services (ISSS) offers support to all international students on campus. In January 2017, WVU created its Office of Sponsored Students to provide extra support to its population of sponsored students, who make up more than 70 percent of all international undergraduates and almost half of all graduate students. “We started it because we realized that sponsors and their students have unique needs that other international students don’t have,” says Cindy Teets, director of sponsored student services. 

Farhan Ahmed, an Indian student who graduated in 2019 with a degree in sport and exercise psychology, appreciates the level of service he received from ISSS and OGA during his time at WVU. “My friends at bigger universities talk about how many international students there are, but there’s not really events going on,” he says. “But here, the environment is so inclusive and so open.”

Extending and Internationalizing Health Sciences

Another draw for international students applying to WVU has been its extensive health sciences programming and specialized training. The university Health Sciences Center runs the state’s largest health system, providing increased access to health care in a largely rural region of the country. The Health Sciences Center runs five schools: dentistry, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and public health. 

Operating within the Health Sciences Center, the Global Engagement Office (GEO) coordinates all international engagement related to health sciences. “We live in one very small world today in respect to health issues,” says professor Chris Martin, who directs the GEO. “Our students these days have a far more contextual understanding of global health than their predecessors did.”

WVU’s health sciences programs provide training to medical and dental students from abroad. Building on the institution’s broader engagement in the Middle East, the Health Sciences Center hosts up to eight Kuwaiti students per year who complete their undergraduate degrees at WVU and then apply to WVU’s medical or dental schools. “They can be here for up to a decade. It’s a nice model because it gives them a lot of time to adjust to different educational systems. By the time they hit medical or dental school, they’re prepared,” Martin says. 

Zeinab Atiah is a third-year student at the School of Dentistry who started at WVU as an undergraduate after receiving a scholarship from the Kuwaiti Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE). “West Virginia University was one of the accredited universities that the MOHE accepts…[and] the best clinical experience that I would possibly get was in the USA,” she says. “Faculty members are always available for us and taught us how to be professional with our patients and build up the skills necessary to become a dentist.”

WVU also trains 19 Saudi Arabian residents and fellows in various graduate medical programs. The residents graduate from medical school in Saudi Arabia and then do specialized training in fields such as internal medicine, pathology, psychiatry, and robotic cardiovascular surgery. According to Martin, WVU’s Health Sciences Center has designed its programs for international professionals to fill unused training capacity. “We’re not displacing our usual pool of applicants. For example, psychiatry has accreditation to take seven residents per year. But we only have funding for six, so that the seventh slot is available to those sponsored students,” Martin says. 

As is the case for the larger institution, taking part in international networks and leveraging partnerships has been central to the Health Science Center’s internationalization strategy. “We’re a small university in terms of financial resources. We don’t have endowments, we don’t have Fogarty [global health] grants that a lot of other large universities do. So we’ve tried to work with national networks to get that coordination,” Martin says.

The institution participates in the Association of American Medical Colleges Visiting Student Learning Opportunities program at global and domestic sites, which allows medical students to take electives while trying to get into residency programs. In addition to sending students abroad through the program, WVU is the second most active site in the United States for hosting international students. 

Through that network, WVU sent a group of neurologists to Guatemala to provide training to health care workers including nurses, social workers, and case managers in the early diagnosis of disorders such as depression, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s. Those frontline health care workers can then find additional support from WVU physicians through telemedicine, which uses technology to diagnose and treat patients remotely.

Allie Karshenas, associate vice president of clinical operations and institutional advancement, says that the engagement of health sciences abroad is beneficial not only to the partners abroad, but also the home state. “By working with these small countries that are impoverished and under-resourced, we are able to internalize those values for our learning,” he says. “Most of what we learn can come back in the form of improving our own processes, access to health care, and access to technology in our own state.”
 

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As one of the oldest public universities in the United States, Miami University welcomed its first students in 1824. Today, the institution brings a global outlook to its three campuses in southwestern Ohio through its curricular requirements, robust faculty-led programs, study abroad center in Luxembourg, and comprehensive support for international students and scholars.

In October 2018, more than 900 alumni, faculty, staff, and friends of Miami University gathered in the Château de Differdange, a fifteenth-century castle located in a village just 20 minutes from Luxembourg City. The event commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Miami University John E. Dolibois European Center (MUDEC), which has served as a study abroad site for Miami students since 1968. 

The center was founded by alumnus John E. Dolibois, who was born in Luxembourg, immigrated to the United States, and enrolled as a student at Miami University in 1938. Shortly after graduation, Dolibois was drafted to serve in the U.S. Army during World War II. He interrogated Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg trials and later served as a U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg. In 1947, he became Miami University’s first full-time alumni secretary. Dolibois took on several more roles at Miami before he was named vice president for university relations in 1981. Throughout his life, Dolibois continued to work to strengthen ties between Miami University and countries such as Luxembourg.

At the 50th Jubilee Celebration, Miami University President Gregory P. Crawford bestowed an honorary degree upon the Hereditary Grand Duke of Luxembourg Prince Guillaume, whose father and grandfather had also received the same honor. 
“We have had tremendous support from Differdange and Luxembourg,” says Phyllis Callahan, who retired in July 2019 after serving almost 5 years as provost. “We also have a broad base of extraordinarily devoted alumni who spent time there over the years. It gives us a foothold in a part of the world where there are opportunities for our students to learn.”

The establishment of MUDEC, along with more than 140 faculty-led programs to countries all over the world, has helped Miami University make its mark in the field of international education. Miami’s undergraduate study abroad programs rank among the top five in the nation among public doctoral universities. 

It is a distinction that the institution has held for several years, according to the Institute of International Education’s 2018 Open Doors report. The university also hosts more than 3,000 international students every year, and it offers a myriad of curricular and cocurricular opportunities for faculty, students, and staff to engage with the world. 

“The international efforts here are not a single domain of one college or one unit or one department,” says Crawford. “It’s all throughout our culture here at Miami, which is very exciting.”

Nurturing a Culture of Internationalization

At the helm of Miami’s study abroad and international education programs is the Global Initiatives division, directed by Cheryl Young, who serves as assistant provost and senior international officer. While Miami University has a long tradition of international engagement, Global Initiatives is relatively new. The division, housed at Miami’s main campus in Oxford, Ohio, was created in 2013 as part of a strategic reorganization of globally focused academic support units. Then-provost Conrado “Bobby” Gempesaw wanted to centralize the university’s international activities, bringing them together under the Global Initiatives umbrella. The division now oversees study abroad, international student and scholar services, continuing education, the Confucius Institute, and the Center for American and World Cultures (CAWC). 

“Provost Gempesaw asked me to develop a plan for comprehensive internationalization at Miami University,” Young says. “We brought all of these units together with the plan to make sure that we infuse intercultural and global dimensions throughout the university.”

An essential component of Miami’s internationalization efforts is the Global Miami Plan (GMP) for Liberal Education, which outlines a six-credit global perspectives requirement and a three-credit intercultural perspectives requirement that serve as part of the university’s general education courses. Students can take one of more than 80 approved globally focused courses on campus or participate in education abroad. 

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Many students also use study abroad to fulfill their capstone or thematic sequence requirements in the GMP. 

“It is designed to help students understand and creatively transform human culture and society by giving the students the tools to ask questions, examine assumptions, exchange views with others, and become better global citizens,” according to the university website. 

Building on the GMP, Miami recently launched a Global Readiness Certificate that has both academic and cocurricular requirements. Coordinated by the CAWC, the first cohort will be piloted in fall 2019 in the College of Education, Health and Society. Approximately 12 to 15 students will go through the orientation, attend globally focused or multicultural on-campus activities, participate in a community engagement or servicelearning project, complete six credits of off-campus study, and take specific approved courses.

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“A big piece of it is that we don’t want students to just check the boxes. They actually have to reflect on what they’re doing and engage with global opportunities in multiple ways,” says program coordinator Alicia Castillo Shrestha. 

Advancing a Global Vision Through Study Abroad

More than half of all Miami students spend time off campus through study abroad or study away in the United States by the time they graduate. In both the 2016–17 and 2017–18 academic years, over 2,000 students went abroad. The institution aims to have at least 60 percent of its students study off campus by 2020. The vast majority of students who study abroad participate in one of Miami’s short-term faculty-led programs, which have grown exponentially since the introduction of a winter term in 2014. Most of the university’s faculty-led programs count toward the Global Miami Plan’s global perspectives requirements. 

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Interactive media studies major Brian Velasquez completed a faculty-led program at the University of Calabria in Italy. In addition to a class taught by a Miami faculty member, he took a coding class focused on knowledge representation that was taught by a faculty member from the local university. “I thought that was pretty cool to get a professor with a different teaching style,” Velasquez says. “The coursework was a lot different. Rather than having class two or three times per week, we had class every day,” he adds. “It was an eye-opener to see a different way that people live.”

Velasquez studied abroad immediately after his freshman year, which he says had a huge impact on his personal growth and understanding of different backgrounds. “I definitely look back and appreciate the people that I met because of how far I’ve come socially and professionally in the classroom,” Velasquez says. 

Bolstering Miami University’s Profile in Europe

Approximately 10 percent of all Miami study abroad students travel to MUDEC, which can host up to 120 students per semester and another 40 in the summer. Students stay with host families in the local community and participate in a study tour that takes them to other parts of Europe. 

The majority of courses taught at MUDEC meet the Global Miami Plan’s general education requirements and have a European focus. Each year, two Miami faculty members travel to MUDEC for one semester, and four others teach an eight-week “sprint course,” which entails an accelerated class format and a brief study tour. All other courses are taught by local European adjunct faculty.

While most Miami students studying in Luxembourg take general education courses, some schools and departments have used the opportunity to develop specialized programs for their majors. Miami’s Farmer School of Business, for instance, offers the FSB LUX Plus, a summer business program based at the Luxembourg center that also takes students to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Italy. Additionally, cohorts of Miami architecture students get the chance to travel to MUDEC where they can take the general education classes offered to all students and then major-specific architecture classes. 

Deepening Community Relations

Miami University’s long-standing engagement in Luxembourg has allowed the institution to develop deep ties with Differdange that go beyond MUDEC. In 2017, Oxford and Differdange signed a sister cities agreement, which has contributed to internationalization on campus and in the surrounding communities. For example, local grocery stores in Oxford stock Bofferding, the leading beer in Luxembourg. The brewery’s chief executive officer Georges Lentz is a Miami University alumnus. 

Over in Luxembourg, École Internationale de Differdange et Esch-Sur-Alzette (EIDE), a local public school that offers curriculum in English, has served as a student teaching site for Miami University teacher candidates for the last 4 years. The majority of students enrolled at EIDE are English language learners (ELLs). “This creates a perfect site for placement of Miami’s teacher education candidates who can improve their ELL teaching skills while also getting an authentic international study abroad experience,” says education professor James Shiveley, who also oversees the MUDEC Curriculum Committee. 

Under Shiveley’s supervision, nine teacher education and special education undergraduates from Miami University planned and ran two weeklong day camps for ELL elementary and middle school students on site in Luxembourg in July 2019. The Miami students, who enrolled in a three-credit course, received free housing from MUDEC. Financial aid for the Miami students was provided by the College of Education Partnership fund and MUDEC, with additional financial support coming from the Luxembourg Ministry of Education and the city of Differdange. 

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Private donations from alumni who studied at MUDEC have also provided scholarships for students from Luxembourg to study in Oxford. Claudia Zaunz, a journalism and English literature double major from Luxembourg, is one of the current recipients. She says she didn’t realize how important Luxembourg’s close connection with Miami University would be until she was on campus. “When I arrived at Miami during orientation, the campus was nearly empty,” she says. “I walked into the Armstrong Student Center and saw the sign: Lux Café. I couldn’t believe my eyes! The windows feature the text of ‘Ons Hémecht,’ the national anthem, and there are pictures on the wall of Luxembourg City…. It made it so much easier to make Miami [my] home away from home! Lux Café is my favorite spot to study for exams.”

Welcoming Students From Around the World

Zaunz is one of approximately 3,000 international students who are currently pursuing their undergraduate education at Miami University. For the last several years, the institution’s investment of time and resources in international undergraduate student recruitment has paid off, growing enrollment numbers from fewer than 500 students in 2009 to over 3,000 in 2018, an increase of more than 500 percent. 

Undergraduate international recruitment is housed in the Office of Admissions, which has four dedicated international recruiters. There were fewer than 100 international undergraduates on campus when Aaron Bixler, senior associate director for international enrollment, started at Miami in 2003. Today, 85 percent of Miami’s 3,000 international students are Chinese. A significant number of students also come from India, Vietnam, South Korea, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. 

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Bixler says that part of Miami’s early success with recruitment in China was because the school quickly expanded to secondary markets outside of Beijing and Shanghai and hired a full-time recruiter based in China. “Having someone there on the ground freed us up a bit to try to explore new markets,” Bixler says. 

Combining Academic and Linguistic Support

To further expand the recruitment pipeline, Miami University established a bridge program in 2011 for international students who are academically qualified but need some extra language support. The American Culture & English (ACE) program, housed at Miami’s main campus in Oxford, offers students with a Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) score between 65 and 79 conditional admission. Students in the bridge program take courses in speaking and listening, reading and writing, and social science, as well as an elective that counts toward one of their general education requirements. 

According to director Carol Olausen, the program is built around an intensive advising model that helps students to develop skills for academic success. Xiaoyi Huang, an early childhood education major, shares her experience: “I love the ACE program because it’s not only a smooth transition from China, but it [also] kind of blew my mind because of how English textbooks and daily life conversations are so different.”

Students are also required to participate in a minimum of eight extracurricular events during the semester. “It helps them become comfortable with campus resources,” Olausen explains. Zhuoran Bao, a Chinese student who started in the ACE program, notes, “I had more time to get involved on campus, like volunteering or joining organizations like dance club.” She adds that she met U.S. students through the program, which was important to her as a media and culture major. 

Students who first complete the ACE program have been found to achieve better outcomes than their international peers who did not start in the program. They have a retention rate of 73 percent compared with 68 percent for international students as a whole, according to Olausen. 

The success of the ACE model led to the development of tailored programming for all international students, many of whom struggle with speaking English and listening despite potentially having high TOEFL scores. “Because TOEFL scores often show you more of passive skills rather than productive skills, we identify students through a speaking test administered to all incoming international students,” Olausen says. Students who struggle with speaking and comprehension are automatically placed in a transition course to further develop those skills.

In addition to the ACE program, Miami University has an English Language Center at its Middletown campus, located about 20 miles from Oxford. The center serves approximately 300 students per year, including during the summer. Many students who complete the intensive English program later enroll at Miami as degree-seeking students. The English Language Center also offers a summer program for around 75 English language learners enrolled at local high schools. 

Rewriting the Rules of Language Learning

In 2018, Miami launched the English Language Learner Writing Center, which is coordinated by Larysa Bobrova. She hired 10 consultants who collaborate with multilingual writers and are trained in second language acquisition theories. The idea is not to offer proofreading or editing services, but to help non-native English speakers become more aware of their own writing process. “We discuss strategies that our consultants can use to help students to correct their own errors,” Bobrova says. 

Bobrova also offers training for faculty members in how to design and give feedback on assignments for English language learners. Moreover, education students taking courses in ELL instruction have been able to observe writing consultations at the center to gain skills and insights they can apply to their future careers as educators. 

Like Miami’s overall approach to internationalization, the mission of the multilingual writing center is to be inclusive and welcoming to all students. “Writing persuasively in a language does not imply being a native speaker,” Bobrova says. “This is something that both our students and our faculty need to know in order to make their pedagogy inclusive and to celebrate the diversity of language and cultures.”

While Harrison Bontrager had certain goals in mind as he traveled to Sydney, Australia, as part of a study abroad program at Kirkwood Community College, he had no idea it would lead to an international career in architecture and design. The study abroad program, led by Kirkwood professor Jillissa Moorman, took students on a two-week tour of architecture and design firms across Australia. 

During the program development stage, Bontrager contacted Moorman and asked if she could include a visit to Alexander & CO., Bontrager’s favorite architecture firm, on the itinerary. This outing had significant outcomes for Bontrager. “After touring their space and getting to chat with their principal, I was offered an internship, which has turned into a position as a designer,” he explains.

Bontrager returned to Iowa to finish one more semester at Kirkwood and then completed his associate’s degree by working with Moorman remotely. “I’m not going to say he can’t continue because he’s around the world,” says Moorman, who coordinates Kirkwood’s interior design program. 

It is the passion and support of faculty members like Moorman that have helped Kirkwood earn its reputation for study abroad programming for community college students. Each year, Kirkwood offers approximately 20 faculty-led programs across multiple disciplines. The Institute of International Education ranks the college fifth nationally in the number of community college students it sends abroad.

Offering a Central Hub for Global Experiences

Kirkwood’s study abroad programs are run through its International Programs (IP) Department, located on the college’s main campus in Cedar Rapids. The department also manages international enrollment management, international student services, English language acquisition, international partnerships, international grants and projects, and faculty and staff development. IP offers a centralized office for global engagement and is intentionally situated within academic affairs to facilitate interaction with all areas of the college. The department’s mission is to have “every faculty, staff, and student at Kirkwood engage in an intercultural experience."

Dawn Wood, dean of international programs, says that this mission is particularly important for Kirkwood as a community college because the vast majority of students stay in eastern Iowa after graduation. Thus, the college takes a broad, long-term outlook on its internationalization efforts. “These are people who are going to live in our community and give us the advantage we need to be globally competitive,” she says. 

When President Lori Sundberg joined Kirkwood in 2018, one of the first things she noticed was how internationalized the college was compared with her previous institutions. “It really is pervasive across the campus, from individual courses to opportunities for students and faculty outside of the classroom,” she says. 

John Henik, associate vice president for academic affairs, says that the college has been engaged internationally since he started at Kirkwood more than 30 years ago. Kirkwood was the fiscal agent and host for Community Colleges for International Development— an association made up of community, technical, and vocational institutions dedicated to creating globally engaged learning environments—from the late 1980s until 2013 and remains a member of the organization’s board. 

To support Kirkwood’s global efforts, the International Programs Department has always had its own budget allocated out of the college’s general fund. Dedicated funding for international activities is essential because new programs at community colleges are often seen as taking away scarce resources, according to Henik. While some specific projects are grant funded, the majority of the department’s budget comes from general funds. 

“There is a commitment to international programs, just like another department like allied health or business,” he says. “That is a really important move for the sustainability of the department.”

Enhancing Professional Development with the Global Service Award

Another aspect of Kirkwood’s internationalization strategy has been to engage stakeholders throughout the institution. Kirkwood has created professional development opportunities for staff, faculty, and administrators through the Global Service Award (GSA), which provides funding for staff to join students on international service-learning trips. The GSA was created in 2012 after former college president Mick Starcevich participated in a service-learning program to Guatemala with dental hygiene professor Lisa Hebl. Starcevich was so moved by the experience that the two sat down at dinner one night and sketched out on a napkin what the GSA might entail. “He didn’t expect [that the experience] was going to impact him as much as it did, and he wanted to make it possible for more people on campus to do it,” Hebl says. 

Full-time faculty and staff who are employed at Kirkwood for at least 3 years are eligible to apply for the award, which is competitive and provides full funding for the trip. While abroad, they participate alongside the students and support the lead faculty. Upon return to campus, the awardees complete an assessment, take part in events where they share their experience with colleagues, and develop projects to integrate what they learned into the classroom or their daily work.

Wood says it is important to give staff a chance to travel because they then become champions for education abroad. “Our students talk more to the people who are sitting at the front—that’s our office assistant, our admissions team, our counselors,” she says.

Five to six faculty and staff receive the GSA each year. Since the program was launched, more than 40 Kirkwood faculty and staff have engaged in service-learning programs in 10 different countries. 

International programs office coordinator Maria Moore traveled to Lima, Peru, as a GSA recipient where she and the students volunteered at an elder care facility and at a school. Moore says the experience gave her a new perspective on her work for the International Programs Department. “I really learned the value of students going abroad, because I think too many people get too entrenched in their own culture and they don’t want to venture out to see what else is out there in the world,” she says.

Making Study Abroad Accessible

Kirkwood’s enrollment is made up of many nontraditional students: older students returning to college, first-generation students, part-time students, low-income students, technical students, rural students, and students from underrepresented backgrounds. Approximately 34 percent of its students were Pell-eligible in the 2017–18 academic year. For many of these populations, education abroad poses particular challenges, but the International Programs Department does everything it can to make education abroad a possibility for anyone who wants to take advantage of it. In 2017–18, Kirkwood sent 151 students overseas out of a total full-time undergraduate population of approximately 15,000.

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By developing its own study abroad programs, the college is able to keep the costs down. All program fees, including the flight, are built into the cost of the program. “When all of us are designing these study abroad programs, it’s about quality, but also looking at cost-effective measures to make sure that students can afford it,” says study abroad adviser Ken Nesbett. “Even when faculty are proposing programs, we have the mindset of, ‘How will this be accessible for students without sacrificing quality?’”

Kirkwood works to break down some of the financial barriers by offering more than 90 percent of its study abroad participants $1,000 to $2,000 each as part of its Global Advantage Scholarships for faculty-led programs, totaling more than $150,000 in funding. Kirkwood is also a top producer of Gilman Awards, which are available to Pell-eligible students, among associate’s colleges. Six Kirkwood students received Gilman Awards in 2017–18.

Kayla Acosta, an early childhood education major, was one of Kirkwood’s recent Gilman awardees and a recipient of the Global Advantage Scholarship. She was able to study abroad in Australia and participate in a service-learning program to Cambodia. “There’s no way financially I’d be able to ever study abroad without a scholarship. It’s just not doable with working and being able to just up and leave everything,” she says.

In Australia, Acosta toured early childhood education centers and learned how they incorporate indoor and outdoor play into the curriculum. “I was able to bring a lot of that back here. I already work at a preschool currently, so I did a lot of training with my staff on how to better incorporate play,” she says.

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Collaborating Through the Global Education Network

For both of her education abroad programs, Acosta joined other students from Australia, Canada, and Singapore who attend institutions that are part of the Global Education Network (GEN), a consortium of four schools that Kirkwood has been a part of since 2001. Acosta and her peers had the chance to interact through established channels prior to departure, allowing for some relationship building among the participants. “We had met prior through Zoom, and when we got off the plane we saw giant groups of us that all looked lost,” she explains. Students from across the GEN consortium have the opportunity to not only learn from their host community, but each other as well.

GEN is a partnership between Kirkwood and the Box Hill Institute in Australia, Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Canada, and Institute of Technical Education (ITE) in Singapore. GEN partners share similarities in their vocational and technical curricula, such as auto technology, welding, graphic design, veterinary technician, and early childhood education. The collaboration of these four institutions has resulted in hundreds of student, faculty, and staff exchanges; virtual exchanges; global learning programs focused on diverse curriculum areas; and joint faculty and staff professional development. 

Henik acts as the representative for the GEN consortium at the World Federation of Colleges and Polytechnics, an international network of colleges delivering workforce education. He says that while each institution brings its own strengths to GEN, they collaborate on the curriculum and plan joint servicelearning programs. “One of the parts of our strategic plan is that we’re sharing best practices and learning from each other,” Wood says. Kirkwood has, for example, developed medical simulation labs modeled after those at ITE.

Together, the four institutions contribute to the network’s operating budget, develop a strategic plan, and determine and assess key performance indicators. Every other year, one partner institution hosts a planning conference that includes the campus presidents. Kirkwood hosted the planning conference in June 2019. 

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Each institution hosts students and faculty from the other partners every year. Kirkwood alumnus Travis Riggan and other students from GEN took a project management course focused on the Jones County Fair, an annual event in Iowa that showcases local agricultural products and livestock. Students worked in multicultural teams and presented their projects to the fair board at the end of the class. 

Riggan says it was a unique experience to be able to take the visiting students to a county fair: “We got to show international students from Canada, Australia, and Singapore our culture. They’ve never been to a fair where people bash demo cars, showcase cows, and [have] fried food galore.” 

Internationalizing Career and Technical Education

Participation in the Global Education Network has helped Kirkwood internationalize its career and technical disciplines through its various student exchanges and other collaborations. At Kirkwood, around 50 percent of students are studying with the intent to transfer to a four-year institution. The remaining half complete a one- or two-year degree before entering the local workforce.

To meet students’ needs, Kirkwood has developed faculty-led programs in fields such as agriculture, construction management, and culinary arts. The architectural technology program takes students to Germany to learn about green building practices, and nursing and allied health students have participated in service programs in Belize, Costa Rica, and Ecuador. Kirkwood’s culinary arts program runs a three-week course at Florence University of the Arts in Italy that allows students to take lab courses or intern at a restaurant. 

Students enrolled in Kirkwood’s agricultural sciences program get the chance to visit Universidade Federal de Lavras (UFLA) in Lavras, Brazil, over spring break. Professor Scott Ermer says that the program balances between academic and cultural activities. “The majority of the students that we have taken have never been outside the country before,” he says. “To immerse them in another, non-English-speaking culture is a game changer for them. You can just see the growth in 12 days.”

The program explores issues related to small-scale agriculture and encourages students to compare and contrast farming practices between Iowa and Brazil. “We spend a day on coffee production, so we drive through miles and miles of coffee. Just like you drive through miles and miles of corn here in Iowa. So, coffee is our corn. Our students learn to look at that as a cash commodity and gain a different perspective when they’re drinking that cup of coffee,” Ermer says. 

Justin Shields, who graduated from Kirkwood in May 2019, says Brazil was the first place he traveled to outside of the United States. The experience was so eyeopening that he plans to study abroad again after he transfers to Iowa State University in fall 2019. 
“Brazil has developed into an agriculture stronghold, and they’re one of our biggest competitors from the global trading standpoint,” Shields says. “It was just incredible to see the mountainous regions and the cattle. You could see them planting crops on such steep slopes that I never imagined was even possible.” 

While the group was in Lavras, students from UFLA served as the tour guides. “When we were getting ready to leave Lavras to head to Rio, there were people who were almost in tears because we were leaving such good friends. And it was just incredible to me that you could build a relationship that strong that quickly,” Shields says.

Diversifying the Campus Through International Student Recruitment

In addition to its efforts to send students abroad, Kirkwood has focused on welcoming international students to its campuses. From 2005 to 2015, Kirkwood’s international student enrollment increased from 174 to 399. Since then, Kirkwood has experienced a decline in international enrollment, forcing a reexamination of its enrollment strategies. Kirkwood’s recruitment efforts now target partnerships in Brazil, South Africa, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian countries. 

To diversify its international student population, the college has also concentrated on recruiting more sponsored students from programs such as the Community College Initiative Program, the Thomas Jefferson Scholarship Program, the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission, and Science Without Borders. 

Still, one of the benefits of having a relatively small international student population is that Kirkwood has been able to personalize the support it provides each student. “I came from an institution where we had 4,000 international students,” says international student adviser Shannon Ingleby. “I couldn’t tell you a single name of any student, compared to Kirkwood where I know all the students. I get to interact with them all the time and spend a ton of time with them.”

Many international students at Kirkwood are active members of the campus community. Mathlida Mola came to the United States from Kenya in 2016 to pursue her associate’s degree in accounting. She was selected as the commencement speaker for the 2019 graduating class because of her work on the international student leadership team, which helps with orientation and organizes activities for international students. 

“I was extremely happy to represent my international student family as the commencement speaker,” Mola says. “It was an honor to share about my experience at Kirkwood as an international student.”

The English Language Acquisition (ELA) Department has provided an important service to the Cedar Rapids area over the years. More than 600 students are involved in the intensive English course sequence targeted at English language learners. While some students are on F-1 visas, the majority are immigrants and refugees who live in Cedar Rapids and the surrounding communities. “We have a five-level English course sequence. They are all courses that prepare students for college-level coursework or whatever certificate coursework they want to take at Kirkwood,” says instructor Betsy Baertlein. “All of our students have some sort of academic goal when they come to us.”

Kirkwood has also been able to leverage its distance learning technology to teach ELA courses to high school students in Brazil by using the same online platform it uses to offer dual enrollment classes to Iowa high school students. “There’s no difference between us communicating between here and Chicago or here and Brazil,” says Todd Prusha, executive dean of distance learning. “It’s been a great partnership.”

Kirkwood ELA instructors have been offering online English courses to Brazilian high school students for the last 7 years. In the course of the partnership, an ELA instructor did a site visit in Brazil and trained local community members on how to administer an oral proficiency exam. Kirkwood instructors have also been able to travel with agriculture students to Brazil over spring break and meet their online students in person. 

Renewing the Commitment to Comprehensive Internationalization

Kirkwood is currently in the process of constructing a new $60 million student center. “The college really wanted us front and center in our new student center because of its focus on equity, diversity, and inclusion,” Wood says. “We want all groups to feel welcomed and have a space to interact and engage.”

Once the building is completed in 2020, the International Programs Department will occupy a prominent location in the new space, along with other student resource centers. The goal is to better integrate international students and other groups into the larger campus community.

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