People Development

Like a championship basketball team from the past, the first dozen Beloit College students who flew off to Europe in 1960 are still remembered and celebrated at the Wisconsin campus as “the Brussels Sprouts” who set the pace for study abroad. Beloit’s international roots extend to the nineteenth century when the first international students enrolled and alumni founded universities in Japan and Turkey. Campus museums display the artifacts that archeology and anthropology professors brought back from Africa and Asia. Between the two world wars, Dean George Collie made headlines with a proposal to turn Beloit into a “world college” for students from around the globe dedicated to pursuing peace and racial harmony.

Today this liberal arts campus by the scenic Rock River is renowned for its success in integrating education abroad into the curriculum. Working with colleagues from Kalamazoo College, International Education Director Elizabeth Brewer coedited and other Beloit faculty contributed to an entire book on the topic, Integrating Study Abroad Into the Curriculum: Theory and Practice Across the Disciplines, which lays out a blueprint for maximizing the benefits of education abroad. “We established a mission statement for international education and then invented learning goals for study abroad,” said Brewer. “We’ve focused on multiple things—communication skills, understanding oneself, learning from the host country, and not just about the host country but making discoveries about the subjects the students study here.” Beloit also is a sponsor of the journal, Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad. A signature Beloit approach is its Cities in Transition courses that use foreign cities as classrooms and send students off on explorations after teaching them how to map new places, conduct ethnographic studies, and interview strangers about their everyday lives. Brewer, an adjunct professor in German, has helped Beloit secure steady support from foundations for these efforts. Brewer, director of the international education office since 2002, is a former study abroad director who took three years off in mid-career to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Slovakia.

Integrating Student Insights From Abroad

The 45 percent of Beloit students who take part in education abroad may spend a semester at one of the college’s 11 bilateral exchange partners or sign up for classes offered by other affiliated universities and study abroad organizations. Almost half study in Asia, Latin America, or Africa and only a small number go to any one place. “Our students become extremely self-sufficient, self-reliant, and independent. They learn to problem solve because they are on their own,” said Beth Dougherty, chair of the international relations department. They must write a series of short essays before they go overseas about how the particular program will enhance their education and demonstrate forethought about the country and people they will encounter. The Committee on International Education, composed of six faculty and two students, reviews each application and sometimes orders rewrites. “We pay a lot of attention to their preparation before they go, and we celebrate the experiences in substantial ways when they return,” said President Scott Bierman. The college calls off classes on a Wednesday in mid-November for an International Symposium where dozens of students make presentations on what they learned overseas. Among topics explored in the 47 talks in November 2010 were human rights activism in China, persecution of albinos in Uganda, Muscovites’ remembrance of their war dead, and Mexicans’ use of the folk healing method curanderismo.

The Cities in Transition experiential learning courses have been offered since 2005 in such places as Moscow; Kaifeng and Jinan, China; and, with Mellon Foundation support, in Quito, Ecuador. The students attend other classes taught by local faculty, but a Beloit professor back in Wisconsin directs their research projects and joins them once or twice over the course of the semester. Beloit students have studied the life-size statues and funerary art in a famous Moscow cemetery, interviewed peddlers who erect a “night market” on the streets of Kaifeng each evening, and explored the hardships of life as a migrant worker in Senegal’s capital. Their professors use the Internet to guide and monitor the students’ site-based learning. Some students have won Fulbright grants to continue these explorations after graduation. In a comparative Cities in Transition course taught mainly on the home campus, students examine issues of health and poverty in Beloit and Managua, Nicaragua, where they spend a week mid-semester. 

The Cities in Transition pedagogy “helps students get out and look at a city in ways they wouldn’t otherwise,” said Donna Oliver, a professor of Russian who dispatches the students to Moscow’s Novoderichy cemetery to begin their research on remembrance. Daniel Youd, chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, said a fascination with contemporary China draws many students into study of Mandarin. At first some questioned why they were going to provincial cities instead of Beijing, “but as the word has gotten out that these are great programs, students are more than excited to go to Kaifeng and Jinan,” Youd said.

Unparalleled Preparation for World Citizenship

Beloit adopted a mission statement in 2005 that reads, “Our emphasis on international and interdisciplinary perspectives, the integration of knowledge with experience, and close collaboration among peers, professors, and staff equips our students to approach the complex problems of the world ethically and thoughtfully.” Its 2008 Strategic Plan for the 21st Century committed the college to expanding the Cities in Transition offerings and providing “unparalleled preparation for world citizenship to all students.” 

“Our emphasis on international and interdisciplinary perspectives, the integration of knowledge with experience, and close collaboration among peers, professors, and staff equips our students to approach the complex problems of the world ethically and thoughtfully.”

Natalie Gummer, an associate professor of religious studies and expert on Buddhism who has twice taught Cities in Transition courses in China, uses the same mapping and exploration techniques in a freshman seminar she directs that dispatches new students out into Beloit, a city of 36,000 residents dealing with aging industry and one of the highest unemployment rates in Wisconsin. While Beloit may not seem as exotic and unfamiliar as Kaifeng or Quito, the exercise gets the college students thinking from the start “about their role in the community and how to engage thoughtfully with the city and its people,” said Gummer.

Although Beloit has no foreign language requirement, 70 percent of students sign up for at least one language class. Half reach the intermediate level and a quarter complete four semesters of Spanish, French, German, Russian, Mandarin, or Japanese. The college provides resources for students to study Arabic on their own, and offers intensive summer classes in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. All students must take at least two courses on global relations and on another language or culture. Beloit opened a Center for the Study of World Affairs, now part of the international education office, back in 1960, the same year those education abroad pioneers flew off to Brussels.

Grants from the Freeman, Mellon, and Luce foundations have enabled Beloit to add faculty in international relations, Chinese, and Japanese, as well as art history. A third of the 105-member faculty contributed to an Asian studies push that led to a flowering of new courses, including one called The Physics of Asian Music. Twenty-nine faculty traveled to Asia with Freeman Foundation support. 

Support for International Students

Beloit enrolled 109 international students in 2009– 10, or 8 percent of the student body. It provides more financial aid to international undergraduates than most U.S. colleges its size or larger. “It’s an enormous commitment on the part of the college, but it’s part of our mission, part of our history,” said Bierman.

The beneficiaries include sophomore Teng (Ted) Liu, 20, of Chengdu, China, the son of a local official and a policeman. It took just one class at Beloit for Liu to decide to major not only in economics but also anthropology. The college gave him a grant to spend a month in New York City’s Chinatown after his freshman year researching how Buddhism helps Chinese immigrants adjust to U.S. life. “Anthropologists and economists need to learn from each other,” said Liu, who believes cultural sensitivity will stand him in good stead for an international business career.

“Anthropologists and economists need to learn from each other, said Liu, who believes cultural sensitivity will stand him in good stead for an international business career.”

Kristof Huszar, 20, an exchange student from Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, savored his one semester on the Wisconsin campus. “I learned new things from different perspectives,” said the budding mathematician, son of a history professor and English teacher. “I have many American friends. The whole atmosphere here is very international. It’s just a global thinking. Quite often students from five continents sit at the same table and have lunch together. This was such a great experience for me.”

Weissberg Chair Draws International Leaders

Each spring the college brings in a prominent international figure for a weeklong series of classes and lectures first made possible by a gift from Marvin Weissberg, a real estate developer and Beloit parent. Daughter Nina Weissberg, class of 1984, now a trustee, is involved as well. Former Iraqi defense, finance, and trade minister Ali Allawi held the visiting Weissberg Chair in International Studies in 2011. Among his predecessors dating back to 1999 have been Palestinian leader Hanan Ashrawi, South African Justice Richard Goldstone, and Jan Egeland, former head of humanitarian affairs for the United Nations.

Allawi, an exile during the long regime of Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath Party, survived two attempts on his life in Baghdad. The historian now sees “a glimmer of light at the end of a dark tunnel” for Iraq and the Middle East. He drew hope from how France and Germany resolved their historic enmity, and from South Korea’s reconciliation with Japan despite years of mistreatment. “The Koreans transcended that. They had to. It’s a question not only of survival but the well being of their people. You can’t just be looking at rectifying historical injustices all the time,” said Allawi. “There has to be something better at the end of the day.”

Short-Term ‘Advertisements’ for Semester Study Abroad

It might be expected that at a liberal arts college with such emphasis on international education, an even higher percentage of students would study abroad. The emphasis on semester programs and the academic calendar at Beloit—there is no January term—“works against us in terms of the metrics,” said Bierman. For first- and second-year students he favors adding new, short-term education abroad offerings “carefully crafted so that they are not seen as substitutes for the semester-length experiences, but rather as advertisements for a subsequent longer period abroad.”

Bierman sees a double advantage to having faculty lead short-term education abroad courses: it would enrich their own international experience and expertise. “We expect faculty to introduce international elements into nearly every class that they teach at Beloit, but that would be leveraged if faculty also had greater opportunities to teach abroad,” the president said.

Up to three-quarters of international relations majors write senior theses on topics they began researching abroad. Pablo Toral, associate professor of political science, said one student who studied disruptions caused by two big dams in Thailand knew so much about the project that students at the Thai university took to calling her “Mrs. Dam.”

Cultivating ‘Intentionality’ About Study Abroad

The Spanish-born Toral advises students who head abroad without a thesis topic in mind “to relax. If you don’t find your thesis, the thesis topic will find you.” The key is to steer them to the right courses beforehand, help them ask the right questions while abroad, “and when they come back, you can’t let the dream die. You have to keep feeding them, pushing them,” said Toral. International education “is a never ending project.”

This strong focus on cultivating “student intentionality” about education abroad and then encouraging undergraduates to take full advantage of international events on campus are “helping us improve the learning outcomes from study abroad,” said Brewer. Students “are bound to learn something if you send them overseas, but the outcomes are so much stronger if you help them think about what they’re trying to achieve before they go.”

When Sonia Penso enrolled at Providence College, it was the dream of her autoworker parents—Portuguese immigrants whose education stopped in grade school—that she become a doctor or lawyer. Sonia herself envisioned law school as a strong possibility. But majoring in global studies, studying abroad in Nicaragua and Argentina, and working with troubled U.S. and Latino youth led her down a different path. She is now a caseworker with Homeboy Industries, a renowned gang intervention program in Los Angeles. “When everything shifted, I was really surprised that both my parents were incredibly supportive,” said the 23-year-old, who graduated in 2011. 

Global studies seems to have the effect of altering career trajectories. Michelle DePlante ‘08, who was among the first to sign up when Providence created the interdisciplinary major in 2005, does immigrant and refugee work in the Rhode Island capital. Victoria Neff ‘09 is at the University of Denver doing graduate work in international studies after two years in the Peace Corps in China. Alexandra BetGeorge ‘11 is a Fulbright Scholar teaching English to high school students in Bulgaria.

These are the career paths that leaders at the Catholic college envisioned when it created the interdisciplinary major and imbued it with extensive community service requirements across all four years. They must become fluent in a second language (two advanced level courses) and, naturally, participate in education abroad. The global studies program now has nearly 100 majors and graduates 25 students each year.

An Ethos of Service and New Emphasis on Education Abroad

The ethos of service runs strong at Providence, the only U.S. college founded and run by the white-robed Dominican Friars, but a push to internationalize students’ experiences picked up steam with the creation of a Center for International Studies in 2007 to facilitate education abroad. The college’s 2011 strategic plan seeks to boost the education abroad participation rate from 15 to 35 percent. An overhaul of the core curriculum addressed the need to develop more engaged students who undertake “research, scholarship, service, internships, and other immersion experiences locally, regionally, and abroad.”

Since making financial aid fully portable for the first time—a step with an annual cost of $3 million—Providence has seen the number of education abroad students rocket from 163 in 2010–11 to 230 in 2011–12, with even larger numbers projected for the 2012–13 academic year, said Dean of International Studies Adrian Beaulieu, who recently hired a fourth staff person for the Center for International Studies. The percentage studying abroad for a full semester has risen to 25 percent. Beaulieu said the first mandate he was given when hired as dean in 2007 was “to get serious about study abroad.”

Nicholas Longo, now the director of global studies, taught the first introductory course on global studies to 20 students back in 2005 as a part-time lecturer. Longo is a summa cum laude graduate from the class of 1996 who majored in political science, minored in a then-new department, public and community service studies, and became a civic engagement activist and scholar. He returned to his alma mater in 2008.

An Interdisciplinary Faculty and Community Advisers

Global studies has no faculty of its own but draws from other departments. Longo, an associate professor in the Department of Public and Community Service, said, “There’s a core group of six faculty from social work, from philosophy, from the business school, from foreign language, from sociology, and from public service.” 

Some courses are co-taught by community advisers such as DePlante, outreach coordinator for International Institute Rhode Island (IIRI), a nonprofit that provides educational, legal, and social services to immigrants and refugees throughout the state and southeast New England. She had done volunteer work for the institute as a college student and joined it full-time upon graduation. Now some of the students she teaches fulfill their service requirement by volunteering at IIRI.

Seeing the Real World Implications of Globalization

Service learning is built into most of the major’s required courses. Students often work in teams on projects that in Longo’s words “examine globalization and global citizenship through the lens of local community engagement.”

Using local activists as co-teachers “really brings a community voice into the classroom,” said Longo, who once was a national student coordinator for the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Campus Compact and later directed Miami University’s civic leadership institute.
“Students are not just studying globalization in that first course. They are doing service learning and civic engagement projects and seeing what the real world implications of globalization are in Providence,” said Longo. 

Like Sonia Penso, DePlante, the daughter of a Cuban immigrant, had to explain her choice of the major “more than once” to her parents and other relatives skeptical of whether it would lead to a job. “But I knew I was learning critical skills that would be the foundation for any direction I wanted to go,” said DePlante, who minored in business and Spanish as well. “The major provides the leadership and thinking skills that employers and grad schools are looking for.” She studied and did a business internship in Seville, Spain, then wrote her thesis on the assimilation of Hispanic immigrants in Providence.

A Capstone Globally Engaged Thesis

Most of Providence’s 3,900 undergraduates do not have to write theses, but the capstone of global studies is a requirement to produce a “globally engaged” thesis. The seniors participate in a year-long seminar synthesizing what they have learned in the classroom and in their community involvement at home and abroad, then write a paper that is supposed to have real world implications, like the comparative study that Penso did on troubled urban youth in Nicaragua, Argentina, and Rhode Island.
Throughout the four years, the majors must develop an individualized learning plan and keep an “e-portfolio” tracking their progress in learning a second language, choosing an education abroad program, engaging in civic and service activities, and demonstrating awareness of global issues.

Longo said it has taken time to convince some faculty colleagues that global studies was “a rigorous and legitimate academic discipline,” but the projects students have taken on and their success after graduation have made that task easier. Neff, who came to Providence on a soccer scholarship, wrote her thesis on the role of community organizations in combating HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. BetGeorge studied abroad in Tunisia, which positioned her well to write a thesis on the role of Facebook in sparking the first Arab Spring revolution.

Reaching Students Outside the Major

While global studies has had a strong influence on its own students, until this fall there was scant room in its courses for non-majors. But with a newly hired adjunct, the college now offers four sections of Introduction to Global Studies instead of two. “Part of the reason we haven’t grown as much as we probably could have is that if you didn’t come in as a global studies major, it was hard to get into the course,” said Longo. Now he hopes to “introduce the themes and the concepts from our course to many more students.”

“People aren’t looking at us any more like we were totally crazy for majoring in global studies,” Penso said with a laugh. “For me, it was the best choice I made. I’m so thankful that so many of the experiences that I had”—she worked with gang kids in Managua and undocumented youth in Buenos Aires—“were so far out of my comfort zone. It made me feel I can accomplish so much and do so many other things. It prepared us for the real world.”

Providence College

Read more about Providence College

They were just brief remarks in the wee hours of the chill October 1960 night on the stone steps of the Michigan Union from a tired John F. Kennedy who had flown in after debating rival Richard Nixon in New York. But the future president threw out a challenge to the thousands of students who had waited in the drizzle to greet him. Speaking off the cuff, he asked, “How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the foreign service and spend your lives traveling around the world?”

The idea of an international volunteer corps of young Americans already had been percolating in Congress, but the Michigan students got the ball rolling, gathering hundreds of signatures on a petition expressing a willingness to serve in poor countries. Kennedy formally proposed a Peace Corps in a San Francisco speech a few days before winning one of the closest elections in U.S. history. On March 1, 1961, JFK signed an executive order creating the agency, which Congress later wrote into law. Among the first volunteers were Alan and Judy Guskin, the Michigan graduate students who organized the petition drive. Half a century later, no tour of the Michigan campus is complete without a stop to read the inscription on the marker on the Union steps: “Conception of Peace Corps First Mentioned on This Spot October 14, 1960.”

The Peace Corps connection is an indelible part of the identity of the University of Michigan, which enrolls nearly 6,000 international students and offers instruction in 65 languages, from Bamana and Bosnian to Tamil and Twi to Urdu and Uzbek. Founded almost two centuries ago, U-M (it prefers the hyphen and never tires of seeing its block letter M logo stamped on sweatshirts and signs) boasts the seventh largest endowment of any U.S. university ($7.8 billion), according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, and conducts more research ($1 billion-plus) than any campus other than Johns Hopkins, according to the National Science Foundation. Constitutionally autonomous, it has weathered large cuts in state funding and still managed to hire dozens of new, tenure-track faculty, all while squeezing over a decade nearly a quarter-billion dollars in recurring costs from its $1.6 billion operating budget. “We have navigated this period well. We’ve remained on our upward trajectory and been able to do a lot of things we wanted to do, like increase the number of students who are studying abroad,” said Provost Philip Hanlon.

Ramping Up International Activities

From a campus with 27,000 undergraduates and 14,000 graduate students, the education abroad numbers have doubled since 2004–05 to nearly 2,000 in 2010–11, with 1,300 others heading abroad for service, internships, and other noncredit opportunities. President Mary Sue Coleman has made it her mission to, as she put it, “ramp up our international efforts,” in part by leading deans and faculty on carefully planned trips to Africa, China, and Brazil that have produced expanded research partnerships and other initiatives.

The 2008 trip to Ghana—on which she brought the Michigan Gospel Chorale—and to South Africa led to creation of an African Presidential Scholars Program that brings ten promising young scholars to Ann Arbor each year for residencies, as well as establishment of a new African Studies Center within the International Institute. Coleman has expanded a partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) in Shanghai, where a Michigan faculty member is dean of the UM-SJTU Joint Institute that confers dual degrees in engineering. The U-M Medical School has a $14 million research partnership with Peking University. At the same time, a top-level U-M task force ruled out opening a branch campus in China, as some universities have done. 

International Opportunities for Undergraduates

President Coleman also created in 2009 the Challenge for the Student Global Experience that has raised tens of millions of dollars for education abroad scholarships. She found internal funds to match $1 for every $2 of large donations, made the first gift herself, and later donated her 2011 salary increase as well. 

More than half of Michigan students (53 percent) now study outside Europe, compared with 38 percent eight years ago. The Center for Global and Intercultural Study within the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, operates the largest education abroad office on the decentralized campus. U-M faculty serve as resident directors of 40 of its 90 study abroad programs. The center also runs a service program called Global Intercultural Experience for Undergraduates (GIEU) that sends 200 students in small groups, each with a professor, to 15 to 20 places in need around the globe each summer. 

Senior Natalie Bisaro, a communications and comparative literature major, spent a month in Grenada working with young children. “Before going, I was kind of terrified of studying abroad, to be honest,” said Bisaro. “This was all pretty much life changing.” She later spent a semester in Switzerland and took a sports management class in Ann Arbor that included two weeks in London looking at preparations for the Summer Olympics. The latter was one of a dozen “Global Course Connections” classes with travel embedded. 

Lester Monts, senior vice provost for academic affairs, pushed for the creation in 2002 of the GIEU program. Monts, an ethnomusicologist and trumpeter who led the U-M Symphonic Band on a tour of China and helped bring to Ann Arbor the only Confucius Institute devoted solely to the arts, said, “One of the things that I’ve tried to do here is not let these big, grand, university initiatives go without some kind of undergraduate involvement,” he said.

Close Ties With Ghana

Fittingly, some of Michigan’s strongest international ties are to Ghana, the country that Kennedy singled out in his remarks on the Union steps. Through a partnership with the Ghanaian Ministry of Health, the University of Ghana, and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, dating to the 1980s, the U-M Medical School has trained most of the country’s obstetrician-gynecologists and helped reverse a “brain drain” of young physicians who used to leave the country for training. Other schools, including Engineering, Public Health, and Social Science, also send faculty to teach and conduct research in Ghana and bring Ghanaian faculty and students to Ann Arbor. 

For a class project, biomedical engineering major Jack Hessburg and classmates spent weeks in Ghana accompanying obstetricians on their rounds in teaching hospitals, and back in Ann Arbor then designed a 17-inch plastic device to place a fabric sleeve around the baby’s head to aid midwives in deliveries. The device awaits approval by health authorities, but “the obstetricians and midwives we were working with were excited and cautiously optimistic,” said Hessburg. 

Sending Engineers and Artists Abroad

The College of Engineering has made a big push to encourage students to study and undertake projects abroad. “We’re broad minded. We talk about study abroad, research abroad, volunteer experiences abroad, engineering projects abroad,” including solar car competitions, said Associate Dean James Paul Holloway. “The goal is not study 
abroad. The goal is for students to get outside their comfort zone.”

The engineers are as much interested “in a challenging experience as they are in academic credit,” said Amy Conger, who directs the college’s international programs. “They want an experience that is engaging, professionally relevant, and that’s going to teach them something new. They want to tackle a problem.”

Bryan Rogers, retiring dean of the School of Art and Design, took an art class while completing a PhD in chemical engineering at University of California Berkeley and wound up reengineering himself into a sculptor and installation artist. The School of Art and Design is the smallest school at Michigan, and Rogers spent a couple of years selling the idea of education abroad to his faculty before convincing them to make international travel and study a requirement for the major. Rogers, who did postgraduate work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, said, “Being somewhere else helped me better understand who I was. That’s what I want for our students and faculty…. The idea is not to go somewhere and get culture dust sprinkled on you, but to get away from the things that you’re familiar with and have an experience that helps you see where you came from.”

Global Scholars for Life

The university keeps expanding its international ambit in ways small and large. Three years ago it created a living-learning community it calls the Global Scholars Program in which U.S. and international students dwell together on the top two floors of a 10-story dorm and work on social justice projects. “When we advertise, we say we want students who are interested in making the world a better place,” said Jennifer Yim, the director. It quickly filled up with 35 students the first year, 70 the second, and the capacity of 130 the third year. “My students say ‘GSP for life,’” Yim said.

Xiaoxiao Liu, a senior from Beijing, served as a GSP resident adviser. He was also president of the student government’s international student affairs committee. Liu won math competitions as a schoolboy in China, but came to the United States for college because he wanted to learn more than the math and sciences emphasized in China’s universities. “Here you can speak whatever you want to say. People tend to have more diverse views of what’s going on. That’s something I really wanted to explore,” said Liu, who pulled off a rare triple major in actuarial math, statistics, and economics.

John Greisberger, director of the International Center, is heartened by the growing number of international undergraduates serving as resident advisers. “Four years ago, fewer than five of the 150 to 160 resident advisers were international students. Now it’s close to 40,” said Greisberger. “It’s a great job on campus. They get free housing and a meal plan. It really does build a multicultural environment within the residence halls.”

An Area Studies Powerhouse

Michigan is an area studies bastion, with six national resource centers among the International Institute’s 18 centers, plus a federally funded international business center. But that distinctive strength also means the Michigan centers were hard hit in 2011 when Congress cut Title VI funding for the national resource centers by 47 percent. Mark Tessler, vice provost for international affairs, said, “We’re better prepared than most. Some of these centers actually have endowments. I think the university will support us for a while.” But “the biggest unanswered question” is what happens in the long run to the dozens of less commonly taught languages, Tessler said. “If universities like us don’t offer them, then the U.S. just won’t have this capacity.” 

“We think it’s very important for a place like Michigan to keep the breadth and depth as much as possible because we know that many other institutions cannot.”

Kenneth Kollman, director of the International Institute, is looking to foundations to help fill in the $1.5 million, two-year funding gap. Although foreign language and area studies fellowships were not cut, Kollman said Michigan has had to cut back on summer language workshops and training for Michigan high school teachers. The university once calculated that it takes 29 students to pay for each section of a language course, but some of the centers’ languages— including Persian, Serbo-Croatian, Tamil, and Quechua—have as few as five students, he said.

Geography Lesson

The university in 2010 launched a “Global Michigan” Web site, globalportal.umich.edu, that pulls together resources and encourages students and faculty to conduct study and research abroad. “The world is today’s college campus. Never before have we had so much to learn from other nations and cultures,” Coleman says in a videotaped message that ends, “Go Blue—abroad!”

Coleman is unwilling to cede any of Michigan’s 65 languages as expendable.

“We think it’s very important for a place like Michigan to keep the breadth and depth as much as possible because we know that many other institutions cannot,” the president said. Cutting programs “is our last resort.”

“We had an experience back in the 1980s when we had one of these budget crunches and made the decision to close a couple of academic departments,” including geography, Coleman said. “Everybody thought there wasn’t any future in geography and then GPS [Global Positioning System] came along with all sorts of new things. Now it’s a very robust discipline. Anybody looking back now would think that decision was silly. So we are very careful; reducing languages for us would be a very serious decision.” 

The strides that Northern Arizona University (NAU) is making on all fronts in international education—doubling international enrollments, tripling participation in education abroad, marshaling enthusiastic faculty support for a Global Learning Initiative that will infuse more global content into the curriculum discipline by discipline—shows what a committed institution can do even under exacting budgetary circumstances. NAU has raised its international profile and activities even while dealing with the loss of a third of its state aid ($60 million) over four years. Part of its success stems from finding a novel way to finance the Global Learning Initiative, coupled with strong leadership and resolute support from the top.  

Arizona’s third-largest university, perched beneath the scenic San Francisco Peaks in Flagstaff, already was deeply involved in study and research across the American Southwest—the 27,000-square mile Navajo Nation is next door. The global engagement push has it looking even farther. The university made global engagement a strategic priority and hired Harvey Charles as vice provost for international affairs and director of the Center for International Education. Charles earlier directed international education offices at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, Georgia Tech, and San Francisco State University. President John Haeger and Provost Liz Grobsmith convened the Task Force for Global Education in 2008 and charged it with crafting a blueprint for transforming NAU into a global campus and ensuring that graduates were ready to compete in a global economy. While 18 faculty and administrators formed the nucleus of the task force, 30 other faculty and the then-mayor of Flagstaff, Joe Donaldson, served on five subcommittees (the mayor was on the community engagement panel). They came up with numerous ways to embed global learning throughout academic majors, general education courses, and cocurricular activities. “It is our hope that students will have multiple and substantive encounters (as opposed to merely a one-course requirement) with these perspectives,” said the panel. The faculty Senate gave its blessings to the panel’s raft of recommendations in 2010.

Fast Forwarding Course Development

Anthropologist Miguel Vasquez recalled a meeting to winnow four dozen faculty proposals in the running for $4,000 seed grants to develop new courses. “Harvey walked in and said, ‘Let’s make this easy. I want to award every one of these grants because this is what we’re trying to do on this campus. We’ve got the money, so let’s do it,’” said Vasquez. “It pushed the whole thing fast forward.” The university-wide belt-tightening brought on by the reductions in state appropriations actually whetted faculty appetites for the global initiative, said Blase Scarnati, director of the Global Learning Initiative. “Things started moving around the table, and that kind of kinetic energy made a lot of innovative things possible.”

“Instead of generic global learning outcomes, we’re talking about global learning outcomes in the language of physics, dental hygiene, electronic media and film, engineering.”

Each department was charged with defining global learning outcomes for its own discipline. “Instead of having a university-wide committee telling everybody how to do global learning, we’ve given the responsibility to the faculty themselves,” explained Charles. “Instead of generic global learning outcomes, we’re talking about global learning outcomes in the language of physics, dental hygiene, electronic media and film, engineering.”

Looking at the World Through Sustainability, Diversity Lenses

The faculty also were pressed to realign the curriculum in ways that buttressed three bedrock NAU values: sustainability, diversity, and global engagement. Charles launched a twice-a-year, 20-page magazine, NAU Global, that explained the changes ahead and shone a beacon on the extensive study and research that faculty and students were undertaking overseas.

Scarnati, a musicologist, said even minor course adjustments “can have quite a dramatic impact” on internationalizing the curriculum. Assigning civil engineering students to design a bridge for Kenya instead of Arizona requires the same complex math calculations, but also forces students to weigh “all sorts of cultural issues in terms of materials and workforce management,” Scarnati said. When professors and students looked closely, global issues hit closer to home than some realized. In Scarnati’s own department, awareness grew about the threats that development poses to the African blackwood trees that provide the wood to make oboes and other woodwinds. 

It will take time to see some changes bear fruit. Starting in fall 2012, a five-year Global Science and Engineer Program (GSEP) offers science and engineering majors the opportunity to spend a full year studying and interning abroad and to earn a second bachelor’s degree in French, German, or Spanish (or a minor in Chinese and Japanese). It is modeled after the University of Rhode Island’s groundbreaking dual-degree program. Eck Doerry, an associate professor of computer science who used to take rising sophomores on “icebreaker” summer trips to Germany, said, “Engineers are going to have to change how they behave.”

Global Engagement Outside the Classroom

Paul Trotta, professor of civil and environmental engineering and adviser to the Engineers Without Borders (EWB) chapter, led students on service trips to a village in Ghana to build a solar-powered water station and perform other work, including building quarters for a village nurse. They undertook the latter after village leaders identified their most pressing need not as more solar power, but as lodging, to convince the government to send them a nurse. When an engineering student came down with malaria, an anthropology student stepped up to manage construction. It wasn’t applied anthropology, but “what a wonderful experience she had,” said Trotta. EWB also has undertaken wastewater projects on the island of Roatán, 30 miles off the coast of Honduras. “We need projects closer to home,” said Trotta, who noted it costs as much to fly one student to Ghana as it does to build a well.

Leslie Schulz, executive dean of the College of Health and Human Services, led a December 2011 service trip to a Tibetan refugee camp in Mainpat, India. Schulz, a nutritionist and diabetes researcher, brought a dozen faculty and students—dental hygienists, engineers, and sustainable community experts—on the journey that began with two days of flying and an arduous 17-hour bus ride. They dwelled for eight days in a Buddhist monastery and, with other Flagstaff volunteers, fanned out to seven refugee camps providing care, mapping needs, and trying to improve the spotty electricity supply. Schulz brought the leader of the Mainpat community to Flagstaff in May 2012 to help convince other NAU colleges to pitch in on future trips. Her only criterion for who goes is that each must be able “to contribute something to the community, not just study people.”

Surge in International Enrollment

NAU’s international enrollments have nearly doubled since 2008, paced by a surge in students from China and Saudi Arabia. Its  intensive English program “had a huge bump in enrollment,” from 90 students in spring 2009 to 220 in fall 2010, said William Crawford, director and associate professor of linguistics. The program recently expanded into a former elementary school building; the playground, still equipped with slides, is now a designated smoking area.

Image

Mandy Hansen, director of international admissions and associate director of the Center for International Education, said NAU’s size and locale is a draw. Sunny Flagstaff has a population of 60,000 and, at 6,900 feet elevation, stays cooler in summer than Phoenix. “In a smaller town like Flagstaff and a midsize school, they can find their place. Parents feel really comfortable sending their students here,” said Hansen. Catherine Ribic, director of international students and scholars, said some “are unhappy when they get here, but then they’re unhappy to leave.” 

NAU was an original participant in an American Association of State Colleges and Universities initiative to promote dual degrees with Chinese universities, and it now has agreements with four dozen universities for a variety of 2+2, 1+2+1, and 1+3 programs. Four of the 35 staff members of the Center for International Education work on the China initiatives. Among them is graduate student Bruce Feng Wang, who originally came to NAU on a 2+2 exchange from Beijing International Studies University. As a junior business major, Wang was part of a student delegation that met Warren Buffett in Omaha, Nebraska. He even got to question the legendary investor about his decision to invest in a Chinese electric car company—an investment that subsequently turned sour. “NAU has really valued international education,” said Wang. “I have friends who went to bigger universities, but they don’t provide the resources for international students that NAU does.”

Grabbing Every Opportunity

The Chinese government pays for faculty to attend what NAU calls its Scholar Academy where they learn about U.S. higher education and pedagogical approaches. Dozens of NAU faculty have lectured in China. Grobsmith allowed Charles to retain some revenues from the Scholar Academy to help fund other global activities, including the engineering dual degrees and a symposium highlighting student research. “We found a mechanism that enables him to invest in all these initiatives that have put us on the map,” said Grobsmith, who retired in June 2012 as provost and became special assistant to the president for strategic and international initiatives (The new provost is Laura Huenneke, biologist and former NAU vice president for research). NAU now is looking to create dual-degree programs with universities in Indonesia, India, and elsewhere. “Every opportunity that comes along, we try to grab it,” said Grobsmith. “There’s just unending opportunity. There’s a tremendous value placed on American-style education, and people are hungry to get their students here.”

Michelle Harris, associate professor of sociology, helped establish a dual master’s degree program with the University of Botswana. Two NAU graduate students spent 2011–12 in Botswana, while Thembelihle Ndebele spent the year earning a master’s degree in Flagstaff. Harris said the soft-spoken Ndebele helped give Arizona students “a taste of the world” in every class she took. Ndebele spent part of her year in Flagstaff interning with Catholic Charities. “I’ve learnt a lot from this experience. It will help me go back and try to boost our child safety systems,” she said.

Go Scholarships and Frequent Sales Pitches

Student participation in faculty-led education abroad courses tripled in three years. So-called GO Scholarships ranging from $250 to $1,000 are helping fuel growth. Half the $100,000 awarded comes from a small fee collected by the student government from all 17,000 undergraduates. There were 20 faculty-led study trips in 2012, mostly in summer. “We presented to 3,400 students in person in spring 2012 through class visits, information sessions, and fairs on campus,” said Eric Deschamps, director of education abroad. NAU focuses mainly on exchanges, which puts education abroad “within reach of a lot of our students,” he added. Still, even with growth in education abroad offerings, only 355 NAU students studied abroad in 2010–11.

NAU serves many first-generation college students and others with little familiarity with other countries and cultures, even though Mexico is just across the border. On a class for graduate students that Charles led to view student affairs operations at European universities in May 2010, more than half the participants were traditionally underrepresented students. Among them was Marvin Jim, a Navajo graduate student who works at NAU’s Native American Cultural Center. He called the trip “a defining moment in my life. We went to Europe with lots of questions and came back with even more. We got out of our comfort zones.” 

Senior Ruth Naegele gave up a career in supply management to start college in midlife and spent a semester at the University of South Australia on a Gilman Scholarship. It “could not have been a better experience,” said Naegele.

Early Stage of the Journey

NAU is still at an early stage of this journey but is well positioned to keep accelerating its progress. Vasquez, the anthropologist, noted the Southwest “is the only place in the world where the so-called first and third worlds share a border.” Both international and minority enrollments are growing. A decade ago 77 percent of students were white; now they comprise 66 percent. Latino enrollment jumped almost 8 percent from 2010 to 2011, while 5 percent more international students enrolled. “This place is a wonderful laboratory for diversity,” said Vasquez. The Global Learning Initiative gives NAU faculty and students new opportunities to learn about the world—and themselves.

Image

Only nine community colleges across the United States enroll more international students than the 1,500 at Green River Community College, and those others are all much larger and in bigger places than Auburn, Washington, a suburb 20 miles south of Seattle. Green River enrolls 8,000 students on a wooded, hilltop campus and two branch campuses. This happened neither by accident nor overnight.

The story of how all these international students got there is a tale that starts a quarter century ago when the board of trustees approved then-President Rich Rutkowski’s plan to create an international programs division under the guiding hand of then-dean of students Mike McIntyre. “World peace through education was always part of my philosophy,” said McIntyre, now retired as executive vice president for instruction and student affairs. Rutkowski, a pragmatic former business manager, saw early on how internationalizing and “looking outward’ could redound to the benefit of the college and a community with a surging immigrant population and where many owe their livelihoods to exports. 

Their first big step was striking a deal to open a small campus in Kanuma, Japan, in 1990 bankrolled by a Japanese politician and magnate who had earlier built a branch for Edmonds Community College campus in Kobe. The arrangement with Green River fell apart in less than a year—Edmonds would close shop seven years later amid a financial scandal—but “it was a launch pad” for Green River’s international activities, said Rutkowski, who retired in 2010 after 27 years.

“The freedom in the early days was unbelievable. Anything was possible,” said McIntyre, who still keeps a hand in cultivating Green River’s international partnerships. Despite the branch’s brief existence, Green River’s name now was known in Japan— classes had been heavily advertised in the Tokyo Metro—and students began journeying to Green River for intensive English classes. When former ESL head and then-executive director of international programs Ross Jennings asked for $10,000 for an exploratory, three-month solo trip to China, McIntyre and Rutkowski said yes. Jennings, now vice president, made fast inroads, convincing dubious U.S. consular officers it wasn’t risky to issue visas for Chinese students to enroll in community colleges. McIntyre said, “We more or less opened China up for community colleges.”

A Running Start

Fast forward 15 years and today 559 of Green River’s 1,500 international students are from China, including teens as young as 16 finishing high school and working on an associate degree at the same time. They enter through a Washington State-authorized program that allows 11th and 12th graders—local or international—to earn both a high school diploma and a college degree. This has not been without controversy. Some faculty are at odds with President 

Eileen Ely over the youngest international students’ maturity, English skills, and readiness for college work. But college officials say the young students who advance out of ESL are earning the same stellar grades—3.5 GPA on average—as older international students. The top sending countries after China are Vietnam, South Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan.

A track record of success in student transfers to universities and extensive support services are the principal reasons Green River draws international students in droves, college leaders said. Arrayed on pegs around the wall of Jennings’ office in the McIntyre International Village (four gray, one-story buildings including ESL classrooms) are colorful baseball hats from dozens of those schools, including Indiana University, University of Washington, University of California-Berkeley, Cornell, and Ohio State.

Home Stays and On-Campus Housing

The college issued bonds in 2003 and partnered with a private developer to build its first student apartments, something most community colleges lack. It is a strong selling point for parents nervous about sending their teens to a distant country. Some 340 local and international students dwell in the 87-unit Campus Corner Apartments, which has a lounge and other amenities but no cafeteria. Many others live with 400-plus host families, while some rent and share apartments and houses on their own.

For $650 a month, the host families provide meals and a room of the student’s own and drive them to campus if there is no bus route. Cyndi Rapier, director of international housing, tells townspeople that “if you’re doing it for the money, don’t do it. You have to value the international experience and value opening your home to these students.” The vast majority do. Deb Casey, vice president of student services, said the students she has hosted from France, Denmark, Egypt, and Afghanistan “have been amazing. It’s been a great experience for my daughter.” Rapier said some students she hosted came back to attend her sons’ weddings.

A Program Within a Program

A staff of more than 50 (including 30 full-time) works with international students. “We’ve become a destination point because of the way we treat our students,” said Ely. “We don’t have the sunshineall-the-time that California has, but we can almost guarantee that a student can get into a four-year institution.” Ely, a Seattle area native who previously headed a Nebraska college, added, “We get accused of handholding the student too much, but I don’t think you can handhold enough.”

Green River, like all 1,600 U.S. community colleges, is an open access institution that offers career and technical courses as well as academic classes. About half its students are on the college transfer track to which most international students aspire, and half of all first-time, full-time freshmen graduate or transfer within three years. Jennings said international students transfer at much higher rates. “What we’ve been able to do is create a program within a program. Our job is to put them on a transfer track and make sure we monitor that every step of the way.” He said 10 percent of students wash out during intensive English, but most transfer.

“I felt like something was missing. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.”

“We’re not unmindful of the fact that they don’t really come to Green River to come to us. They come to get into USC, Washington, Indiana” and other universities, he added. 

Strong Returns on International Education

The main campus is literally in the woods a few miles from restaurants and shops in downtown Auburn, which can be a shock for students from metropolises with millions of people. Green River is considering adding student housing to a branch it has opened in nearby Kent in the middle of an “urban village” teeming with shops and restaurants and on a commuter rail stop. It already offers ESL classes there.

Green River’s investment in Kent has been made possible by the large returns the college has generated from its investments in educating international students. Vice President for Business Affairs Rick Brumfield said that since 1988 the Office of International Programs has generated more than $109 million in gross revenues that netted the college more than $53 million.

That money “has allowed Green River to maintain and expand classes, programming, services, and capital projects that support all students who study at Green River,” he said. “This has been particularly critical during difficult economic times and with the decline in state funding of public higher education.”

Teaching Service and Activism

The international students who come to Green River get not only grades on their transcripts but notations of how much community service they performed. Martha Koch, manager of international student activities, said there is never any shortage of volunteers for projects her office organizes. “They’re at the food bank, they’re planting trees, they might be removing invasive blackberries or helping at the Seattle marathon,” said Koch, jokingly adding, “We could be breaking rocks and they’re like, ‘Yeah! Let’s do it.’” She encourages students to keep a portfolio and show their service certificates to universities when they apply for admission and scholarships.

Yu Sato arrived from Tokyo in 2010 at age 18 for intensive English classes. At first she stuck to her studies and hung out with friends, but “I felt like something was missing. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.” She threw herself into activities and wound up as vice president of student government. The diminutive Sato, who wants to become a research veterinarian, also got a Chihuahua that she carried everywhere, à la Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. Now the 4.0 student is carting it around her new school, the University of California, Berkeley.

Koen Valks, 19, of Amsterdam, Netherlands, arrived at age 17 to do a gap year on a Fulbright-arranged program before starting at a Dutch university, but stayed for a second year and now has transferred to American University as an international relations major. He was one of Green River’s five “international student ambassadors.”

The son of a former diplomat, Valks aspires to follow in his father’s footsteps. He expressed gratitude to Green River for teaching him how to work with people from many different countries and cultures, a skill “I’m going to use the rest of my life.”

An aspiring electrical engineer, Ugo Nwachuku, 19, of Lagos, Nigeria, also came to Green River at 17. “I don’t think I would have had the right attitude and mental state to carry on and be a good student if I’d gone straight to university,” said Nwachuku, who won a scholarship to Drexel University. This “prepares you for a whole lot of situations in life.”

Studying in Japan and Australia

Education abroad is a tough sell at Green River, as it is at most community colleges due principally to financial reasons, but programs to Japan, Australia, and New Zealand are popular. Sixty-four students studied abroad in 2011–2012. Gary Oliveira, who teaches photography, led Green River’s own 10-week study program in Japan four times. “Many do it on financial aid and loans. A lot don’t get help from their parents,” said Oliveira. “I’ve had students who brought a lunch on every field trip and did whatever they could to cut costs.” 

Among the most popular and longest running is the 10-week education abroad program that history Professor Bruce Haulman, now emeritus, has led to Australia and New Zealand each winter since 2001. It draws 30 students, including some from other Washington community colleges. Haulman had to turn students away from a popular London program in the 1990s. He applauded the support he got from college leaders. “It’s an entrepreneurial model. If you want to do something and it’s not going to have a negative financial impact, why not try?” Haulman said.

Development Works Open a New Chapter

As vice president of international programs and extended learning, Edith Bannister, newly retired, cultivated partnerships with schools in Denmark, France, Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, China, Finland, and Iceland.

Her spouse, Barry Bannister, director of international development, has opened a new international chapter for Green River by undertaking projects for the U.S. State Department. The Australian educator and management consultant has worked on international education projects across Asia and the Middle East for the World Bank and other clients.

Since 2007 Green River has won $1.5 million in U.S. State Department grants to host students from developing countries each summer. Green River is the only community college among four institutions offering the Study of the United States Institutes for Student Leaders (SUSI) program on women’s leadership. Female students from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan took classes in summer July 2013, and in the past students have come from the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India to study communications, human rights, the U.S. Constitution, and gender. Edith Bannister, who directs the project, said, “It’s helped internationalize the faculty.” 

“World history professor Michelle Marshman called it “an absolute gift” to have these students in her classes.”

World history professor Michelle Marshman called it “an absolute gift” to have these students in her classes. Barry Bannister, Marshman and sociology instructor Louise Hull led a workshop in Delhi, India, in December 2012 for 40 past SUSI participants. Marshman stays in touch with them by e-mail and Facebook and got firsthand accounts on the Arab Spring from students in Egypt. “Learning is a twoway street,” she said.

Green River, located in a valley that is a hub of the aviation industry, has provided classroom training for future pilots and air traffic controllers in partnership with institutions in China and Japan.

The Ohio State University (OSU) is imposing by any dimension. Its 64,000 students make it the third largest higher education institution in the United States. The research budget is closing in on $1 billion. Recently it generated nearly a half-billion dollars for its endowment by leasing to an Australian firm the concession to operate the campus parking garages for 50 years. When it piloted an undergraduate mentorship program that came with a $2,000 carrot that could be used for education abroad, it started with 1,000 students. “We don’t do anything small in Ohio State,” said Dolan Evanovich, vice president for strategic enrollment planning.

But five years ago its president, provost, and faculty decided that Ohio State was not sufficiently international. They set out to remedy that in a hurry. Today Ohio State has what it calls Global Gateway offices in Shanghai, China, Mumbai, India, and São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, and it’s eyeing which continent will be next. International enrollments have rocketed from 4,000 to 6,000, mostly due to a large influx of Chinese undergraduates, who now comprise two-thirds of all 3,600 students the world’s largest country sends off to Columbus. Education abroad enrollments have spiked from 1,716 to 2,255, thanks to a switch from quarters to semesters and the introduction of May session courses. Deans of the 14 colleges have embraced the strategy, recognizing internationalization is vital to their mission, not to mention their job evaluation.

Even colleges deeply engaged for years in overseas research and partnerships now see new doors opening. Bruce McPheron, dean of the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, said, “This gateway strategy provides an opportunity not only to build lasting partnerships with other scholars, but with the private and public sectors, just like we do here as a land-grant university.”

What’s taking place, said Vice Provost for Global Strategies and International Affairs William Brustein, is that internationalization has become rooted in “the campus community’s DNA.”

Sherri Geldin, director of Ohio State’s showcase Wexner Center for the Arts, which just mounted an exhibition on the work of contemporary Brazilian artists and filmmakers, observed, “It’s nothing we even have to think about very consciously. It just happens.”

New Leadership and Status for International Affairs

Ohio State wooed Brustein from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009 by elevating the position of senior international officer to the rank of vice provost and including him in the Council of Deans. Brustein also was promised “that he would have the attention of not only the provost, but also the president. Symbolically that’s critical,” said Joseph Alutto, provost at the time and later interim president after E. Gordon Gee stepped down in 2013 (it was the globally minded Gee who set a goal of making Ohio State “the landgrant university to the world).”

“This university was punching under its weight when it came to comprehensive internationalization,” said Brustein, who also was given an office in Bricker Hall on the Oval amidst the rest of the university’s leadership. “A lot was going on in the colleges, but in terms of having signature university programs and an institutional strategy, those didn’t exist.” Kelechi Kalu, a professor of African American and African Studies, was tapped in 2012 for associate provost, overseeing day-to-day operations of the Office of International Affairs (OIA) in century-old Oxley Hall.

A President’s and Provost’s Council on Strategic Internationalization prepared a detailed blueprint for engaging more faculty and students in global learning, teaching, and research. Undergirding the strategy were what the council called its six “pillars”: recruiting more international faculty and students, promoting scholarship on global issues, creating dual-degree programs, developing an international physical presence, increasing international experiences for students, and collaborating with alumni and Ohio business ventures.

Ohio State has embarked on a 10-year, $400 million initiative to hire 500 new, interdisciplinary faculty to pursue breakthroughs on the “grand challenges of the twenty-first century” in three realms: energy and environment, food production and safety, and health and wellness. These Discovery Themes, as Ohio State calls them, all have deep international dimensions.

Understanding the Worth of Global Gateways

Ohio State leaders originally thought the gateway offices could largely cover their $250,000-a-year costs by generating revenues from executive training, which would subsidize recruiting and academic activities. Professors would fly in from Columbus to provide executive training in short bursts. But “the price points for delivering executive-type education in China and India are not what they are here in the U.S.,” said Christopher Carey, a West Point graduate who is Global Gateways director.

The original business model, Brustein said, “was overly ambitious” and undervalued the academic benefits accruing from these overseas outposts.

“We said, ‘Let’s look at what the gateways are doing in terms of assisting the quantity and quality of the students who are coming here, particularly from China, and let’s monetize that. Let’s look at (how) they’re facilitating faculty teaching and research collaborations. Let’s look at the monetary value of the new internships and study abroad programs that we’ve created,’” he recalled. That reasoning carried the day.

New dual-degree programs have sprouted with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and other institutions. The gateways energized local Buckeye alumni, one of whom donated prime office space in Mumbai. With a half-million living alumni, Buckeyes are everywhere. “We just started our own alumni club in Shanghai,” boasted David Williams, dean of the College of Engineering. “We’re building the same kind of network for engineers we have here in this country.” The gateway also gives Ohio State an edge in recruiting “fabulous” Shanghai Jiao Tong students for graduate school, he added.

“None of this is cheap, but if you’re going to do it, you have to do it well,” said Alutto, the former longtime dean of the Fisher College of Business, who returned to the faculty after Ohio State’s new president, Michael Drake, took office this summer.

Ramping Up Student Services and Friendship

As recently as a quarter century ago, Ohio State had open admissions and nearly nine in 10 students were from Ohio. As it raised standards, it attracted more out-of-staters and international students, who together now make up nearly a third of the student body. Engineering and business are the biggest draws for the 6,000 international students.

The emphasis now is not on driving that number higher, but diversifying the pool and improving the experience when they reach Columbus. “We’re concentrating on making sure that our students are well taken care of, feel welcome, and integrate well into the fabric of Ohio State,” said Gifty Ako-Adounvo, international student and scholar services director.

Improved services come at a price. Ohio State in 2012 added a $500 per-term fee to tuition for new international undergraduates to expand academic support and extracurricular programs, provide more English proficiency instruction, and offer more housing options. It also underwrote the $175,000 cost of flying a 10-person team from admissions, international affairs, and student life to China to hold full-blown preorientation sessions for hundreds of incoming students and their parents.

The raft of extracurricular programming includes weekly “Global Engagement Nights” that bring dozens of U.S. and international students together. Xin Ni Au, 21, a nutrition major from Johor, Malaysia, attended nearly every one, became a volunteer Global Ambassador, and exuberantly greeted new arrivals at an OIA booth at the Columbus airport.

Au, a junior, transferred to Ohio State just nine months earlier, but with help from two Malaysian students she found on Facebook, she threw herself into campus life. She’s still surprised “how friendly people are. People smile and say, ‘Hi. How are you?’ and everything. Frankly, you don’t get that in Malaysia.”

Tianxia “Mark” Gu, 22, a senior from Shanghai, also became a Global Ambassador. The gregarious Gu said he was “pretty shy” before coming to Columbus, but now counts more than 50 students as close friends. A self-described “super sports fan,” he “learned the Buckeye pride before I came here.” He credits his American accent to watching reruns of the sitcom Friends back in Shanghai and considers Monica, the perfectionist, a role model. The finance and math major wants to return to China and develop job search software to help people “build their dream.”

Tackling Rabies and Cervical Cancer in Ethiopia

Wide-ranging partnerships in Ethiopia with universities, government agencies, and NGOs testify to the breadth of resources Ohio State can summon to address endemic health problems. Its “One Health” initiative musters administrators, faculty, and students from all seven OSU health science colleges, as well as the business college and others. Already the collaboration has laid the groundwork for a mass campaign to vaccinate dogs against rabies and introduce cervical cancer screening in places where that has never been done.

Spearheading the One Health work in Ethiopia is Wondwossen Gebreyes, a veterinary molecular epidemiologist. “We’ve been teaching courses there every summer since 2009,” said Gebreyes. “For the past two years we’ve adopted the One Health model and expanded the disciplines.” For him, One Health is a way to pay back the poor farmers whose cattle Gebreyes once treated after earning a veterinary degree at Addis Ababa University (he also has a PhD from North Carolina State). “I got all my education in Ethiopia for free on their shoulders,” he said.

Usha Menon, vice dean of the College of Nursing, has journeyed to Addis Ababa four times to teach and prepare a pilot cervical cancer screening program in the Amhara region. A half-dozen nursing students accompanied her on the last trip. Nearly 90 percent of cervical cancer occurs in the developing world, where four of five women have never been screened, said Menon, who came to Ohio State in 2012. “I’ve never seen this level of collaboration at other schools among the health sciences.” Menon encountered fewer bureaucratic hurdles for her screening since Gebreyes already had secured permission from the Ethiopian government for the larger One Health project. “That’s the joy of Ohio State for me. Cross-collaboration makes these things much easier to do. I don’t have to start from scratch,” she said.

“I’ve never seen this level of collaboration at other schools among the health sciences....That’s the joy of Ohio State for me.”

Tom Gregoire, dean of the College of Social Work, made his first visit to Ethiopia with the One Health team and will return to teach a graduate course. Did the College of Social Work need a kick to internationalize? No, Gregoire said, but the strategic plan “sent a signal from the top and created more enthusiasm around it. It’s more sanctioned. There’s a zillion things one can do around here and a good plan helps you choose.”

Teaching Critical Languages

Ohio State has six Title VI national resource centers, including the National East Asian Languages Resource Center. The Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures offers more than 160 language courses and in 2012 received a threeyear, nearly $10 million grant to administer the U.S. State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program to establish intensive summer language institutes at partner universities in China, Japan, and Korea.

Professor Galal Walker underscored the difficulty the United States faces in producing enough graduates fluent in these languages. “There are 200,000 Chinese studying in the United States and about 15,000 Americans studying in China, most in very low-level, short-term classes, sometimes with no language at all,” he said. While Mandarin course enrollments have grown to 60,000 at U.S. campuses, 50,000 are at beginner levels, said Walker.

Walker is doing his part. He runs a two-year master’s program that prepares Americans to work in China-related careers. They do internships in China and spend the second year taking regular classes at a Chinese university. “The idea is to provide our students a basis for having sophisticated interactions with Chinese counterparts, the kind of educated people you meet in large companies and corporations,” said Walker.

Briun Greene, one of those graduate students, first learned Mandarin as a linguist for the Army. Recently he was tapped to serve as the interpreter for a visiting Chinese business delegation at a big trade show in Las Vegas. (The company flew in several of Walker’s students as its guests.)

“You have to be really fast on your feet to do that. He did a great job,” said the professor. The problem is that “very few get up to Briun’s level, which takes 2,500 hours of instruction—more than it takes to earn a law degree.” Greene sees his future as an entrepreneur in China. “I love living in Asia. I felt the most alive there,” he said.

Preparing Stem Faculty for India

When the U.S. Department of State announced in June 2013 that Ohio State had won a prestigious Obama-Singh 21st Century Knowledge Initiative award to expand India’s pipeline for producing science and engineering faculty, astrophysicist Anil Pradhan received accolades as the driving force behind the effort. Two OSU colleagues and a professor at partner Aligarh Muslim University are codirectors.

But Pradhan said “20 to 30 busy people” at OSU and an equal number at the Uttar Pradesh, India, university helped prepare the complex proposal. Ohio State also matched his $150,000 grant and will provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in fellowships to allow future Indian faculty to conduct PhD research, receive mentoring, and earn a master’s degree in teaching in Columbus.

“The idea is to train STEM faculty at the worldclass level,” said Pradhan. “Thousands upon thousands of universities and colleges have opened up in India with practically no (such) faculty.” He hopes to speed up the 10 years of training customarily required.

“Other universities in India are watching this project. It has huge potential,” said Pradhan, who taught radiation physics in India last spring as a Fulbright scholar, one of 14 Ohio State faculty so honored in 2013–2014. Pradhan, who emigrated from India as a teen, had never before ventured outside his laboratory on a project like this, but felt emboldened by OSU’s internationalization efforts. The big U.S. land-grant universities “have the most experience in providing higher education to masses of people,” said Pradhan, and Ohio State can “lead the pack.”

Pradhan is not alone in that belief. “There’s a certain hunger for helping this university realize its goal of global eminence. It’s become everybody’s narrative,” said Kalu.

As an ecologist studying vector-borne diseases, Courtney Murdock had long been interested in conducting research in Brazil, which made headlines around the world in 2015 due to the Zika virus epidemic. Her opportunity to travel to Brazil came in 2016 due to an innovative partnership between the University of Georgia (UGA), where Murdock is an assistant professor, and the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. After participating in a university-sponsored faculty workshop designed to foster research collaboration with several Brazilian institutions, Murdock and faculty from Brazil’s Federal University of Viçosa (UFV) received a $15,000 seed grant. The project, which will include the training of Brazilian and U.S. PhD students, explores how temperature variations affect the mosquito-Zika virus interaction. 

Murdock’s grant was part of UGA’s strategic, data-driven approach to building international partnerships in Brazil. UGA has combined targeted use of incentive funding with facilitated faculty mobility to enhance research collaboration with five institutions in Minas Gerais. The partnership aims to not only strengthen faculty involvement in campus internationalization, but also focus resources on complementary research areas. 

Balancing Individual Initiative and Centralized Coordination

As a comprehensive land- and sea-grant institution made up of 17 schools and colleges, UGA faces many of the same challenges that other large public universities encounter when it comes to international research collaboration. Many areas of the university are actively engaged in international research, but opportunities for synergies are often lost. While centralized coordination is essential, collaborative research is ultimately driven by the faculty. 

“Particularly if you move beyond student mobility, you have this challenge of relying on individual faculty initiative to generate lasting research and service interactions,” says Brian Watkins, director for international partnerships. When Noel Fallows became the associate provost for international education and senior international officer in 2016, he wanted to address this issue by strengthening the role of the UGA Office of International Education in establishing research partnerships. “I wanted to position the international office as a major nexus for international research on campus,” he says. 

Fallows and Watkins worked together to pinpoint where they wanted to focus their efforts. “We wanted to figure out where in the world we have an existing critical mass of relationships where there is also potential for further collaboration in priority research areas,” Watkins says.  

Using Data Analysis to Identify Strategic Partners

Using an internal faculty database and Clarivate Analytics’s InCites platform, Watkins performed a bibliometric analysis to identify the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais as a region where UGA already had substantial engagement. While the university had always viewed Brazil as a strategically important partner, the analysis showed that an outsized portion of UGA’s collaborations in Brazil could be traced to several institutions in Minas Gerais. Furthermore, there was significant overlap in several priority areas—such as human and animal health, life sciences, agriculture, and environmental sciences—that suggested possibilities for future research collaboration.

Image

One of the outcomes of Watkins’s analysis was the UGA-Minas Gerais Joint Research Accelerator, which offers a four-year, $240,000 seed grant program in collaboration with the Minas Gerais State Agency for Research and Development (FAPEMIG). UGA quickly established, or refocused, institutional partnerships with three universities in that region that had overlapping strengths across one or more strategic research areas. 

The next step was to bring faculty from UGA together with their Brazilian counterparts for a two-day faculty workshop in Tiradentes, Brazil. The UGA Office of the Provost and the Office of Research, among other units on campus, provided financial support for the workshop. Twenty-four participants were tasked with developing new joint research proposals to be presented to their peers. Faculty developed 12 new joint research proposals, half of which were refined into applications for the UGA-FAPEMIG seed funding program, and two of which were ultimately selected for funding.

Planting the Seeds for Future Collaboration

Murdock expects that the seed funding she, her UGA colleague Melinda Brindley, and their Brazilian collaborators received from UGA-FAPEMIG will lead to larger external grant opportunities. The initial investment will result in two or three collaborative publications, and the preliminary data from the project will form the backbone of a National Institutes of Health Research Project Grant (R01) application.

“In order to successfully obtain funding for large-scale international collaborations, teams need to be in place with a sufficient track record of research,” Murdock says. “This is incredibly difficult to initially set up without seed grant opportunities. Initiatives such as this one [are] hugely helpful in facilitating the formation of these international teams and building the groundwork for future, larger-scale research collaborations.” 

Image

The seed funding was not limited to faculty who participated in the workshop in Tiradentes. UGA linguistics professor Pilar Chamorro Fernandez and Fabio Bonfim Duarte, a linguist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), received funding to build on their previous work on indigenous languages in Brazil. “Given that these languages are normally in remote areas, we need funding to do this kind of research,” Fernandez says. “It’s made me feel like the research we do as linguists has finally been acknowledged.”

The project has also created opportunities for graduate student research on both sides. Brazilian graduate students from UFMG worked with Fernandez and Duarte to document endangered languages in Brazil’s Tenetehara communities. Three graduate students at UGA will begin working on the project in fall 2018. 

In addition to the institutional relationships built upon the seed funding, UGA has developed strong ties to Minas Gerais through its Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute (LACSI). LACSI is a Title VI National Resource Center (NRC) funded by the U.S. Department of Education. According to LACSI Director Richard Gordon, they were able to use NRC funds to help support the partnership between FAPEMIG and UGA. 

Image

LACSI hosts the Portuguese Flagship program, the only Flagship program in the United States that is dedicated to Portuguese. The Flagship is funded through a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense’s National Security Education program, with the goal of teaching critical languages to undergraduate students. UGA expects that the Portuguese Flagship program, and its close partnership with the Federal University of São João del-Rei (UFSJ), will eventually lead to increased student and faculty mobility as well as joint research. 

A Model for Engagement Around the World

The UGA-Minas Gerais partnership serves as a model for joint research collaboration in other regions. Watkins cautions, however, that the approach is not applicable in all countries. “It’s a compelling model to follow in terms of building out research collaboration with peers abroad, but it presupposes a group of partners in geographic proximity where there are congruent research interests and capacity,” he says.  

Watkins says that while seed funding is not unique, what is innovative is the combination of data-driven analysis and faculty incentives. “We use the available data to target seed funding and combine both of those with face-to-face meetings to generate organic yet directed faculty interest,” he says. 

UGA will be utilizing the same data-driven approach in its engagement in other world regions, particularly in China. “We view the UGA-Minas model as an essential first step in projecting a physical presence that builds [the] institution’s international profile and leads to additional research and student mobility opportunities in a way not otherwise possible through ad hoc collaborations,” Watkins says.

University of Georgia

Read more about University of Georgia

The mission of Babson College is to educate entrepreneurial leaders who create great economic and social value—everywhere. Recognized as one of the top entrepreneurship schools in the United States, Babson draws more than 1,000 international students from around the world to its campus in Wellesley, Massachusetts, every year. Nearly 27 percent of the undergraduate students and more than 70 percent of the graduate students come from abroad, with a total student body of just over 3,000.

Internationalization has been at the heart of Babson’s mission as a private business college since entrepreneur Roger Babson founded the institution in 1919. “Roger Babson took away the lesson from World War I that the world needed to come together,” says President Kerry Healey. “The way that he thought that could best be done was through business, executed in the interest of humanity. Roger Babson’s original vision is still applicable for us almost 100 years later.”  

Spreading Entrepreneurship Education Around the World

Babson seeks to share its approach to entrepreneurship education beyond the borders of its Wellesley campus. “We want to be the preeminent institution for entrepreneurship education everywhere,” says Amir Reza, vice provost for international and multicultural education and senior international officer (SIO). “The opportunities for internationalization sit within the ‘everywhere’ context. We want to create access to our methodology, which we call entrepreneurial thought and action.” 

Heidi Neck, professor of entrepreneurship, oversees the Global Symposia for Entrepreneurship Educators (SEE) program, which is delivered twice a year on the Babson campus and available on demand internationally. “We train other educators from around the world in how Babson teaches entrepreneurship,” Neck says.

Neck also directs the Babson Collaborative for Entrepreneurship Education, an institutional membership organization under Babson’s leadership made up of 23 institutions around the world. “We’re trying to build a better entrepreneurship education ecosystem by collaborating, helping one another, sharing best practices, but also imagining future possibilities,” Neck says. “Babson is very small, but we want to bring what we do with respect to entrepreneurship education to the world.”

Babson has used technology to increase access to its entrepreneurship expertise. The college has contributed six entrepreneurship courses to edX, the platform created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University that provides online learning and massive online open courses (MOOCs). More than 100,000 people in 220 countries and territories have participated in Babson’s entrepreneurship MOOCs, according to Healey. 

Bringing Together International and Multicultural Education

The Glavin Office of Multicultural & International Education is at the heart of Babson’s internationalization efforts. It is home to international education, multicultural, service-learning, and multifaith programs. In an innovative approach to internationalization, the Glavin Office aims to foster conversations about identity, diversity, inclusion, and equity on campus. 

When Reza became SIO in 2010, he brought together international education—which includes education abroad and international student and scholar services—and multicultural education under the larger umbrella of the Glavin Office. In 2014, the office also assumed responsibility for service-learning and multifaith programs, which provided more intersectionality. 

“We have experimented with intentional strategies to bridge the gap between these areas to benefit our students’ education,” Reza says. “Each area continues to have professionals with expertise in their respective fields, and we have seen both organic and intentional programming that has helped us further the mission and goals of each area through the lens of the other.” 

Much of the Glavin Office’s programming consequently revolves around encouraging students to explore their cultural identities and how that impacts the ways in which they interact with the world. Glavin’s predeparture orientations for education abroad, for example, take an inclusive approach to the subject of identity. Students are asked to list five to 10 aspects of their identities and are guided through a set of reflection questions that ask them to explore the ways that identities like LGBTQ, gender, and race are seen in their host country and to consider how they will interact on those issues.

“What we are doing is talking about the relationship between identity and place for everybody, using several different examples,” explains Reza. “If I’m an African American student and I’m going to a predominantly white environment, what does that mean? Or if I am a Muslim and I want to practice my faith, what does Islamophobia mean for me?”

Image

Another example of the collaboration between the international and multicultural education teams was the development of a three-part workshop titled “Understanding Race and Racism in the U.S. for International Students.” Designed by arts and humanities professor Elizabeth Swanson, the first workshop gives students an understanding of language and terminology and the idea of race as a social construct. The second segment focuses on slavery and historical race relations in the United States, and the final workshop helps students process current events and issues such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the actions and policies of the Trump administration. 

The goal of the workshop series is to help international students gain a better perspective on current events and historical precedents that shape many of the discussions on today’s college campuses.

Salome Mosehle, a senior from South Africa, says that although her country has its own history of racism, she grew up in a predominantly black society. “I came to the United States and was told that there was a struggle that comes with being black,” she says. “It was a tough thing to grasp.”

She says the racism workshop helped her understand the new cultural context in which she found herself. “The [workshop] really helped open my eyes about what it means to be black in America,” Mosehle says. 

Recruiting International Students Through the Global Scholars Program

When Kerry Healey took office as Babson’s president in July 2013, one of the first things she did was to establish the Global Scholars program, a need-based scholarship for talented international students. She created the program because she wanted to diversify the international student population, both economically and geographically. “I thought that we were missing a great opportunity to bring some of the most talented students from around the world who aspire to be entrepreneurs to Babson,” Healey says. 

In 2014, when she offered the first 10 need-based scholarships for international students, more than 900 students applied. Since then, the college has committed more than $1 million a year to fund 10 scholarships, which cover tuition, room and board, airfare, and books, depending on the individual student’s level of need. There are currently 45 Global Scholars on the Babson campus.

A faculty mentor works with each cohort of Global Scholars, and the international student advising team designs a special orientation and plans retreats and cultural events throughout the year. 

“Having this group of scholars on campus has been transformative. We have the sense that each and every one of them are going to go back to their countries and become profound change makers,” Healey says. 

Lizaveta (Lisa) Litvinava, who earned a dual concentration in global business management and diversity and identity, is an international student from Belarus. Litvinava is among the first cohort of Global Scholars who graduated in May 2018. Her fellow Global Scholars came from Afghanistan, Brazil, Rwanda, and South Africa. 

Litvinava says that her experience as a Global Scholar has “meant everything.” “If it weren’t for [this program], I would have never been able to speak about the world in the way that I speak about it right now. I would never have been able to become the person I am right now without the experience and education that Babson gave me,” she says.

Creating a Welcoming Environment for International Students

With a third of its student body coming from abroad, Babson goes out of its way to make sure that international students such as Litvinava feel at home. Babson intentionally avoids separating international students from domestic students throughout their college experience. Many universities offer separate welcome programs for international students, but Babson holds a single orientation for all incoming students. While international students might attend specific sessions on topics such as immigration and work authorization, they are integrated with domestic students for the majority of the orientation. 

Image

The college has also taken specific steps to make sure that international students feel welcome in light of recent political developments. “We take our lead from students. When something happens in the world, such as the [travel] ban and attacks against DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], we reach out to students to find out what they need and what’s meaningful to them,” says Jamie Kendrioski, director of international services and multicultural education. “I don’t make any decision about how to react to a crisis or issue without talking to students first and seeing what matters to them,” adds Kendrioski. 

International students concur that Babson goes the extra mile to make sure that they feel comfortable. “From emails coming out from the president directly [to students] to teachers speaking about things in class, I think it gave us a sense of comfort and assurance that we are accepted here,” says Ashutosh Pandit, an MBA student from India.

Fostering Global Awareness Through Glavin Global Fellows

In order to bring together all of the various international opportunities available on campus, Babson launched the Glavin Global Fellows program, a cohort-based program for undergraduate students. The program includes a first-year living learning community, a certificate program, and internationally themed events throughout the year. The Glavin Office also sponsors students to take part in international and language case competitions, and it awards more than $12,000 in grants for students to conduct independent research abroad. 

According to Lorien Romito, director of education abroad and the Global Fellows program adviser, each year, approximately 250 students are Glavin Global Fellows and around 25 students graduate with the certificate. Romito also serves as the campus Fulbright adviser because students who demonstrate an early interest in international issues are prime candidates to apply for the Fulbright program.

To earn a Glavin Global Fellows certificate, students need to take two or more courses in a foreign language and three advanced classes with international content. Additionally, students need to participate in an international experience abroad or a multicultural experience in the United States. 

Image

Aidan Dennis, who is doing a dual concentration in global business management and social and cultural studies, first became interested in the Glavin Global Fellows program as a first-year student. He says that half of the 20 students living on his floor in the residence hall that first year were international. He describes the Glavin Global Fellows program as “a community of students who are very interested in global issues.” 

Dennis, who will graduate in 2019, has had three international experiences on three different continents. He studied abroad in Argentina and Chile, and he did a short-term elective abroad in Thailand and Laos. He also applied for and received a grant to spend a week in Amsterdam conducting interviews as part of a Glavin Global Fellows project on consumer behavior in the Netherlands. 

He says that spending time abroad helped him understand the challenges that international students at Babson face: “From the Glavin Global Fellows program, I really learned about myself through interacting with all these other people from different countries, and then going abroad myself and coming back is like stepping into their shoes.” 

Education Abroad for Global Entrepreneurs

Dennis is among the 547 Babson students who went abroad in 2016–17. In 2018, 52 percent of Babson’s graduating undergraduate class participated in a credit-bearing education abroad experience. This is an average increase of 10 percent year-over-year since 2005. 

Babson is intentional about its education abroad advising, with a particular focus on early outreach during students’ required first-year seminars. In addition to providing specialized workshops on finances for study abroad, the college awarded more than $368,000 in internal need-based education abroad grants to undergraduate students during the 2016–17 academic year. 

Babson offers a variety of programs of different lengths, ranging from short-term electives abroad to semester and academic year programs. Each year, approximately 150 undergraduate and 155 graduate students participate in faculty-led electives abroad that run during academic breaks. These courses combine classroom instruction on campus in Massachusetts with in-country lectures, company visits, and cultural excursions. Examples include a humanities course on postmodernism in the United Arab Emirates, a theater course in England, and an economics course in Argentina and Uruguay. 

Through Babson’s International Consulting Experience program, student teams work on project assignments with international corporate sponsors. The program includes predeparture sessions in the fall that are focused on consulting methodologies and intercultural competencies, with travel to the company site taking place during winter break. The 33 projects that were carried out over the past 5 years included 126 Babson students, 15 Babson faculty, and engaged partner schools and businesses in 12 countries. Participating companies during this period include Bosch in Germany, the Mariinsky Theatre in Russia, and Care&Share in India.

The college’s flagship education abroad program is a multidestination faculty-led program known as Babson - Russia, India, China: The Cornerstone of the New Global Economy (BRIC). Every fall semester, a cohort of 24 students spend a month each in St. Petersburg, Russia; Shanghai, China; and New Delhi, India. Babson faculty lead each segment of the program, offering a full courseload combined with business visits, cultural excursions, and service-learning opportunities. 

Bill Coyle, professor of accounting and law, has been taking students to Russia since the early 1990s. His relationships with partners there, along with commitment from other faculty and the Glavin Office, laid the foundation for the BRIC program, which launched in 2009. The program was created with a desire to give students a comparative framework within which to understand developing economies. 

Before departing for Russia, students attend an intensive predeparture orientation on the Babson campus that provides guidance on thinking comparatively across cultures. Students also take a two-credit intercultural communications course that spans the entire semester that allows them to reflect on their experiences in different cultural contexts. According to history professor Katherine Platt, the orientation and the communications course help students reflect on their identities as individuals and as a group. 

Notably, participation in BRIC has resulted in significant intercultural development demonstrated by pre- and post-Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) results. On average, participants’ IDI scores increase more than 20 percent. 

Image

Students benefit from simultaneously taking business and liberal arts classes. “The whole semester is a balance of business and liberal arts courses—entrepreneurship, management, history, and philosophy,” says Platt, who teaches in the India portion of the program. 

Coyle says the liberal arts courses provide a foundation for students to understand the three countries’ business environments. “As a business professor, I have a real appreciation for the fact that you can’t be serious about doing international business if you do not understand the liberal arts aspects of the country you are considering doing business in,” he says. “The way [Russians] do business is based on their history and politics and economics and the literature they have grown up with.”

Alumni Outreach Around the World

With 40,000 alumni in 125 countries, Babson has recently focused on finding innovative ways to build up its alumni network. In 2015, President Healey launched Babson Connect: Worldwide, a three-day alumni conference and networking platform that is held in a different region each year. The inaugural conference was held in Cartagena, Colombia, followed by Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Bangkok, Thailand; and Madrid, Spain. Approximately 400 alumni attended each conference. 

Babson has been able to get significant press coverage prior to the events, which in turn has boosted the number of student applications from that region. “We saw immediately that bringing the conference to the region [gave us a return in investment] in alumni support [that was] many times [more valuable than] the cost of the event,” Healey says. “There are benefits to enrollment, fundraising, and just general reputational benefits. We have the opportunity to rally all of our local alumni in the planning stage to make sure that we have local engagement.” 

The 2019 Babson Connect: Worldwide will return to Boston, Massachusetts, to celebrate Babson’s 100th birthday, giving its international alumni a chance to reconnect at their alma mater. “I’m proud to say we are coming home for our centennial,” Healey says. 

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.

Image

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.

Image

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. 

Image

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.

Image