Recruitment, Enrollment, and Advising

Two dozen young scholars visiting the United States on Fulbright exchanges were in the middle of an afternoon of workshops at Northeastern University in Boston when President Joseph Aoun dropped by to offer greetings and a short lesson on U.S. higher education. The linguistics scholar called it “the only truly open system in the world.” When there is a faculty opening, no one checks where the applicants’ passports are from, he said. Instead, “we seek the best brains wherever they are.” Public and private universities compete fiercely for faculty, students, and research grants; promotion is based on merit; and professors share in profits from their inventions. The government provides support but does not dictate what or how colleges and universities teach. “We don’t believe in onesize-fits-all,” Aoun said. India and other countries in Asia and Latin America are looking to adapt this model and open up their systems of higher education, Aoun said. “It’s going to happen. Competition is going to intensify at the worldwide level,” he predicted, then added with a smile, “That’s why you’re here. You’re making our life more difficult.”

The Fulbrighters laughed and applauded, appreciating that their host was a personification of how the U.S. system works. Born in Beirut, Labanon, Aoun was educated there, in Paris, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a PhD in linguistics and philosophy. He was a professor and dean at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles before returning to Boston in 2006 to become the seventh president of Northeastern University.

Northeastern, a private research university in the heart of Boston, is a recognized leader in experiential or cooperative education. The tradition started in 1909, a decade after the university’s founding, when four engineering students rode trolleys after class to part-time jobs around the city. Today, thousands of Northeastern students alternate semesters in the classroom with sixmonth stints in the working world. Those jobs, once confined to Boston, now take them from coast to coast and, increasingly, to London, Paris, Singapore, and beyond. Aoun created a Presidential Global Scholars initiative with a $1 million annual budget that awards students grants up to $6,000 to cover the added expense and, in some cases, lost income when they do co-ops abroad. Northeastern students typically earn $15,000 on co-ops in the United States—a far cry from the 10 cents an hour those four engineering students made a century ago. Many do two or three co-ops before graduation.

“Aoun wants to double the number of students’ choosing international co-ops and ‘give every student the opportunity to have an international experience.’”

So far only a small fraction—about 300—of the 6,000 co-ops that Northeastern students go on each year are international. The difficulty of securing visas and work permits means that some placements are unpaid internships or volunteer positions with charities.

Aoun wants to double the number of students’ choosing international co-ops and “give every student the opportunity to have an international experience.” Aoun expressed delight that at Northeastern he found a university with “a predisposition to embrace the world.” He quickly set in motion the drafting of a new strategic plan for “building a global university” and preparing students to become “engaged citizens of the world.”

Dialogue of Civilizations Propel Education Abroad

Northeastern’s education abroad programs are burgeoning. Nearly 1,700 students studied abroad for credit in 2009–10, a 240 percent increase from barely 700 in 2006–07, and the Office of International Study Programs under new Director William Hyndman III has expanded its staff.

Much of this growth is due to the rapid proliferation in recent years of Dialogue of Civilizations courses in which faculty lead cohorts of students to other countries for intensive courses over several weeks in the summer. The Dialogue courses were pioneered by Denis Sullivan, who directs the International Affairs Program as well as Northeastern’s Middle East Center for Peace, Culture, and Development. He first offered a Middle East studies course in Cairo more than a decade ago, borrowing the “Dialogue of Civilization” name from a term popularized by then-Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, who suggested it as a riposte to the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s prediction of a “Clash of Civilizations.”

“Then the United Nations started using the term (Dialogue of Civilization). I thought, ‘That’s what I’m doing. I’m bringing students to Egypt to have a dialogue.’ I started calling my program the Dialogue of Civilizations,” recalled Sullivan. A handful of colleagues followed his example, teaching summer courses in China, Greece, and Mexico. In 2006 then-provost Ahmed Abdelal decided to allow students to apply tuition dollars to cover most of the costs. By summer 2010 some 960 undergraduates took 50 Dialogue programs taught in 37 countries by nearly five dozen faculty. Hyndman, the study abroad director, said for some it is less expensive to study overseas than to stay in Boston and take classes there. “They pay for their eight credits and maybe an additional fee of a few hundred dollars, but that’s it. It’s quite a good deal,” said Hyndman.

In five years at Northeastern, Denise Horn, an assistant professor of international affairs, has led students twice to both South Africa and Thailand and once to Brazil, Dominican Republic, India, and Indonesia either for Dialogue courses or for an international service-learning experience called the NU Global Corps. She teamed with Lori Gardinier, a lecturer and director of the human services program, on a course that took students to India for fall 2009 to work with the Deshpande Foundation on helping poor farmers improve their lives and livelihoods (the human services program is an interdisciplinary major that imparts the skills needed for political advocacy, community development, and social service, at home and abroad). In India, the Northeastern students purchased seeds and encouraged farmers to plant home gardens to feed their families. They also created a sewing workshop for women and taught English to preschoolers. “I had one goal and that was to get out in the world and see what I could find,” said junior Rosie Pagerey. “I consider myself a global citizen now."

“We have a lot of flexibility, a lot of resources, and a culture that’s academic but also business-minded, all of which enables us to move a little faster than other people.”

A New Home and New Interest in Languages

Northeastern moved most of its language classes in 2007 out of the Department of Modern Languages into a World Languages Center housed in the College of Professional Studies. That entrepreneurial college, which once catered primarily to evening and continuing education students, hired 25 new instructors to meet the increased demand from undergraduates. “This has been phenomenal for us,” said Dennis Cokely, chair of modern languages. “Five years ago, we had 800 students per semester studying seven languages. Today we have 13 languages and nearly 1,700 students.” The popularity of international business and international affairs majors also whets students’ appetites for languages. The center teaches 13 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, and Swahili.

Christopher Hopey, the outgoing vice president and dean of the College of Professional Studies, said, “We have a lot of flexibility, a lot of resources, and a culture that’s academic but also business-minded, all of which enables us to move a little faster than other people.” Hopey, recently named president of Merrimack College, retooled the College of Professional Studies in other ways, offering more courses online and off-site at partner institutions in Turkey and Australia. He started the successful NUIn program, which allows Northeastern to admit 200 additional freshmen each year who are sent to London or Thessalonica, Greece, for their first semester of classes. Northeastern forged a partnership with the education company Kaplan Inc. to bring hundreds of students from China and a dozen other countries to Boston and groom them for college-level work. Four hundred such students were enrolled in the Global Pathways program in 2009–10 plus 300 others in English as a Second Language courses.

Online MBAs

The College of Business Administration launched an online MBA in 2006 that now enrolls 1,000 overseas students each year. Typically these online students perform as well or better than those in regular MBA classes in Boston, said Dean Tom Moore, who created the program in response to a request from IBM, which sought to retain promising managers in India by offering them a route to the professional degree.

Many of the business school’s top undergraduates gravitate toward an international business major that requires six months of classes abroad followed by a six-month co-op in the same country. “They are quite cosmopolitan by the time they return,” the dean said. Northeastern also receives 100 exchange students from partner business programs in Europe and Mexico, which “helps internationalize our campus here,” he said.

Drawing International Students With Co-Ops and Carnevale

International enrollments at Northeastern surged in recent years to 3,313 in fall 2009, with students from China and India accounting for almost half. Scott Quint, then-associate dean for International Student and Scholar Services and Intercultural Programs, said many are drawn to business and computer science and to the School of Allied Health Professions. The city of Boston is a big draw; so are the opportunities to do coops, said Quint. The 12-member International Student and Scholar Institute (ISSI) includes a full-time specialist who works to arrange co-ops for international students.

Quint, who stepped down last April after more than a quarter century working with the university’s international students, was also the impresario of Northeastern’s Carnevale, a twomonth-long international festival of music, art, dance, poetry, lectures, food, song, and fashion. It started in 1996 with one event: an ice-carving contest. International students are still carving Shinto shrines and icons such as the Sydney Opera House from ice with chainsaws each winter, but that is only one of the host of attractions. There were 48 events over eight weeks last February and March.

Twin Cities on a Global Scale

Northeastern’s expanding international profile also can be glimpsed in the creation of a World Class Cities Partnership by the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, which is building ties among municipal, business, and cultural leaders from 10 cities that girdle the globe from Boston to Barcelona to Haifa to Hangzhou to Kyoto to Vancouver. None of these cities is their country’s largest or the capital, but many are on the cutting edge of technology and culture, said Dean Barry Bluestone.

Bluestone sees this global partnership as emblematic of the “incredible trajectory” that Northeastern has been on since weathering a financial crisis that forced it to downsize in the early 1990s. “It’s cutting its own wake, really figuring out new ways of engaging with the community and developing extraordinary new international programs,” he said. “There’s a sense of academic entrepreneurship here: ‘Let’s try something new. Let’s see if it works. Let’s put some real effort into it and see what we can build.’”

Next Steps on the International Journey

Robert Lowndes, vice provost for International Affairs, said the pace of Northeastern’s internationalization has accelerated since the adoption of the new academic plan in 2007. “We’re getting more people out into the world,” said Lowndes, a physicist. Just as Northeastern built an infrastructure that includes more than 60 cooperative counselors and coordinators that makes it possible for 90 percent of undergraduates to gain that work experience, the university now is building the capacity to deliver on the 2007 academic plan’s goal of seeing that all students gain international experience. This will become Northeastern’s “second signature experiential effort,” Lowndes predicted.

The next step, said Aoun, is “to get more students to take advantage of the global opportunities” and to start thinking of Northeastern as an institution not confined to the physical campus in Boston. The president envisions some students’ spending two years in Singapore or Australia before coming to Boston, or starting on some other yet-to-be-built satellite campus. “What we are seeking to do is have students completely at ease with the world—and not only one part of the world,” said Aoun.

Living space is at a premium in the middle of New York City, even in the dorms at Barnard College. But every spring there were empty beds in those residences when Barnard students headed abroad for a semester. Wouldn’t it be nice, administrators thought, if international students could be brought to campus for four months to fill those spaces? Traditional exchanges wouldn’t work. There was no shortage of universities with students eager to study in Manhattan, but there was no guarantee that the Barnard women would want to spend a semester at those particular universities. There was also the disparity in tuition—$20,000 a semester at Barnard and nothing for students in Europe and some other countries. 

Then longtime Provost Elizabeth S. Boylan and Hillary Link, associate provost and dean for international programs, thought of something: Why not invite partners in Women’s Education Worldwide, an international network of women’s colleges, to send a small number of students who could take all the courses they wanted but not have to pay full tuition since they would not receive credit from Barnard? They called this the Visiting International Student Program (VISP) and started small in spring 2008 with five students from the University of Copenhagen and the Collegio Nuovo of the University of Pavia in Italy. It worked so well that they took in 41 students the next year from those and other universities in China and South Korea. This year 59 young women from seven countries—Italy, Denmark, China, South Korea, Australia, Ghana, and South Africa—spent the spring on Morningside Heights. The Gilder Foundation paid the way for the students from Ghana and South Africa.

“It’s a program born in part out of relative poverty,” said Barnard President Debora L. Spar, whose institution’s $186 million endowment is the smallest (three to seven times smaller) of the elite women’s colleges once known as the Seven Sisters. “This program works beautifully because it enables us to internationalize the campus in a way that’s not particularly expensive for us or the students.” There are 150 other international students at Barnard enrolled for four-year degrees; they pay full tuition.

Spar is a political scientist who came to Barnard from Harvard Business School. In her 2008 inaugural address, she expressed a determination to expose Barnard students “to the complex realities of the global economy” and do their part to solve the educational inequality that women face in much of the world.

Liberal Arts Classes and a Cultural Immersion

The VISP students arrive in January, go through orientation, and dive right into their academic and cultural immersion in the Big Apple, including trips to Broadway shows and the Metropolitan Opera and tours of the United Nations and the Cloisters. They live in the dorms on Barnard’s compact four-acre campus, across Broadway from Columbia University (Columbia, once all-male, is coed. Barnard and Columbia students attend classes interchangeably). The activities outside the classroom play an important role in helping the visiting students fit into campus life. “Our students struggle with the same things when they go abroad. Inevitably they say the hardest thing is to make friends with the local students,” said Link. 

Alberta Spreafico, among the five original VISP students, had no trouble finding her place at Barnard. Born in Milan and raised in England and Italy, Spreafico was so taken with Barnard and Columbia that she returned the next year to complete work on a master’s degree from the University of Pavia. She interned at the United Nations and is now working at Henry Ford Health Systems in Detroit on a telemedicine project to improve health care in poor countries. Barnard was “wonderful,” said Spreafico. “I was just thrilled by the liberal arts education and the broadness of the opportunities presented.”

Sunny Nam, 20, an English and political science major from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea, who studied at Barnard in spring 2011, said, “The semester in New York City was like a dream for me.” She learned “to set priorities that fit me, not by other people’s standards or the society’s standards. This has changed a lot of my education goals, and more broadly, my identity.” Barnard, Ewha, and the Collegio Nuovo all belong to the Women’s Education Worldwide, an organization that brings together presidents and deans from women’s colleges around the world to advocate for the education of women.

Professor of Economics Rajiv Sethi advised five VISP students and went to see Phantom of the  Opera with a dozen of them. Asked if one semester was sufficient for the visiting students to make their presence felt, Sethi replied, “In some respects the one-semester model is even better…. We get a much larger number of students’ cycling through the program than we would if they came for four years each. This results in contact with many more individuals, and a more rapid spread of information about us globally.”

Global Symposia on Women’s Issues

Indeed, raising Barnard’s international profile and attracting more applicants from other countries is an expressed goal. Spar is pursuing those ends on another front with an annual Global Symposium on women’s issues that she launched in Beijing, China, in 2009 and subsequently has staged in Dubai and Johannesburg, South Africa. The fourth will take place in Mumbai, India, in March 2012.

The first symposium came about fortuitously. Spar had been invited to participate on a panel at the opening of Columbia’s global center in Beijing. By coincidence, several Chinese-American applicants had mentioned in their essays Barnard’s first Asian student, Kang Tongbi of the Class of 1909, who returned to China and worked for women’s suffrage and against the practice of foot binding. Spar and Link put together the “Kang Tongbi Commemorative Symposium: Women Changing China” featuring a novelist, television host, filmmaker, and women’s rights advocate. It drew a full house of 175 alumnae, educators, and business leaders. “We launched that symposium on a prayer and a shoestring. Something just clicked. We realized that whereas in the United States you can go to dozens of conferences every day on (women’s issues)… they are much fewer and farther in between” in developing countries, Spar said. “In creating these forums we’ve carved out a space that’s kind of empty right now.”

The “Women in the Arab World Global Symposium” in Dubai in 2010 drew 300 people, and the 2011 symposium on “Women Changing Africa” drew nearly 400 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Spar took a half-dozen Barnard students and two faculty with her. The students held a workshop for girls at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg on leadership and self-esteem. Spar hopes to bring even more students and faculty to India in March 2012. 

A Spurt in International Applications

One bonus of VISP and the symposia is that Barnard is seeing more applications from these countries, as well as more interest on the part of Barnard students in studying at the universities where they now have friends.

Spar, addressing the “Women Changing Africa” symposium, said her career switch from the predominantly male Harvard Business School to a college “totally dominated by women” has given her a new perspective on gender differences.

It is “not that women are better or that women necessarily make better leaders, but I think women lead differently than men,” Spar said. Barnard now is trying to “take what we were learning about women’s leadership and education and push it outside the gates of New York City and embrace the rest of the world.”

Barnard College

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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.

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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.

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Stony Brook University’s reach extends far beyond its campus on Long Island, New York. As part of the State University of New York (SUNY) system, Stony Brook has leveraged its position as a public research university to develop strategic partnerships around the world and attract a robust international student population. The university has established research field sites in Madagascar and Kenya and a global campus in Korea, in addition to considerable engagement in China. 

In the last few years, Stony Brook’s administration has invested significant resources in enhancing its comprehensive internationalization agenda. President Samuel L. Stanley Jr. and Provost Michael A. Bernstein have dedicated more than $1 million to support five new staff members in the Office of Global Affairs (OGA) and the development of a new China Center, which aims to boost recruitment and build alumni relations in China. 

Leading the charge for internationalization is Jun Liu, who joined Stony Brook as vice provost of global affairs, dean of international academic programs and services (IAPS), and professor of linguistics in January 2016. As the senior international officer (SIO), Liu oversees the OGA, which encompasses study abroad, visa and immigration services, global partnerships, intensive English programs, and the Institute for Global Studies. 

One of the first things Liu did as SIO was to visit the institution’s main study abroad and international research facilities, as well as spend time getting to know the campus community. “I spent a lot of time understanding what the current global operations were, ...what challenges we were facing, and what... concerns administrators, faculty, and students had in terms of globalizing the campus,” he says. 

Liu created an international advisory board to provide input on the development of a global strategic plan, which helped build a vision for internationalization and streamline Stony Brook’s existing international activities. Some of the recommendations that came out of the strategic planning process included increased campus outreach through a global forum on various international topics and a newsletter promoting international activities on campus. The OGA revamped the website for study abroad programs and created a database of Stony Brook’s international research, partnerships, and initiatives around the world to better track the university’s global engagement.  

“We now have a purposeful strategy to have planned campus internationalization through concrete projects, innovative programs, and engagement of faculty, staff, and students. Meanwhile, we are constantly assessing what we do and adjusting the process,” Liu says.

Fostering an Environment for International Student Success

In response to its growing international student population, Stony Brook has expanded the support services it offers to its international students, which currently make up 23 percent of the total student body, including students on optional practical training. With a 61 percent increase of international students over the past 6 years—from 3,726 in 2011–12 to 5,998 in 2017–18—the university has adopted strategies that focus not only on growing the number of international students, but also on attracting academically talented incoming students through innovative recruitment strategies, such as working directly with high schools and developing alternative admissions criteria, like adding oral interviews and accepting Chinese Gaokao scores. 

In addition to providing a comprehensive orientation staffed by international student ambassadors, Stony Brook offers workshops to help new international students succeed. Trista Yang Lu, coordinator for international student orientation and services, runs iCafe, a coffee house and international student success workshop series. International students are invited to come and discuss topics such as class participation, reading and study skills, networking, and time management. 

To encourage international students to attend, Lu has partnered with the professors who teach first-year seminars. All freshman students are required to attend a first-year seminar within their respective colleges, with the goal of helping them acclimate to the campus community. “As part of the curriculum, students participating in the first-year seminar are required to attend [a certain number of] themed events,” Lu says. “They can attend iCafe to satisfy these requirements.”

iCafe is just one example of the university’s broader focus on international student success. With support from Provost Michael A. Bernstein, and in collaboration with the Division of Undergraduate Education, the OGA launched an international student success task force made up of faculty and staff across all major academic and administrative units intended to identify common challenges to international student success. 

A new initiative aimed at promoting international student success is the Global Summer Institute, a short-term summer program launched in 2017 that allows students planning to enroll at Stony Brook an extended period of adjustment prior to the start of classes in the fall. In the first year, 235 students enrolled, and Stony Brook is hoping to attract similar numbers in summer 2018.

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The Global Summer Institute has three different tracks. Students can (1) participate in an intensive English program; (2) enroll in a three-week certificate program that focuses to getting to know the U.S. culture and educational system; or (3) take academic classes that are part of Stony Brook’s regular summer offerings. 

The Global Summer Institute also serves as a recruitment incentive for students at partner universities who want to experience college life in the United States. The program has helped to deepen relationships in regions of the world where Stony Brook is actively engaged. In 2017, the university partnered with the Malagasy Ministry of Education to sponsor a Malagasy student to attend the Global Summer Institute.

Facilitating Study Abroad Through Faculty-Led Programs

In addition to fostering its international student programs, Stony Brook’s global strategic plan aims to create new and unique educational opportunities abroad. As part of the SUNY system, Stony Brook has become a leader in education abroad among the 64 campuses in New York state. With more than 700 students studying abroad in the 2016–17 academic year, Stony Brook sends more students abroad than any of its SUNY peers. 

Along with the 18 study abroad programs led by Stony Brook faculty, Stony Brook students have access to more than 500 education abroad programs offered through the other SUNY campuses. For programs not directly taught by Stony Brook faculty, the university’s new course articulation database provides a list of preapproved courses at partner institutions. The database eases the process of transferring study abroad credits back to Stony Brook.  

Stony Brook’s first faculty-led study abroad program was launched in the early 1980s by Italian professor Mario Mignone, who has continued to take students to Italy for more than 30 years. In that time, in addition to using its field sites in Kenya and Madagascar to offer specialized education abroad experiences, Stony Brook’s faculty-led programs have expanded to include Russia and Tanzania. One of Stony Brook’s strategies to building a robust education abroad portfolio has been to leverage its international relationships and expand existing programs to other disciplines.

Linguistics professor John Bailyn, who is also the director of the SUNY Russia Programs Network, oversees two summer programs in Russia. “Explore St. Petersburg!” features an extensive cultural program that gives students the chance to become familiar with the city through excursions, films, lectures, and other events. Participants attend courses in cultural and media studies at an international summer school where they interact with students from throughout Russia and Europe, and they also complete an internship. Bailyn also directs the Advanced Critical Language Institute for Russian Immersion, which provides an intensive summer language program.

Research Abroad for Engineers at the Turkana Basin Institute

As the academic affiliate for the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI), Stony Brook has been able to expand its study abroad portfolio due to its physical presence in Kenya. Located in a remote part of northwestern Kenya, the TBI is one of the world’s premier paleoanthropology research field stations. The Turkana Basin has been the site of unprecedented fossil and archaeological discoveries that trace back to the origins of human civilization.  

The TBI was the brainchild of Stony Brook professor Richard Leakey, a world-renowned paleoanthropologist who approached the university in 2005 with the idea of creating a permanent infrastructure for yearround research. Stony Brook committed funding to the project, and construction of the two field camps located at Lake Turkana was completed in 2016. 

In addition to serving as a base for researchers from around the world, the TBI hosts a variety of study abroad programs, including a summer and semesterlong Origins Field School where students can earn 15 credits of 300-level coursework in archaeology, paleontology, physical anthropology, and geology.

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Other academic departments have also been able to take advantage of Stony Brook’s presence in Kenya. When Fotis Sotiropoulos, dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS), joined Stony Brook, he knew he wanted to implement programs that would give engineering students a global perspective. 

Sotiropoulos visited the TBI in March 2017, and by May, he had sent nine students to Kenya as part of the new six-week Global Innovation Field School. Not only was the off-grid construction of the physical infrastructure at the TBI interesting from an engineering perspective, it also gave the CEAS students a chance to visit a truly unique place, Sotiropoulos says. 

During the 2017 and 2018 programs, students worked on projects such as designing a septic system for a rural clinic and cataloging and repairing instruments donated by nongovernmental organizations. Faculty encouraged students to identify more challenging problems that they could bring back to Stony Brook to work on for their senior design course. 

Julian Kingston, who studied engineering at Stony Brook as an undergraduate student, participated in the 2017 Global Innovation Field School as a teaching assistant. He says that the students had to rethink their problem-solving approaches during the experience. “When we first arrived at the TBI facility and connected with the nearby community, the students had a plethora of solutions to everyday ‘problems’ they saw the community having,” he says. “After taking the time to connect with and communicate with the community, the students were surprised to find that the problems they identified—such as moving large loads over long distances—was not an issue for the community. A huge challenge for the students coming in was to put...what they saw as problems to the side in order to listen for what the community actually needed.”

One of the biggest challenges that students discovered was a lack of access to clean water. Available water sources in the Turkana Basin often have high levels of fluoride, which is toxic in large amounts. Two students from the 2017 Global Innovation Field School, Cheng-Wen Hsu and Jacob Marlin, discovered another use for the excess goat bones that they found in this community of goat herders. Hsu and Marlin charred the goat bones using firewood and a tin can to create a charcoal water filter that decreased fluoride levels. 

Hsu and Marlin have since been working with a Stony Brook faculty member to refine the filter as part of their senior capstone project. “[It was] a first step to creating a sustainable filter using minimal materials that could make a difference for the local community long term,” Kingston says. 

Community Outreach in Madagascar Through Centre ValBio

One of Stony Brook’s strategic internationalization priorities is engagement in Madagascar through the Centre ValBio (CVB), a modern research campus located in the rainforest in the southeastern part of the country. Although the island of Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world, it is rich in biodiversity, encompassing a wide range of ecosystems. 

Patricia Wright, a distinguished professor of anthropology and primatologist at Stony Brook, founded the CVB campus in 2003. Wright is known for, among other things, the discovery of a new species of lemurs in the late 1980s. She was also the driving force behind the creation of Ranomafana National Park, the 106,000acre World Heritage site where CVB is located. CVB currently employs 70 Malagasy in the facility’s day-today operations. 

Wright took the first group of Stony Brook students to Madagascar in 1993 as one of the university’s earliest faculty-led programs. She wanted to create a study abroad program for science majors that not only gave them an immersive opportunity to do field work, but also a chance to interact with the local community. Wright continues to take students to Centre ValBio every summer, winter, and fall semester. 

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Ezzeldin Enan, a senior who is double majoring in biology and anthropology, says the program helped him decide that he wants to focus on global health in his future career. “What specifically drew me to the study abroad program was the independent research opportunity in biological anthropology, overseen by... Patricia Wright, as well as full access to an advanced lab facility,” he says. 

CVB is also home to the Global Health Institute (GHI), which promotes health research in the region, in conjunction with a nongovernmental organization dedicated to establishing an evidence-based model health system for Madagascar. The GHI addresses health care issues ranging from trauma and injury prevention to oral health treatments. Since 2005, Stony Brook dental students and faculty have traveled to Madagascar to support efforts to improve the oral health of underserved communities. 

In 2016, CVB launched the world’s first medical delivery drones to transport blood, stool, and tissue samples from remote Malagasy communities to the Centre ValBio research station for quick diagnoses. The drone, designed by Stony Brook alumni Daniel Pepper, is also able to deliver medications to the same communities, which are often cut off from proper health care services due to poor or nonexistent roads. 

Stony Brook’s engagement in Madagascar has allowed the institution to build deeper collaboration with other international partners such as Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTC) in China. In 2017, for example, two students from SUSTC joined the winter study abroad program at CVB. 

“We encourage and advocate for multilateral partnerships....We share our resources with many international partner universities [by inviting] their students and faculty to participate in the signature programs we have around the world,” says Liu. 

Offering a Stony Brook Degree at SUNY Korea

In 2008, Myung Oh, an alumni who earned a PhD in electrical engineering and served as former deputy prime minister of South Korea, approached Stony Brook about the possibility of opening a global campus in Korea. Following approval by the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST), SUNY Korea launched its first four graduate degree programs in 2012 on the Incheon Global Campus, a global education hub established in the high-tech city of Songdo, South Korea. The next year, students enrolled in SUNY Korea’s first undergraduate degree program in technological systems management. The first class graduated in January 2017.

SUNY Korea currently offers four undergraduate and graduate degree programs to more than 500 students; degree offerings and student numbers are steadily growing. Students are awarded a Stony Brook degree, and all programs require students to spend 1 year on the main campus in New York. The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), which is also part of the SUNY system, joined Stony Brook on the SUNY Korea campus in 2017 to offer its programs in fashion design and fashion business management. Huojeong Son, a mathematics major who is planning to graduate in December 2018, says she always wanted to study in the United States. She chose SUNY Korea because it was more affordable than spending 4 years in the United States, but still gave her an opportunity to study abroad. 

Stony Brook hopes to use its physical presence in Korea as a way to establish itself as a global hub in Asia. The institution has worked with the Chinese Ministry of Education and Chinese Embassy in Korea to accredit the campus and boost the enrollment of students from China.  

“Having a global campus enhances our brand and reputation overseas,” says Imin Kao, executive director of SUNY Korea and professor of mechanical engineering. 

Leveraging its physical footprint around the world— from SUNY Korea to the field sites in Africa—and developing more than 160 strategic international partnerships has allowed Stony Brook to raise its profile as a top research institution. Stony Brook’s overall approach to internationalization has been built on developing symbiotic relationships with international partners. “A lot of these programs are enabled by the fact that we are a trusted partner,” says President Stanley. “The more resources you invest in an area, the more people know you are going to deliver. You are not just there to take advantage, you really are making a long-term commitment.”

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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?”

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

From street signs pointing the way to its study abroad centers to parking signs in 11 languages, internationalization at Dickinson College is evident from the moment one steps on campus in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. With 60 percent of students studying abroad and 14 percent of its population made up of international students, the private liberal arts college is the first two-time winner of the Senator Paul Simon Award for Comprehensive Internationalization.

When Sagun Sharma began her studies as an international student at Dickinson College, she had no idea she would end up working as a writing tutor for international fellows from the nearby U.S. Army War College. At first, Sharma was worried she wasn’t up to the task, especially since many of the fellows’ papers focused on international relations. “The topics of their essays are usually very different from what we are familiar with,” she explains. “It’s very interesting to learn through their essays, but they’re also very receptive to our feedback.” Sharma’s efforts were acknowledged at the end of the year when the War College presented her with a certificate of appreciation.

Serving Students Across Languages

Dickinson’s Norman M. Eberly Multilingual Writing Center is the only writing center in the United States that offers tutoring services in English and the 11 modern languages taught at the college. The center has a partnership with the War College to offer writing tutoring to the 80 senior military officers from around the world who participate in a yearlong fellowship in Carlisle.

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In addition to tutoring international fellows, Sharma often works with native English speakers. As an international student from Nepal, English isn’t Sharma’s first language, which caused her some apprehension at the beginning. “When I got offered the position, I was nervous because I wasn’t sure how I could help American students who have been doing this in their language for such a long time,” she says. “But my job is more of helping students to think differently about writing. The approach we take is more of focusing on the writing process.”

According to Noreen Lape, director of the writing program and associate provost of academic affairs, the writing center tries to flout what she calls “native speaker privilege.” “We do have native speakers tutoring in the language, but right now we have about seven Vietnamese students and other international students tutoring English writing,” Lape says. “And then we have U.S. domestic students tutoring in the various foreign languages. Some may be heritage speakers of that language, but others went and studied abroad and increased their proficiency.”

Sharma is one of more than 300 Dickinson undergraduates who come from abroad, making up 14 percent of the degree-seeking 2,300 students on campus. The writing center isn’t the only place on the Dickinson campus where international and domestic students come together. International students serve as orientation leaders, participate in a mentoring program for first-year students, are represented on the President’s Commission on Inclusivity, and run an international student advisory board.

Sharma says she appreciates Dickinson’s efforts to integrate international students into the campus community while at the same time offering specific support. “One of the challenges that comes with being an international student is finding that balance of not standing out too much, but also finding recognition that I have different needs because I am an international student,” she notes.

Increasing Diversity On Campus

Dickinson has a long history of international education, dating back to its creation in 1783. The college’s founder Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, earned his medical degree abroad at the University of Edinburgh. That deep-rooted appreciation for international exchange is found throughout Dickinson. The college created its first study abroad center in Bologna, Italy, in 1965 and further grew its international profile with support from a series of international education grants in the 1980s.

When Dickinson was named one of the winners of the inaugural Simon Award for Comprehensive Internationalization in 2003, the institution had already sent a significant number of students abroad and boasted a broad array of courses and majors with an international focus. But at the time, there were only a few dozen international students on campus. Since then, the college has invested significant resources in recruiting international students and diversifying its student population.

From 2009 to 2018, the racial and cultural diversity of the entering freshman classes has changed dramatically. International enrollment has grown from 5 percent of the first-year cohort in 2008 to 14 percent in 2018. The top six countries represented on campus are China, Vietnam, Nepal, South Korea, India, and Pakistan.

According to Provost and Dean of the College Neil Weissman, Dickinson’s current international engagement is based on a continuation of partnerships and programs that have been in place for decades. “We’ve continued to have a really deep commitment to study abroad. We’ve continued to have a high percentage of internationally oriented courses in the curriculum. We continue to hire faculty into positions and programs that are international in their scope,” says Weissman, who has been at Dickinson for 44 years and provost for 22 years. “The most noteworthy change is the increase in international students on campus. We’ve continued to internationalize the student body and try to do so in a way that…is not focused on a single country.”

Committing to Inclusion and Intercultural Competency

Margee M. Ensign, who became the college’s 29th president in July 2017, says the institution’s commitment to global education is part of the reason she was attracted to Dickinson. Prior to coming to Carlisle, Ensign spent 7 years as president of the American University of Nigeria, a legacy and direction that she has brought to Dickinson.

Given her expertise in Africa, Ensign has delivered several guest lectures for a course that took students to Rwanda for 2 weeks in May 2019. She also found private funding to sponsor four young Chibok women from Nigeria who had been kidnapped by the Boko Haram terrorist group. This led to the creation of a program wherein young people whose education has been disrupted by war and natural disaster can complete high school and eventually study at Dickinson.

Ensign returned to the United States at a time when an understanding of other countries and cultures is more critical than ever, she says. “A lack of international knowledge is one of our greatest national security threats,” Ensign argues. “We’re deeply committed to deepening our intercultural competency, not just for international students, not just for students who are studying abroad, but throughout campus.”

Under Ensign’s leadership, Dickinson’s internationalization efforts have provided more structure for initiatives that promote inclusivity and intercultural competence across all aspects of the college’s operations. She created a new vice president position focused on institutional effectiveness and inclusivity. Brenda Bretz, the new vice president and chief diversity officer, co-chairs the President’s Commission on Inclusivity with Samantha Brandauer, who serves as associate provost and executive director of the Center for Global Study and Engagement (CGSE). Representatives of the Office of LGBTQ Services, Popel Shaw Center for Race and Ethnicity, and the Women’s & Gender Resource Center, as well as faculty, are also included on the commission.

Bretz says that an element of integrating global learning and inclusion into the college experience is helping students navigate all kinds of difference. “We are thinking about positionality, power, and privilege and how that relates to both our students going abroad and also international students coming here and trying to adjust to the culture of the United States,” she explains. “It’s new territory for both groups and a good opportunity for talking across issues.”

Implementing a Cross-cutting Approach to internalization

Ensign has ushered in a three-pillared approach that cuts across Dickinson’s liberal arts core: global study, sustainability, and civic engagement. In line with that approach, as executive director of the CGSE, Brandauer oversees education abroad, international student and scholar services, and global learning on campus.

Brandauer works closely with the Center for Sustain­ability Education (CSE) and the new Center for Civic Learning & Action (CCLA), which opened in January 2019 with a $900,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The three centers operate in partnership to ensure that the themes of global study, sus­tainability, and civic engagement run throughout the curriculum. As part of their general education requirements, all ­students have to take courses that center on U.S. ­diversity, global diversity, and sustainability.

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One of the ways that Dickinson has promoted cross-fertilization between global study, sustainability, and civic engagement is by having the director of each center sit on the strategic planning committee for the other two, according to CCLA founding director Gary Kirk. “We’ve already started at the margins to be really intentional about integrating civic learning outcomes into the coursework associated with our study abroad programs. I want to make sure that’s happening in every program,” he says.

That begins with support from the faculty, Kirk adds. Professors at Dickinson's study abroad sites have received training through the Valley & Ridge professional development workshops offered through the CSE. “We’ve started focusing on faculty who are going to be directing one of our study abroad programs to help them integrate sustainability into the different kinds of courses that they’re teaching,” says Neil Leary, associate provost and CSE director.

The CSE also promotes place-based education, which pushes students to connect what they are learning with where they are studying. Professor Ed Webb has a joint appointment in political science and international studies and helped establish the college’s Middle East studies program. For his courses on international politics, students keep a diary where they track their consumption of water, food, and fuel over a specific period.

“They have to write a detailed blog post reporting on what they used and how much they used and how that compares to U.S. national averages,” he says. “But then they also compare it to the countries we’re studying and Middle East and North Africa. What I’m trying to do there is connect [what they’re studying] with how we live on this campus. It makes it a little more visceral.”

Promoting Education Abroad Throughout Campus

One of the areas where Dickinson has been most successful is its student and faculty mobility. Nearly 70 percent of students who go abroad participate in a Dickinson program. The CGSE offers 17 programs in 13 countries: Argentina, Australia, Cameroon, China, Ecuador, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, and Spain, plus one in New York City.

Some countries such as England have multiple programs. In Italy, students can choose between the Italian studies and European studies programs, as well as take courses from the University of Bologna. The South American program starts with a month-long intensive language course in Ecuador and includes a semester in Argentina.

A distinguishing factor of Dickinson’s education abroad programs is the number of students who complete a semester- or yearlong program. Dickinson consistently ranks in the top five for long-term study abroad, according to the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors data. Of the students who study off campus, 67 percent spend a semester off campus; among those who go abroad, 14 percent study for an academic year in one or more locations and 2 percent combine a short-term experience with study for a semester or academic year.

Recent graduate Alden Mohacsi spent a semester at the Dickinson center in Bologna, Italy. His experience left a lasting impression even upon return. As a tour guide for the Dickinson campus in Carlisle, Mohacsi always made it a point to show prospective students the international signposts when he was leading them around campus.

Mohacsi says that while he was in Italy, his professor helped facilitate a meeting with asylum seekers from Nigeria so that he could better understand what was happening in Italy. “I don’t think I would’ve had that experience at any other school,” he says.

Dickinson’s education abroad portfolio is further bolstered by the college’s strong modern languages programs, which include Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Modern Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. All students are required to obtain at least an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language. In 2017–18, 40 percent of education abroad participants enrolled in programs that have a language prerequisite.

During the 2017–18 academic year, the CGSE team developed and launched a mandatory three-part intercultural workshop series for all students studying off campus for a semester or academic year. Using Kathryn Sorrells’s Intercultural Praxis Model as the foundation for the curriculum, these interactive workshops establish the campus community and Carlisle as prime settings for students to start practicing and fine-tuning their intercultural skill sets in preparation for living, learning, and growing in an unfamiliar country, and within an unfamiliar culture. This intentional predeparture programming has helped to expand the profile and benefits of education abroad.

Dickinson has made great strides in making sure education abroad is accessible to underrepresented students. Fifty-two percent of first-generation students, 66 percent of students of color, and 58 percent of Pell Grant recipients in the graduating class of 2018 participated in education abroad. Students pay the same comprehensive fee that they are charged on campus and are able to use their institutional aid on semester-long programs coordinated by Dickinson and by its partners. The CGSE works closely with other offices, such as the Popel Shaw Center for Race and Ethnicity, and staff overseas to make sure that underrepresented students are supported before, during, and after study abroad.

Also contributing to Dickinson’s education abroad enrollment numbers are its international students. Harry Qiu is a Russian and international studies major from China who spent a semester in Moscow, Russia. When he came to Dickinson, he wanted to learn a second foreign language and eventually chose Russian. “Because the Russian department here is pretty small, the professors are very welcoming to me because I’m from such a different background,” he says.

Qiu serves as a community adviser in the Russian House, where he lives with other Russian majors and an exchange student from Russia who comes from the Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH), which hosts the Dickinson in Russia program. The connections that students build often extend far beyond the campus walls. “When we go abroad to that university, those students who previously studied here also often meet with us and are in charge of some trips and just taking us around,” Qui says.

Engaging Faculty Partnerships

Provost Weissman says that one of the keys to Dickinson’s dynamic education abroad offerings is having long-standing relationships with partners abroad. When it comes to developing programs, “there is no one size fits all except that we always work with at least one local partner university,” Brandauer says. “Many have permanent staff and our own locally hired faculty and, in some cases, we work directly with the international office at the university for student support.”

Brandauer herself is a product of Dickinson’s global education, studying abroad on programs in Cameroon and Germany and a Dickinson program to France. After Brandauer earned her undergraduate degree from Dickinson, she did an Austrian Fulbright teaching fellowship during which time she met her Austrian husband whose eventual faculty position at a college near Carlisle brought her back full circle. “I’m a Dickinson alumna, was gone for 20 years engaged in international education, and I’m now associate provost at the best college to do the work to which I have devoted my career, ” she says.

Having faculty and staff with an international perspective reinforces the college’s commitment to intercultural competency. “The core concept for us in study abroad is this hybrid notion that we want our students to have an immersive experience,” says Provost Weissman. “At the same time, we have our own staff there when we can. And being there for a long time, we can identify faculty and courses that fit our [curriculum] here.”

Roughly 40 percent of faculty have participated in the two-year resident directorship at Dickinson programs in England, Italy, and Spain, or have run a short-term faculty-led program. Faculty members can apply for the two-year positions through a competitive application process. In the next few years, the college plans to move one of the two faculty directorships from England to New Zealand.

Creative writing professor Susan Perabo was the resident director for the Norwich Humanities program at the University of East Anglia in England from 2013 to 2015. In addition to teaching, the resident directors often help students manage logistical issues such as planning cultural excursions and learning how to navigate a university that is much larger than Dickinson. “I loved that piece of it, because it allowed me to get to understand the way that the country works and to think about the kinds of things that were important for the students to do,” Perabo says.

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Perabo feels refreshed after spending 2 years in England: “I was able to bring some of that energy back here, but also just make connections with a lot of British writers that I’ve been able to take advantage of since coming back here.”

Innovating Internationalization

Innovation has been integral to internationalization at Dickinson, both on and off campus. When professor Carolina Castellanos arrived at Dickinson, Portuguese was not being taught on a regular basis. Since then, a Portuguese minor was approved in spring 2012 and the college will soon launch a Dickinson in Brazil program in partnership with study abroad provider CET Academic Programs and the University of São Paulo. “I had complete support from the get-go to build the program,” Castellanos says.

Japanese professor Alex Bates adds that the college is supportive of and even encourages new ideas: “If I come in and say that I want to do this funky summer program, but I’m not sure if it’ll work, they’ll say, ‘Okay, let’s help you make it work.’”

One of Dickinson’s most recent innovations is the launch of graduate courses on peacebuilding, established through a memorandum of understanding with the War College. Dickinson has already developed several electives for the War College’s master’s of strategic studies. According to President Ensign, Dickinson is also designing a full master’s program with Tulane University’s Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. “We’ve just launched our first course, which is [on] how social media is used to support and counter violent extremism. It’s one of the first courses in the country on the topic,” Ensign says.

From its cutting-edge graduate courses to new study abroad partners in Brazil and New Zealand, Dickinson continues to innovate while maintaining its deep commitment to comprehensive campus internationalization. “Heavy faculty involvement, long-term commitment to particular sites abroad, and the ability to innovate and change have been critical. There are also checks and balances along the way to make sure that we’re still in dialogue with our curriculum,” Brandauer says.

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