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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Political scientist Emil Nagengast was hired by Juniata College in 1996 to teach international politics, with Europe and the former East Germany—he’d studied at Karl Marx University in Leipzig shortly before the Berlin Wall fell—his special province. But in 2004, with a conscience pricked by complaints from two former, African-born students about the Eurocentricity of his course, he spent a sabbatical in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, examining the workings of the fledgling African Union. The next year, with guidance and help from a Washington & Jefferson College professor who had already begun taking students to The Gambia, Nagengast led four Juniata students to Senegal and The Gambia for three weeks. In 2008 Juniata and other colleges in Pennsylvania formed a Keystone Study Away Consortium to offer a full semester at the University of  The Gambia. Nagengast, or Nags as students call him, now has led eight summer trips to The Gambia and launched a winter class as well. He calculates that 135 Juniata students to date have studied in The Gambia over summer and 31 in spring semester. His Introduction to International Politics course now devotes as much time to the African Union as it does to the European Union (one week). Of his midcareer switch in interests, Nagengast recalls that when he broached the idea of education abroad in West Africa, administrators “just said, ‘Interesting. Go do it.’ They trusted me.” 

He is not alone in finding ready support for internationalizing courses and the entire experience at Juniata, a liberal arts college with 1,600 students tucked in the Appalachian mountains in the central Pennsylvania town of Huntingdon. Juniata was founded in 1876 as the first of a half dozen colleges associated with the pacifist Church of the Brethren. It is independent but still part of a network of Brethren colleges. Most past presidents were church ministers and a fraction of current faculty and students are members. The Brethren heritage is manifest most strongly in its peace and conflict studies program and in the meditative “Peace Chapel,” a circular ring of stones set on a nearby hilltop designed by architect Maya Lin. Traditionally its student body was drawn from within the borders of the Quaker State. But that is changing.

A Long International Journey

Juniata set out almost two decades ago to make itself a more globally minded campus. A 1993 strategic plan identified internationalization as a top priority and urged the recruitment of more international students. The next year it opened an Intensive English Program to help attract them to Huntingdon. Juniata in 2004 joined the American Council on Education (ACE) Internationalization Collaborative, and its 2008 strategic plan embraced a goal of raising international enrollments from 6 to 10 percent. It reached that mark swiftly, with 166 students on visas on campus in 2011–12, including 50 from China. President Thomas Kepple said he would gladly see that percentage double to 20 percent so long as Juniata’s overall enrollment keeps growing as it has on his watch, from 1,200 in 1998 to the current 1,600. Juniata’s out-of-state enrollment has doubled to 40 percent.

“It’s becoming a better place. It’s hard work in admissions, basically,” said Kepple, who will retire in May 2013. Students are drawn in part by Juniata’s generous financial aid for both domestic and international applicants. Dean of Admissions Michelle Bartol said, “We’re never coasting. Right now with China recruitment, everyone else is kind of catching up. We’ve got to stay one step ahead.” 

The college, which boasts an alumnus with a Nobel Prize in physics (William Phillips ’70), is particularly strong in the sciences and sends dozens of graduates to medical and graduate schools. For international parents, “the sales pitch is they already know people who’ve sent their children here and they’ve done well,” said Kepple. “Ninety percent of our Chinese students graduate. That’s larger than our U.S. student number.”

Language Houses and a Global Village

Dean of International Education Jenifer Cushman and Rosalie Rodriguez, the college’s chief diversity officer, returned from an ACE Bridging the Gap Symposium in 2008 determined to find new ways to change the face of the college and encourage more students to encounter and reflect upon cultural differences. They came up with a Global Engagement Initiative that included the creation of a residential Global Village that features an intercultural floor for a mix of international and domestic students within a larger dorm. 

“This is a really good community. People are really nice and welcoming, the professors remember your name and their office is always open.”

Clarissa Diniz, a pre-med student from Recife, Brazil, said it was “really cool” living there as a freshman. She stayed on as a resident adviser for sophomore year. Diniz, daughter of two math professors, has a brother who graduated from UCLA, but was happy with her small town choice. “This is a really good community. People are really nice and welcoming, the professors remember your name and their office is always open.”

Also as part of the Global Village, several small houses on campuses are being turned into Spanish, French, and German houses where students live together to improve their language skills. Sophomore Rebekah Sheeler from Boyertown, Pennsylvania, was programming coordinator for the newly opened Spanish House in 2011–12. “The other students call me the Mom,” laughed Sheeler, who was drawn to Juniata to play field hockey but dropped the sport after a year in part to pursue international education interests. She combined classes and an internship in Orizaba, Mexico, in summer 2011, spent fall 2011 at a university in Quito, Ecuador, and will intern at a wildlife reserve in Peru in spring 2013.

A Thirst for Languages Without a Requirement

Juniata has no language requirement beyond two years in high school for admission. The college jettisoned a stronger requirement in the 1970s, and an effort in 1996 to reinstate it fell a few votes short. But Professor of Spanish Henry Thurston-Griswold said, “When I came in 1992, we averaged 50 students per semester taking Spanish. Now we have more than triple that number.” Juniata is home to the much-honored Language in Motion program, which deploys international students and study abroad returnees to local K–12 classrooms where they present language lessons and cultural activities. Language in Motion, led by Deborah Roney, has taken root at 13 other colleges and universities. 

Juniata offers French, German, and Russian as well as Spanish and two years of Chinese. “The difficulty with languages other than Spanish is we’re basically one-person programs,” said Michael Henderson, chair of world languages and associate professor of French. “Obviously offering an upper division course in French critical theory is not a good idea…. My main motivation is to get students in my classes to study abroad.”

In the 1980s Juniata exchanged as many as 20 science majors each year with the Catholic University of Lille in France and the University of Marburg in Germany. Chemistry Professor Ruth Reed, a former Fulbright scholar in Germany, championed the exchanges, which later dropped off. She saw one downside to sending so many Juniata students to Lille and Marburg. “If you send too many, then you defeat the purpose. You have this little clique that doesn’t integrate. We can be too successful,” said the retiring chemistry professor.

While Reed’s passion came early, Gerald Kruse, a professor of math and computer science, was farther along in his career when he had a serendipitous meeting with Thomas Weik, a computer science professor at Juniata partner Muenster University of Applied Sciences in Germany. They wound up swapping homes and classes for fall 2006. “It was just a fantastic experience. I went over as a passive supporter (of education abroad) and came back as a very active promoter,” said Kruse, who now serves on Juniata’s International Education Committee. 

An Engaged Faculty and Two Advisers

Almost half the class of 2011 studied abroad, many on the 20 education abroad courses led by Juniata professors. Juniata has exchange partners in 19 countries. “Our success at this didn’t start at the top,” said Provost James Lasko. “Faculty who had international contacts were largely responsible for this exchange model. Sometimes administrators just have to know when to get out of the way and give your people a little latitude to run with a good idea.” Cushman, the dean of international education and associate professor of German, said, “Faculty involvement and engagement really are the heart of our international programs. Faculty members go above and beyond. Every time my office takes a step, it’s in conjunction with faculty.” 

Juniata has 102 full-time and 48 part-time faculty, and each student has two academic advisers, one for their Program of Emphasis (POE)—Juniata’s interdisciplinary alternative to majors—and another from a second discipline to offer a different perspective. The advice includes strong encouragement to study abroad.

Most students choose straightforward business, science, and humanities concentrations, but three in 10 chart new pathways to their bachelor’s degrees. 

Brianne Rowan, 22, from Port Townsend, Washington, fashioned her POE around global health issues. She spent three summers doing volunteer work in Thailand with a humanitarian group from her hometown, spent junior year abroad in Lille, France, and twice went on two-week service trips with Juniata’s Habitat for Humanity chapter to build homes for the poor in Yerevan, Armenia, and in El Salvador. 

Megan Russell, 22, a senior from Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania, and a Habitat for Humanity leader, learned on Nagengast’s 2011 trip to The Gambia that “things do not always go as planned. Sometimes a pipe breaks in your room or scorpions are chasing you around, but it’s all part of the experience.” The aspiring physical therapist came back from Gambia and organized a fundraiser to buy solar panels for a rural hospital.

Growing Pains and Essays on the Radio

There have been growing pains with the rapid climb in international enrollments, especially the spurt in the number of students from China. History professor David Sowell, a former international education director, said, “Our big challenge now is how do we integrate them? We have the Global Village; we have lots and lots of student groups. How do we use programming and those groups to draw students into that intercultural exchange?”

Doug Stiffler, an associate professor of history and East Asia specialist, sees that already happening. When Stiffler and spouse Jingxia Yang, now the Chinese language instructor, came to Juniata in 2002, “there was one student from mainland China and a handful of ethnic Chinese students. It was a pretty homogenous place, albeit with a great commitment to international education,” said Stiffler. “Over five or six years, we saw that number change to 50 Chinese students. For us, it’s a wonderful thing.”

The influx has boosted enrollments in Juniata’s Intensive English Program. Instructor Gretchen Ketner, a National Public Radio fan, found an unusual way to help students hone writing skills and adjust to U.S. college life. She assigned them to write “This I Believe” essays for the Penn State public radio station, WPSU. Nearly a dozen have gotten on the air.

Separately, Stiffler did an on-air interview for that station’s “StoryCorps” broadcast with a freshman from Chengdu, China, who wrote in Ketner’s class about his admiration for Lin Zhao, a student leader in Beijing during the Hundred Flowers Movement in 1956 when Mao Zedong briefly encouraged citizens to speak freely. She was imprisoned in 1960, but wrote about freedom and democracy in her letters and diary—some in her own blood—until her execution in 1968. “She’s a real hero,” the business student told Stiffler. “Our government and our school never talk about this…. I want to learn something about America. I want to teach people what is liberty, what is freedom, what we can do in this special time.” 

Kati Csoman, assistant dean of international education, said that in addition to the regular orientation, all new international students can join the U.S. freshman in “Inbound” retreats built around such activities as backpacking, hiking, cooking, the arts and exploring spirituality, pop culture, and other topics. The students choose from more than 30 tracks. Two peer leaders assisted by faculty or staff shepherd the new students in groups of 10 through the three-day experience. “The idea is to bring together students across their interests, but then also help them make friendships and learn about the college,” said Csoman.

Amid the woods, lakes, and prairies of Central Minnesota, the College of Saint Benedict (CSB) for women and Saint John’s University (SJU) for men provide a liberal arts education suffused with international experiences and coursework. Saint Benedict and Saint John’s ranked first among baccalaureate institutions in semester-long education abroad and 13th in international student enrollment in the 2011 Open Doors report. The biggest department—management—recently overhauled its curriculum and changed its name to the Department of Global Business Leadership. CSB and SJU have one of the most unusual coeducational arrangements in U.S. higher education: two campuses, four miles apart with two presidents but a single faculty and school buses that ferry students back and forth during half-hour breaks between 70-minute classes.

The separate campuses are bound by shared Benedictine values—monks founded Saint John’s in 1856 and nuns opened Saint Benedict in 1913. Saint John’s recently named its first lay president,  Michael Hemesath, an alumnus and Carlton College professor of economics, and shifted to lay control, as the sisters did half a century ago. Father Bob Koopmann, the last Benedictine president of Saint John’s, said the values won’t change. He expressed pride that the two schools have been able to partner since 1965 without one engulfing the other. “It hasn’t been easy over the years because Saint Ben’s was smaller—now they’re bigger—and within the Catholic Church men dominated and still do. But the fact that we could work it out is just wonderful,” said Koopmann, a concert pianist, music professor, and alumnus.

A More Seamless Approach to Internationalization

Sixty percent of the 2,000 “Bennies,” as the female students are known, and 45 percent of the 1,900 “Johnnies” study abroad, most on one of the colleges’ 17 semester-long programs on a half-dozen continents. Sixteen of these programs are led by faculty. In addition, the schools offer up to a dozen summer courses overseas and arrange service and internship opportunities from Belize to Bosnia to Hong Kong. 

It’s expensive to dispatch so many faculty around the world. “It has some challenging attributes,” said College of Saint Benedict President MaryAnn Baenninger, but this approach makes it easy for students to study abroad “with little detrimental challenge to their curriculum.” It is also “the only model that lets you change the international experience of your faculty in a wholesale way after they arrive.”

Nonetheless, the Saint Benedict president sees “a very big danger in equating internationalization with study abroad.” Especially since making internationalization one of three cornerstones of a 2010 strategic plan, the colleges have shifted emphasis from student mobility to a more comprehensive approach. “We’re developing more of a seamlessness on what it means to be global, but we’re not there yet,” said Baenninger, a psychologist. “We have to constantly poke ourselves and remind ourselves that just counting study abroad numbers isn’t what it’s all about. It’s what other activities students voluntarily choose to engage in and how they interpret difference and the ‘other.’” It is tempting for the 80 percent of students from Minnesota “to think that they and their culture are the norm,” she said. “You have to come at that in every which way.”

A Part for Everyone

Joseph Rogers, director of the Center for Global Education, echoed those sentiments. Internationalization “has to be embedded in all aspects of the college. It can’t reside just in study abroad or international student programming. Everyone has to feel they have a part to play in internationalization, from faculty who teach mathematics and the natural sciences to student development professionals in the residence halls,” he said. 

Rogers, an attorney and East Asia expert, led a semester program in China in 2006 for his alma mater, stayed on as director of education abroad, and was tapped to run the new Center for Global Education in 2010. Peggy Retka, his successor as director of education abroad, said, “We stick with our own programs because that allows us to build the academic offerings around our common curriculum, and so, almost every student can fit a semester abroad into their four-year plan. That’s good for our faculty and good for our students’ participation rate.” Each student on the faculty-led semester programs takes a four-credit study abroad seminar to fulfill an intercultural and experiential learning study requirement.

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In the years leading up to creation of the Center for Global Education, top administrators already were pushing to professionalize study abroad operations and make them less dependent on the proclivities of individual faculty. “Some faculty thought they were losing ownership of the programs,” said Vice Provost Joseph DesJardins. “There were some tough times but those conversations really matured the community.” DesJardins credited Rogers and Retka with allaying those concerns “by making decisions in a real collaborative way.” A 12-person advisory council composed of faculty and administrators now provides the vehicle for that collaboration. 

Growing Interest in China, Japan, and India

Rogers has moved to expand partnerships with institutions around the world and cement ties that began with those individual faculty contacts. One of the oldest and deepest partnerships is with Southwest University in Beibei, China, which stretches back to 1986. A faculty development trip to East Asia a decade later whetted chemistry professor Henry Jakubowski’s interest in Chinese medicine. He went on to lead the China semester program twice and teach an honors senior seminar, “Medicine: East Meets West.” He also had a hand in creating a summer exchange that allows 16 students from both countries to conduct research for six weeks in China and then six weeks in Minnesota. “It’s a fantastic way to build relationships,” said Jakubowski, who listens to Mandarin tapes through a speaker mounted on his bicycle as he pedals to work.

The colleges launched an Asian studies major in 2009 and expanded Chinese and Japanese language instruction with the help of a $140,000 U.S. Department of Education Title VI grant. A semester study program in Kolkata, India, was launched in 2011, thanks to the efforts of English department chair Madhu Mitra and other faculty with roots in that area. Mitra led the first group of students to Kolkata and even landed novelist Amitav Ghosh as a guest lecturer. It took three years and three faculty development trips to India to make that new program happen. “We did our homework,” said Provost Rita Knuesel. “I wanted to make sure I could look at two presidents and say, ‘We are ready to go.’” An economics professor, Sucharita Sinha Mukherjee, led the program in 2012, and Mitra will take the class to Kolkata again next spring. But Mitra said, “We’re really hoping that the next time (2014), a non-Indian faculty member will lead this course. It will be completely unsustainable if it’s just people from India.”

Junior Kia Marie Lor, 20, of St. Paul, the daughter of Hmong immigrants and recipient of a Gates Millennium Scholarship, jumped at the opportunity to study in Kolkata, but first had some convincing to do at home. “My mom was really upset. She was like, ‘Are you dropping out of college?’” the communication major related. “I told her, ‘No, I am just studying abroad.’ To a Hmong mother that is completely bizarre. In the Hmong language there is no word for study abroad.” But she won her mother over and later spent a second semester in China.

Since 1989 more than 1,200 Japanese high school students have attended a summer ESL program at CSB and SJU, which grew out of an enrichment program for U.S. high schoolers that history professor David Bennetts had organized. “That was the start of my venture into things international,” said Bennetts, who taught January courses in Japan seven times, started a semester exchange with Bunkyo Gakuin University in Tokyo, and created a U.S. history course for international students.

A Semester-Long Orientation Course

The colleges enrolled 252 international students in 2010–11, or six percent of enrollment. They are drawn by the availability of financial aid and scholarships that range from $4,000 to $19,000 a year. Vice Provost DesJardins said, “They are not visitors. It’s not ‘them.’ They’re us. If a kid is coming from Japan, they are going to be treated the same way for financial aid purposes as the kids coming from Chicago.” 

International students take a 12-week cultural academic orientation course in their first semester in addition to the standard three-day orientation that all new students attend.  Lisa Scott, the academic adviser who co-teaches the classes, said, “One of my very first lectures is about explaining the liberal arts and understanding why you’re here and what the liberal arts means to you.” For students interested only in business, “that’s a hard one to swallow at first so we come back to it again and again,” Scott said. “That ongoing orientation class is a real gift,” said Alex Schleper, director of the International Student Program Office and a onetime Saint John’s quarterback who shares the instructional duties.

“They are not visitors. It’s not ‘them.’ They’re us. If a kid is coming from Japan, they are going to be treated the same way for financial aid purposes as the kids coming from Chicago.”

The colleges tapped the brakes on recruitment in China after an outsized entering class—50 instead of the usual 25—encountered difficulties in 2009–10. “They weren’t as successful in their first year as we had hoped they would be,” said Baenninger. The number reverted to normal for 2010. The lesson, said Roger Young, the international admission director, was that “we need to diversify. We can’t rely on China and the Bahamas and Trinidad and not on other areas of the world.” The colleges traditionally have had a pipeline to Caribbean countries where the Benedictines have monasteries.

There are far more success stories than disappointments. Huaweilang (Clement) Dai, 23, of Shanghai, China, graduated with a Phi Beta Kappa key and landed an internship with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and its Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. Dai, who interned previously with the American Council on Renewable Energy, dreams of helping his homeland make greater use of clean energy even while it builds more coal plants. “We can’t abandon fossil fuel energy overnight,” said Dai, three of whose roommates studied or traveled in China.

Documenting Humanitarian Issues

The colleges offer students opportunities to volunteer in Tanzania, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. (Forty young people from Bosnia-Herzegovina attended the colleges on scholarships paid for by a trustee). Senior Trang Pham, 23, went to Bosnia for 20 days as part of a student group called Extending the Link that each year travels the world to produce a documentary on humanitarian issues. Hers was on recovery from the Balkan war. Earlier documentaries addressed the plight of orphans in Uganda and human trafficking in Nepal.

It was the fifth time the Vietnam-born Pham used her passport for college-sponsored study and service, after earlier stops in Japan (May 2009), Egypt and Israel (May 2010), Vietnam (summer 2010), and China and Hong Kong (winter 2010). She was one of the E-Scholars—“E” for entrepreneur—who are groomed to create socially conscious business ventures. 

Students can earn credit following El Camino de Santiago de Compostela (or Way of Saint James), the pilgrims’ route in Spain. The late Jose Antonio Fabres, a professor of Hispanic Studies, said that class provides “a very humbling” experience for college students: being on the receiving end of help. “In a lot of programs students do things for others. In this program others do things for them. They get help from strangers when their blisters become unbearable,” explained the Chilean-born Fabres in an interview weeks before his death from cancer.

Baenninger has launched a program that has taken dozens of Saint Benedict students to the Women as Global Leaders Conference in the United Arab Emirates, where the president serves on the board of trustees of American University of Sharjah.

Brent Swails, a cub news producer at CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta, happened to be in the back of the room one day when executives were discussing the launch of a new program by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the neurosurgeon and the TV network’s chief medical correspondent. CNN would be dispatching crews from Atlanta to cover global health stories for Gupta’s weekly series. Swails spoke up and mentioned that he had minored in global health studies at Northwestern University. He got the assignment and soon flew to Brazil for his first “Vital Signs” story. 

When a news producer’s job in CNN’s Johannesburg bureau opened up, he landed that, too. The four months he’d spent as a Northwestern sophomore studying and researching HIV/AIDS in South Africa helped with that advancement, too. Now at age 28, he’s a CNN veteran who has spent four of the six years since college posted overseas including a stint in Hong Kong and a second tour in South Africa, covering much of the sub-Saharan continent. He had dreamed of such a career, “but thought it would take a long time to go the international route. I was lucky.”

However, as Louis Pasteur said, chance favors the prepared mind. Not many journalism students concentrate on global health studies. Swails, in fact, was the only one in his class at the prestigious Medill School of Journalism. But the private university on the banks of Lake Michigan in the Chicago suburb of Evanston sends scores of other students around the world each year to study public health problems in China, Chile, Cuba, France, and South Africa and, where possible, to do something about them.

Sparking Interdisciplinary Collaborations

Half the global health minors are pre-med students, but the program attracts students from across disciplines, including engineering, education, journalism, and even music. Faculty collaborate across disciplines to teach the core courses and offer electives on infectious diseases, disabilities, mental health, refugees, and other global health issues. President Morton Schapiro said the program “embodies the interdisciplinary spirit of the most successful programs at Northwestern” and stands as a model for other efforts “on campus and around the world.” The university has declared global health one of its “areas of greatest strength” alongside nanoscience, energy, and sustainability, all the foci of a major fundraising campaign.

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Fast Start with Federal Help

Global health studies was launched in 2000 with help from a $500,000 National Security Education Program grant won by the fledgling Office of International Program Development (IPD). “In a very short time we were able to do a lot of things: develop curriculum, create programs abroad, organize conferences, (and) provide support for students’ going abroad and for faculty,” said IPD Director Dévora Grynspan. “Very quickly we had a critical mass of courses and programs abroad.”

Global health studies became a minor in 2004, with students required to take three core courses and four electives and to participate in a “substantial” public health experience abroad. That means “they cannot just go volunteer in some hospital,” said Grynspan. “They have to formally learn about public health conditions abroad.” The minor attracts close to 300 students at the 16,000-student university and graduates five dozen or more each year.

Delivering Care in Rural Liberia

Most get that experience primarily by enrolling in classes at partner schools in Paris; Beijing; Santiago, Chile; Cape Town and Stellenbosch, South Africa; Havana, Cuba, and starting in 2014, Tel Aviv, Israel. But some choose to work independently, as did anthropology major Peter Luckow ‘10.

Luckow came to college with an interest in biology and public service, and more than one high school teacher urged him to consider a career in international medicine. He spent two summers interning for Partners in Health, the Boston nonprofit that works in some of the poorest places in the world. At the suggestion of its celebrated cofounder, Dr. Paul Farmer, Luckow went to Liberia in summer 2009 to help a small charity trying to build a community health network in a country still struggling to recover from civil war. The World Health Organization estimated there were only 30 physicians left in the country of 3 million people when the conflict ended in 2003.

Luckow had taken a year off at Northwestern to expand a student-run charity that he helped found called GlobeMed, which raises funds and medical supplies and does hands-on humanitarian work in poor countries. GlobeMed now has chapters on more than 50 campuses. Dr. Rajesh Panjabi, a Harvard Medical School physician who had founded a non-profit called Last Mile Health to provide care in rural Liberia, asked Luckow to return after graduation to help grow the organization, which is known in Liberia as Tiyatien Health. It had a budget of $50,000 and a dozen community health workers then. Today it is a $1.7 million operation with a staff of 120, and Luckow was featured in Forbes magazine recently as one of “30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs.”

“Save the World” Types Eager to Help

William Leonard, chair of anthropology and co-director of global health studies, said Northwestern students were hungry for something like this. When he offered his Introduction to International Public Health course in 2001 for the first time, “the student response was amazing. The course with 45 slots was overenrolled after the first 30 minutes of preregistration.”

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The program has had the ancillary benefit of strengthening a bond between the main campus in Evanston and the medical school in downtown Chicago. Medical students were already doing volunteer work or study overseas, “but the medical school was looking for a way in which experiences abroad could be more structured,” said Grynspan. Now there are regular pathways to conduct research at partner institutions, including Stellenbosch University in South Africa, Makerere University in Uganda, Peking University in China, and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago. 

Northwestern won a grant from the National Institutes of Health in 2008 to strengthen global health programs campus-wide and establish a Center for Global Health within the School of Medicine, which now has its own adviser helping students find places and people in need of support.

Grynspan, working with a staff of six, sends close to 200 undergraduates each year on the global health and on some other education abroad programs, or about a quarter of all Northwestern students who study overseas. The IPD office also handles international agreements, hosts visitors, and arranges student exchanges. It shifted the Mexico program to Chile on short notice in 2009 due to the swine flu scare.

Undergraduates who choose global health “are all save-the-world-type people. They just love the idea of going to poor countries, helping out, and doing research,” said Grynspan, a political scientist by training. “This is an organized way to do it.” Not incidentally for the pre-meds, “it looks very good on their transcript and c.v. They are going straight into the best medical schools and public health programs in the country.”

Turning Passion Into Action

Students are learning something not taught in labs or found in most textbooks.

“What we try to teach them is more a way of looking at the world: What are the right questions to ask? How is (health care) different in different countries? We just want them to have that type of sensitivity because there’s no time to learn it when they go to grad school. It’s just too intense,” said Grynspan, who was born in Israel and raised in Costa Rica.

Luckow is applying to medical schools now, but intends to stay connected with both Last Mile Health and GlobeMed (he is on the board). He remains grateful for the opportunities the global health studies program gave him to turn what had been “a very extracurricular passion for global health” into real action. “I know it changed my life and, given the success of the program, it’s changing hundreds of other students’ lives,” he said.

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Northwestern University

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The largest international program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), has come a long way from its roots as what it calls “a self-supporting start-up on the fringes of MIT.” What really started three decades ago as a modest effort to send students to work in Japan for a semester or two, today is a juggernaut that sends upward of 550 MIT students and recent graduates each summer to 20 countries on all-expenses-paid internships. The hands-on work and research they do in labs and companies give them a real taste of what it is like to operate outside their country and culture, often in another language. MIT also sends 100 students overseas to teach science to high school and college students. It has been a seminal experience over the past generation for 5,600 students, including 800 who worked in China. 

“We make sure that every single internship opportunity is completely cost-free for the students,” said April Julich Perez, MISTI associate director. Their airfares and living expenses are covered mostly by companies, foundations, foreign governments, and donors. The 2012 budget for the internship program was $3.3 million, 85 percent from outside funding. MISTI awarded $2 million to 100 faculty in 2012 for international research and collaborations, many of which involve students. MIT itself kicks in $300,000 for the seed grants.

Entrepreneurs, Inventors, and a TV Host

MISTI has spawned entrepreneurs, academics, and venture capitalists who work on the global stage with language skills on top of advanced technological prowess. While on a MISTI internship in China after his freshman year, Scot Frank ’08, ventured on his own to the Himalayan plateau where he “met many people and began building friendships. I was curious about local culture, traditional innovation to survive on such a harsh environment.”

The engineering and computer science major became passionate about harnessing new technology and ideas to help people in the Himalayas meet their energy and water needs. The situation became dire in 2010 “when anti-wood felling laws were enforced and people had no other source of energy available.”

One Earth Designs, a nonprofit Frank co-founded, created a nonpolluting, solar-powered cooker now used by 4,000 rural inhabitants in place of polluting woodburning stoves.

Kirsten Sydney Hessler ’12, a materials science and engineering major, did a summer internship at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart and one at Osram Opto Semiconductors, a leading LED manufacturer in Regensburg. “The power of my MISTI experiences was that I immersed myself in German language and culture but also felt that I was challenging myself as an engineer and really contributing to my host,” said Hessler, now a graduate student in materials science at Stanford University.

Not every MISTI pathway leads to science and engineering. Janet Hsieh ’01, a Texan, went to Taiwan, her parents’ birthplace, to intern as a paramedic before applying to medical school. She wound up as a model and television personality who hosts “Fun Taiwan” and other travel shows for Discovery Travel and Living Channel. “Six months turned into eleven years and I’m still here in Asia,” she wrote in a recent MIT-China newsletter. “MISTI helped me open the door to this fantastic ride.”

Applied International Studies

The eagerness of companies, nonprofits, and other enterprises overseas to welcome MIT students into their workplaces reflects the stature of perhaps the world’s most famous science and technology training institution. But MISTI is also a testament to and product of the ingenuity and passion of individual faculty starting with Richard Samuels, a political scientist and director of the Center for International Studies who launched MIT-Japan in 1983.

MISTI pioneered what we call applied international studies,” said Samuels. It is very different from standard study abroad programs in which students travel in a group and take courses together. MISTI students head directly into workplaces instead of taking classes. “The idea was to create a cohort of (future) scientists and engineers who could operate effectively in Japan,” he said. Initially Samuels thought only a year’s stay would do for students “to really immerse themselves,” but later “it turned out a summer was not too short. They go over, come back, and go back again.”

Other faculty took note of the success of MIT-Japan and wanted similar opportunities for their students. MISTI was born in 1994 with a China program. Now it’s grown to Belgium, Brazil, Chile, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, and Switzerland, with pilot programs in Argentina, the Netherlands, and Turkey. 

Language, Culture Study, and Teamwork Required

While MIT doesn’t require all students to learn other languages, MISTI requires two years of language and a course on the politics and culture of the host country. With the exceptions of Singapore, India, and Israel, the students must be able to work in a language other than English, said Chappell Lawson, MISTI director.

Each country program has its own faculty director and program manager, with the professors’ ensuring the academic caliber and helping to raise funds while the managers match students with internships and travel to meet with the host companies and find new ones.

Suzanne Berger was MISTI’s founding director and served in that capacity until 2011, when she turned the reins over to Lawson, a fellow political scientist. The internships teach students how to work in teams with researchers who may approach a problem very differently than it’s done in MIT labs, said Berger, who still directs MIT-France.

When a biology graduate student returned from the Pasteur Institute in France, Berger asked how the four months had gone. The student replied, “Honestly after the first month I thought it was a big mistake. The equipment wasn’t as good and I thought nobody was working. People were drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and wandering around. But after one month, I saw that they had taken a major leap forward on the very same project that we’d been working on in our MIT lab. I didn’t see it coming.”

A Russian Revival and Expanded German Vocabulary

Berger said MISTI has grown carefully, adding countries only after ensuring it had the faculty and language courses to warrant sending students there. That meant teaching Portuguese for the first time for MIT-Brazil students and restoring Russian language classes that had been shut down.

MISTI has also been a boon for German and French enrollments, added Berger. “Now we send 90 students a year to Germany and 75 to France.” German instructors have added business and scientific vocabulary to their lessons.

Arnoldo Hax, professor emeritus of management and director of MIT-Chile, said the MISTI Global Seed Funds grants have had a major impact in Chile, his native country, with faculty from 16 MIT departments collaborating with counterparts at Chilean universities. “It’s a wonderful thing,” said Hax, who was recently given a medal by Chilean President Sebastián Piñera. For the interns, the international exposure “is serious stuff. It’s not just taking a plane and landing in Santiago.”

Hard to Replicate MISTI’s Scale

Lawson, an expert on Mexican politics who served as executive director of policy and planning for U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the Department of Homeland Security in 2009–2011, called MISTI “unique. Everyone is trying to do something like this. MIT has had more success partly because people are willing to pay the costs of having an MIT intern who may only be there for 10 weeks in the summer.” That would be hard for any other institution to replicate on this scale, he added.

MISTI considers itself an embodiment of the university’s Latin motto Mens et Manus, or Mind and Hand. Lawson foresees growing the fledgling program in South Korea and elsewhere and making more inroads in Latin America. Wherever MISTI goes, its aim will be the same: finding internships “that are practical, relevant for students, and on the frontier of what is possible in international education.”

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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It took some families in a barrio of Managua, Nicaragua, by surprise when U.S. and  Nicaraguan college students showed up at their door asking what they knew about HIV/AIDS prevention. But soon the students were familiar faces. The nursing students from Fairfield University in Connecticut and the social work and Teaching English as a Second Language students from Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) were part of a project called Cuidemos Nuestra Salud (Take Care of Our Health). The project began in 2009 and now continues every year to improve the health of preschool children and their families in the impoverished Barrio Ayapal. 

Vilma Alvarez, UCA professor of social work, had connected with community leaders the year before when she sent her students to the barrio to perform service. At the time, UCA and Fairfield, both Jesuit institutions, were no strangers to one another. Fairfield faculty had research ties there that stretched back to the 1990s, and the university began sending Latin American and Caribbean studies students on short trips in 2000. In 2004 the universities signed a collaborative agreement that established a semester-long study abroad program at UCA and also provided a full scholarship for a UCA student to attend the sister school in Connecticut each semester.

In for the Long Haul

Lydia and Philip Greiner, nursing professors and spouses, decided the sister school partnership presented a perfect opportunity to enrich the learning experience for undergraduates in her public health class, students who usually do prevention work in low-income neighborhoods in Bridgeport, a few miles from the Fairfield campus. Now some would spend spring break in 2009 learning about and addressing the challenges and needs in Ayapal. 

The Greiners had laid the groundwork in an earlier visit where they met Alvarez and Marisol Morales Vega, the community leader and director of a preschool, Amigos por Siempre, for the barrio’s three-to-five-year-old children. Morales “was really clear. She said, ‘You’re not just coming once. That’s been done before. People have come, they promise, and they leave. I’m not interested in that.’ We made a commitment that we were in for the long haul,” Lydia said.

Listening First

They also committed to listening to the community first before deciding what to do. A dozen Fairfield nursing students were paired with UCA social work students and a student who could translate, and they went door-to-door asking families about their most pressing health concerns. Later Morales called a meeting with parents active in the preschool to discuss the results. The answer was clear: HIV/AIDS education was what people wanted most.

“They felt people were very stigmatized and there was a lot of misinformation. They asked us to produce a homegrown DVD that people could watch in the privacy of their homes because Marisol said they would not come to an event about HIV/AIDS,” said Greiner. The Fairfield contingent returned home but continued to collaborate with the UCA students by e-mail and Facebook. They also enlisted help from other Fairfield students with video-making skills. They produced a four-minute video with images from Nicaragua and a draft script that was translated into Spanish and vetted by Morales and some of her school parents. A UCA student at Fairfield narrated the final version.

Lydia Greiner returned in 2010 with a dozen more students and, with the same UCA students, distributed 400 copies of the DVD to families throughout the barrio. Subsequently Fairfield has sent students and faculty to Nicaragua twice a year, fulfilling their public health nursing requirements while working on priorities such as cardiovascular health problems and promoting hygiene in a barrio that floods easily and does not always have running tap water.

Finding the Link Between the Barrio and Bridgeport

Greiner and other faculty take both traditional college-age nursing students and older adult students who are switching careers. Greiner said she has seen some students who had a passing interest in public health nursing “become passionate about it,” including Colleen Grady, now an emergency room nurse in Boulder, Colorado, who went on that first trip in 2009.

“My Spanish skills were terrible. It was such a blessing to have the UCA students there to help translate,” said Grady. “One thing that I will always remember is when one of the UCA students told me how sad she was to see how people in the barrio were living. She lived nearby, but was unaware of the hardships in the barrio. It made me think about how easily we can become disconnected to people in our own cities and neighborhoods.”

“After this trip I knew that I wanted to volunteer as a nurse internationally, but I also felt the importance of taking care of people in my own community,” said the 31-year-old Grady, who has subsequently volunteered with a nonprofit called Blanca’s House in El Salvador and Liberia.

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Professor Jessica Planas, who has made three of the trips, said she impresses upon her students the similarity of challenges facing the poor whether in Managua or Bridgeport. “Many of the families that we work with in Ayapal deal with the same issues that my patients back home deal with,” including lack of money to buy medicine and low literacy levels, she said. “And these 
issues will be encountered by all my students, regardless where they choose to practice nursing.”

Internationalizing the UCA Students’ Education

Speaking through an interpreter, Professor Alvarez said, “What we have in common is the community work.” While the Fairfield contingent comes for just a week, the work “is continuous,” with her students and the community leaders continuing to promote preventive health measures year-round. The added value for her students “is the intercultural experience and the interdisciplinary approach.”

UCA psychology student Maria Christina Aguirre, who spent the fall 2012 semester at Fairfield, said working in Ayapal “was a beautiful experience. The people were very thankful.” 

UCA has 8,000 students, most on government-funded scholarships to the Catholic institution. Laurie Cordua, UCA’s director of academic cooperation and internationalization, said, “Having this relationship with Fairfield is very important for us. Our students don’t have the means to have a study abroad experience. This gives them the opportunity of having an intercultural experience, of sharing, of working in teams with students from the United States that otherwise they wouldn’t have. It’s really an internationalization experience at home, locally.”

Mirroring the University Mission

Sixty percent of Fairfield’s 5,000 students study abroad for a semester, year, or shorter periods, or perform service in five countries. The university’s strategic plan speaks about producing young men and women “committed to diversity and the promotion of justice” and “prepared to engage with the world around them as competent and informed global citizens.”

President Jeffrey von Arx, S.J., said, “It is no longer sufficient to measure globalization by the numbers of students getting on a plane.” The partnership with UCA and Ayapal crosses “language and cultural divides to effect real and lasting change,” he said, and stands as “an exemplar of how the university lives out its mission.”

Fairfield, which enrolls students from other U.S. universities in its semester-long program at UCA, has also invited nursing faculty and students from other schools to join the work in Ayapal, and it is planning to send its own nurse practitioner graduate students to work in a rural health clinic in January 2014 in Santa Maura, Nicaragua, a mountain region where coffee is grown. January is the harvesting season when the clinic nurse has her hands full treating an influx of 3,000 migrant workers. 

So the partnership is growing despite challenges that include the paucity of bilingual nursing students and faculty at Fairfield’s end as well as the time constraints of academic requirements in both institutions. Despite those impediments, both sides regard their collaboration as a model for communitybased work. Neither has the complete answer, but by working together they are making a difference in people’s health in barrio Ayapal.

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Fairfield University

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When the University of South Florida reorganized its international programs, it squeezed into two words the name of the wide-ranging operation: USF World. Karen Holbrook, senior vice president for global affairs and international research, describes USF World as “a mindset, a culture, a strategy, and a reality” as well as the particular branches of its international operations nestled in the Patel Center for Global Solutions. Holbrook, a biologist and former president of Ohio State University, answered a call from USF President Judy Genshaft to come to Tampa in 2008 for a short period to watch over its burgeoning research enterprise. Five years later she’s still there, arriving in her sports car at the Patel Center at dawn and staying late. “It’s really fun, probably more fun than anything I’ve ever done,” said Holbrook. “I’ve really, really enjoyed being at USF World.” Her idea of fun includes spending hours on a cruise designing an intricate schemata for USF’s quest to become a global research university, with circles within circles and boxes crammed with goals, metrics, and strategies. A vision plan she drafted is 380 pages and a PowerPoint presentation to the Faculty Senate contained 120 slides. “I go through them fast,” she said. 

USF is going fast. Built on a World War II practice bombing range and opened in 1960, what was largely a commuter college now is a system institution with 48,000 students and $411 million in research grants and contracts. All freshmen must live on the green campus lined with graceful live oak trees. It has weathered $125 million in state budget cuts. The out-of-state tuition of $16,260 (Floridians pay $6,330) is a draw for the 2,368 international students, and more are coming through a new partnership with INTO University Partnerships, the British recruiting enterprise that places students from China and elsewhere into intensive English and academic pathway programs at allied universities (Colorado State University, another Simon Award winner, is another INTO school). On a campus where Floridians once comprised 96 percent of students, USF aims to double international enrollments to 10 percent by 2018. “We’re doing it to enhance the quality and moreover the relevance of the educational experience,” said Provost Ralph Wilcox. “We believe we’ve got something to offer international students, but they also have an incredible amount to bring to us.”

Serving the Needs of a Global Community

Genshaft, president since 2000, is carrying out her third strategic plan, each more globally focused than the preceding one. That is only natural for Tampa Bay, she said, home to 480 multinational corporations as well as Florida’s busiest port and MacDill U.S. Air Force Base, headquarters for U.S. Central Command (CentCom) and Strategic Operations Command. Genshaft said one business leader told her pointblank that his company cannot alone teach employees “tolerance, cultural knowledge, and the value of international activities. You’ve got to do it and then they’re better employees for us.” The military, too, relies on USF’s help to bring academic perspectives to grappling with the world’s trouble spots and resolving problems peacefully instead of using “kinetics,” as retired three-star Marine Lt. General Martin Steele, associate vice president for veterans research and executive director of USF Military Partnerships, delicately put it. 

Learning Mandarin in Tampa Bay and Qingdao

USF secured a Confucius Institute in 2008 by promising to recruit its first tenure-track professor of Mandarin. Eric Shepherd got the job. “It was unfathomable to me that at that time we had 40,000 students and basically no Chinese language program beyond an introductory class taught mostly in English,” he said. Now the Department of World Languages offers a Chinese minor, and 200 students attend classes taught by three professors and three instructors. “We came along a little later, but we’re quick learners,” said Genshaft.

Shepherd, a master of the Chinese storytelling performance art called Shandung “fast tales,” sends students to Qingdao University and Ocean University of China for up to 18 months of classes and internships. “They learn how to work at a professional level,” he said. “If they’re an international business major, they learn to do international business in Chinese. If they’re a chemistry major, they’re learning how to do chemistry in Chinese.”

As an undergraduate Victor Florez, 23, now working for the Confucius Institute, finished fourth in a monthlong, nationally televised “Chinese Bridge” language contest for international students. Florez, a Miami native of Colombian ancestry, came to college with a strong desire “to learn a language that was completely alien to me.” Mandarin fit the bill. “My first year I studied three hours a day,” said Florez. “If you put in the work, it’s inevitable that you’ll come out speaking fluent Chinese.”

Ambassadors for Education Abroad and a Gateway in the Student Center

Some 2.5 percent of USF students graduate with an international experience. Some 844 earned credit abroad in 2011–2012. Holbrook wants to grow that number exponentially. Genshaft and her husband donated more than $1 million to endow Passport Scholarships of $2,500 to $5,000. USF World recruits returning undergraduates to serve as “GloBull Ambassadors” for education abroad (the Bull is the university mascot), and the professional staff has grown from 5 to 11. Since the Patel Center sits at a distance from the heart of campus, USF World opened a satellite study abroad office in Marshall Student Center. “We needed to be more central to be able to catch and serve the students. We call it the Gateway Office,” said Amanda Maurer, director of education abroad. Maurer underscored the importance of the GloBull Ambassadors in convincing fellow students to pursue education abroad. “We can say it ourselves five or six times, but if a student goes up there and says, ‘You’ve really got to do this; it changed my life,’ they listen,” she said.

A new Global Citizenship program rewards up to 200 freshmen and sophomores who study global issues with $2,000 scholarships for education abroad. Anthropologist Karla Davis-Salazar, who has excavated Mayan ruins in Honduras, led the first cohort to Panama in 2013. Despite tight budgets, the provost found $400,000 to fund the Global Citizenship initiative. “Part of my goal for the future is (finding out) why more students aren’t interested. What do we need to do to open their minds?” said DavisSalazar, now an associate dean.

The international services staff also has expanded from six to nine. The INTO partnership will bring more Asian students to Tampa. USF also draws students from Latin America, including 60 undergraduates from Venezuela. Among them are engineering students Ana and Juan Lopez Marcano, siblings who said the courses and workload are harder back home but the research opportunities much greater at USF. Ana, 19, who was president of her high school class, hopes to design biomedical devices. “I really like it here,” said her 20-year-old brother, aspires to land a job at a tech giant such as Microsoft and learn “the cool stuff.” 

Establishing the USF Brand in Far Places

Roger Brindley, associate vice president for global academic programs, sees his job as “brand profile development writ large.” He works on expanding international partnerships. “For the life of me I can’t understand why people in India have heard of Harvard, but not South Florida,” quipped Brindley, a British-born expert on early childhood education. USF World now has two people in Delhi who work on recruiting students as well as finding new research opportunities and promoting economic development. USF has more than 40 faculty members of Indian heritage and 240 students from India.

“For the life of me I can’t understand why people in India have heard of Harvard, but not South Florida.”

The university provides grants up to $12,000 to faculty to generate research, scholarship, and “creative activity” with counterparts at five partner universities in Ghana, China, and the United Kingdom. Its Ghana Scholars Program, which brings faculty from the University of Ghana and the University of Cape Coast to USF to complete dissertation work, recently received an honorable mention Andrew Heiskell award from the Institute of International Education.

These partnerships are vital to USF’s achieving its goal of becoming globally engaged, said Brindley. No one “thinks becoming globalized is switching on a light. A generation from now the only relevant universities, in our opinion, will be globally engaged. We have a responsibility to do that work and be one of the universities that succeeds.”

Faculty Interests Drive Internationalization

Michael Churton has witnessed the changes as a longtime professor of special education with a deep international bent. An authority on distance learning, he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malaysia in the 1970s. To honor the memory of a friend killed in Vietnam, he flew to wartime Saigon and applied for a teaching job just before the government fell. He has made Southeast Asia a focus of his career, studying disabilities among indigenous people in Borneo as a Fulbright Scholar, coordinating a USF partnership with the University of Malaysia-Sarawak, and working with Vietnam’s education ministry on e-learning courses for medical students. He is an honorary professor at Hanoi Medical University and has travelled to Vietnam a dozen times and to Malaysia 20 times.

When he joined the USF faculty in 1994, “there was no support from any place” for such work overseas, he said. “It was faculty members on their own. Slowly, as a new administration and new people came in, the evolution began and now we’re much farther along.”

“USF World has greatly enriched the possibilities for faculty and students. I can’t tell you how much they have helped us to stretch ourselves,” said education psychologist Darlene DeMarie, who established a model child care center at the University of Limpopo on a Fulbright in South Africa.

More than 120 Peace Corps volunteers have earned master’s degrees under the tutelage of James Mihelcic, a civil and environmental engineering professor, first at Michigan Tech and since 2008 at USF. Mihelcic, a prolific researcher, was recruited to be a 21st Century World Class Scholar, a distinction created by the Florida legislature. He finds low-tech solutions to water and sanitation problems in developing countries and heads a multi-university consortium that recently won a $3.9 million National Science Foundation grant to recover energy, water, and nutrients from wastewater.

Mihelcic said the Peace Corps volunteers in his master’s program are equipped to tackle complex sanitation problems. “It’s a scarce skill set,” said Mihelcic. “The Peace Corps has had trouble attracting and retaining engineers overseas.” Cohorts of 20 students spend two semesters at USF studying not just environmental engineering, but anthropology and global health. “Part of our job is to get students to understand you can do a lot of behavioral change besides the technological solutions,” he said.

Still Building “Who We Are”

In separate conversations, administrators and faculty alike describe USF in terms that suggest a large canvas still being painted. As Davis-Salazar, the anthropologist, put it, “We are still building who we are.” It is a collegial undertaking. At the helm of USF World, Holbrook has displayed a prodigious capacity for organizing and putting forward her own ideas, but she said they are “only the starting point. What’s exciting is other people’s ideas.” More than 100 faculty are involved in workgroups fleshing out USF’s international vision plan and coming up with metrics to gauge the university’s progress. “We want people to know about it and be excited about it,” Holbrook said. “When you do it by yourself, it’s just out there for everybody to attack, and that’s what I hope everybody will do.”

“There’s no doubt that the needs of international students are on the minds of most people at the university.”

The words have been backed up with dollars and actions. Wilcox, the provost, said, “We have invested and created a budget for USF World in difficult times.” Even with a 25 percent, $104 million cut in state appropriations over the past four years, “we had the focus, the discipline, and the strategic appetite to say the world is important and USF World is important.”

“This is a high-energy university,” said Wilcox. “This is an incredibly ambitious set of goals….We all realize that being a 50-something-year-old institution if we aspire to the level of achievement we do, we’re going to have work harder than other, older institutions because they want to improve and get better, too. We’re not going to sit still. There’s so much more to do.”

The ties that bind both the international and the multicultural student services offices at St. Cloud State University (SCSU) are particularly strong, reflecting the conviction of campus leaders that it is incumbent upon them to prepare students for a world far more diverse than the central Minnesota communities where the overwhelming number of undergraduates grew up. The multicultural student services office is deeply involved in the arrangements for education abroad programs in South Africa, Laos, and Thailand that are aimed especially at students of color who trace their ethnicities to these parts of the globe.

President Earl Potter III said his institution is the leader among the 31 institutions in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system—which is separate from the flagship University of Minnesota—“in developing curricular and co-curricular learning opportunities in support of multiculturalism and internationalism. We approach these two aspects of awareness as part of the same continuum, with distinctive characteristics but connected through the imperative of educating our students for life.” 

A partnership with Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU) in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, dates back to 1995, when Professor of Ethnic Studies Robert Johnson, History and African Studies Professor Peter Nayenga and Director of Multicultural Student Services Shahzad Ahmad began a semester-long program on comparative race relations. “It is a transformative personal experience,” said Johnson. Ahmad, a Pakistani-born SCSU alumnus, said, “It engages a very different set of students who typically have not participated in study abroad.” 

Now SCSU sends students to South Africa for two to three weeks over spring break as well. Junior Tashiana Osborne, 21, went as a freshman. Osborne, a leader in the National Society of Black Engineers, said it “was like a flashback” to the segregation era in the United States “even though I never witnessed that.”

SCSU also sends faculty and staff to South Africa for professional development, and nursing students for clinical practice. Nearly 600 students, faculty, and staff have made the journey since the partnership began. SCSU spends $500,000 a year making such international study and research opportunities possible.

In-State Tuition for International Students

Under the leadership of Potter, a no-nonsense former Coast Guard captain, Provost Devinder Malhotra, an Indian-born economist, and Associate Vice Provost for International Affairs Ann Bos Radwan, who directed the Fulbright Commission in Cairo for more than 20 years, SCSU is now seeking to make international study, research, and experiences an integral part of life for all 17,600 students and 900 faculty. This is taking place on the heels of wrenching budget cuts and a reorganization that eliminated 26 of 200 academic programs.

SCSU ranked 13th among master’s level institutions in Open Doors 2012, with 1,250 international students. The largest contingents come from Saudi Arabia (180) and China (170), but the campus also draws 131 students from Nepal and an equal number from African nations. One lure is that international students effectively pay in-state tuition simply by volunteering twice each semester at cultural events on campus or in the community. That shaves $6,000 off annual tuition and “makes us very competitive,” said Radwan, who calls it “a champagne education at beer prices.” 

Malhotra said that when he came to St. Cloud in 2009, he found “an institution in quest of an identity. Regional comprehensives are in an awkward position within the hierarchy of higher education. We are not RI (research) nor are we community colleges, but nobody tells us what we are,” he said. Still, that meant it was well poised to define a new identity.

Frank Diagnosis of Strengths and Weaknesses

Potter said there had been some strategic planning and talk about becoming “a global university” before his arrival in 2007, but it was merely “a stake in the ground with nothing underneath.” What was really needed, he decided, was “action planning.” Potter commissioned an International Vision Task Force composed of a dozen faculty, deans, administrators, and staff. The report they produced in 2011 contained some unsparing language: the past approach to internationalization had been “unsystematic”; education abroad programs were weak, with too many students going on island programs taught in English; domestic and international students stayed to themselves within “mono-cultural” groups; international activities were largely “decorative”; and partnerships with universities overseas were “idiosyncratic,” not strategic. The task force laid out a vision and strategy for SCSU “to be recognized as the most innovative comprehensive university for international education,” with faculty winning grants for international research and businesses vying to hire graduates because of their international understanding and experience. 

The university also pared a prolix mission statement to 13 words: “We prepare our students for life, work, and citizenship in the twenty-first century.” Potter said, “It was important to be clear and direct, and to anchor our future work.” Imparting global and cultural understanding is one of four pillars of what SCSU calls its learning commitments to students (the others are active and applied learning, community engagement, and sustainability).

“We have to ask ourselves how do we create a curricular design and delivery (system) that recognizes the rapidly increasing globalized nature of our society and economy…and gives our graduates a sense of awareness and ability to operate in such a world.”

Malhotra said it isn’t just a question of sending more students abroad or boosting international enrollments. “We have to ask ourselves how do we create a curricular design and delivery (system) that recognizes the rapidly increasing globalized nature of our society and economy…and gives our graduates a sense of awareness and ability to operate in such a world.”

Breaking Out of the Minnesota Bubble

Eighty-eight percent of undergraduates are Minnesotans. About 400 students a year study overseas. By graduation, 13 percent have had an international experience. An added challenge in meeting the global citizenship goal is that many students are transfers who spend just two years at SCSU. Mikhail Blinnikov, a Moscow-born geography professor and director of the Global Studies program, said, “Our job is to catch them early.”

Seventy percent of Minnesotans trace their ancestry to the Scandinavian countries and Germany. But Minnesota is also a state with a welcome mat out for new immigrants and refugees, including Hmong who fled Laos after the Vietnam War and more recent arrivals from Somalia. “My classroom looked a whole lot more Scandinavian when I came in 1980,” said Professor of Communications Studies Roseanna Ross.

Still, Minnesotans “have a very strong affinity for their state,” said Professor of Geography Gareth John, who has known tourism majors to turn down great jobs that would have required them to relocate. 

“The presence of international students “really enriches the community in St. Cloud,” she said. Too many Minnesota students “stay in their safe little bubble. I think they are missing out.”

Graduate student Amy Lindquist came from small-town Spicer, Minnesota (population 1,167), and seized every opportunity at SCSU to internationalize her education. Lindquist taught intensive English classes filled with students from China and the Arab world, and won a Fulbright assistantship to teach English to high schoolers in Bulgaria. She spent another year studying at Universidad de Concepción in Chile and now is eyeing a career in international education. The presence of international students “really enriches the community in St. Cloud,” she said. Too many Minnesota students “stay in their safe little bubble. I think they are missing out.”

Strategy and Serendipity

Radwan, an economic historian, has drawn on her extensive experience in the Middle East to deepen the university’s existing international partnerships, forge new ones, and look for more opportunities overseas. “We’ve sorted the world into the areas that the State Department uses—Europe and Eurasia, South and Central Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific—because that’s where the funding usually is. We’re looking at each and asking, ‘What do we do in this area?’”

Potter stressed the need to think strategically about partnerships, but allowed there is “a bit of serendipity” in all of them. “Nepal for years has been one of the largest sources of international students on this campus. I can’t tell you how we got started, but the numbers become their own justification for relationships.” Potter has been a commencement speaker at Pokhara University in Nepal. In May 2013 SCSU sent five students and a professor to study social and environmental issues in Nepal’s mountain regions. “We’re beginning to do things in Nepal that we would not have chosen to do without this long-term pipeline of students,” the president said. 

Supporting China’s “Angel” on Mission to Improve Special Education

SCSU has had relationships of long standing in China, but Professor of Special Education Professor Kathryn Johnson opened a new chapter by enlisting the university’s support for Chunli “Angel” Zhao, who has overcome enormous odds to become a champion for disabled children in her homeland. She was born with brittle bone disease and dwarfism and raised in Yangshuo, a scenic fishing village that then-President Bill Clinton visited in 1998. Angel’s parents were told by local officials to keep the teenager out of sight. Later an American ex-pat, Chris Barkley, took Angel under his wing, taught her English, and hired her as receptionist for an eco-friendly mountain lodge he built in Yangshuo.

Johnson, once a UNICEF consultant in Beijing, met Angel there in 2011, brought her to St. Cloud as an intern in the Educational Leadership program, and made it her mission to arrange for Angel to meet Clinton at last. The costs of attending a Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York almost proved prohibitive, but Potter told Johnson he would pay for it. “We got there and it was magical,” said Johnson. The former president not only greeted Angel, but brought her up on stage and promised support for her efforts to build a model school and teacher training center in Yangshuo. Angel “could have been a victim of circumstance, but now she is the leading advocate for people with disabilities in China,” Clinton said.

Finding Roots and Relatives in Laos

SCSU has sent more than 250 students, most of them children of Hmong refugees, to Laos and Thailand over winter breaks. That program is led by Political Science Professor Shoua Yang, a refugee himself. Many Hmong youth in Minneapolis and elsewhere still struggle with adjusting to U.S. life. The high achievers who make it to college “don’t understand their heritage, culture, and how their parents just struggled in the past. It’s the missing piece of information in their past,” said Yang.

The winter 2012 class filled in that piece for Allen Yang, 21, a junior majoring in information systems, and his freshman brother who met their grandmother and uncle for the first time. “It was a really emotional experience,” said Yang, president of the Hmong Student Association. “It’s really about finding your identity, which is what every college student does.” Now Yang encourages as many Hmong-Americans as possible to visit Laos, including his parents, who are planning a homecoming 40 years after fleeing as newlyweds.

A Lesson From Nepal

Chemistry Department Chair Lakshmaiah (Ram) Sreerama taught biotechnology at Tribhuvan University in Kirtipur, Nepal, as a Fulbright Scholar in 2010–2011. He said only half-jokingly that he gets more respect from his students since winning the Fulbright. Sreerama grew up in Bangalore, India, and still recalls the impact on his life by a U.S. professor on a Fulbright who gave a science lecture at his high school. “He gave me all kinds of ideas. That was always lingering in the back of my mind,” said the biochemist.

Sreerama marveled at how much Tribhuvan’s graduate students achieve in rudimentary laboratories. That has allowed him to raise the bar for chemistry majors. “I tell them, ‘Look at all the resources and the technologies you have. How come we can’t accomplish that?’ I use that all the time—and they like it, they absolutely like it.”

An Internationalization Push Still in Infancy

SCSU also won a 2013 Andrew Heiskell Award for a wide-ranging partnership and student exchange program with Universidad de Concepción in Chile that was launched in 2001 by Robert Lavenda, professor of anthropology.

Notwithstanding all the laurels, administrators and faculty alike concede there is much to be done. Some but not all the dozens of recommendations in the visionary plan laid out in 2011 are being implemented, including adding more language study to education abroad programs and offering both homegrown and third-party opportunities. 

Business Dean Diana Lawson, a member of the International Vision Task Force, said the university now has “a manageable framework” for international activities, and once a governance structure is “cemented in the institution, it will be easier to expand the scope and scale of what we do.” Likewise, Radwan said, “Now that we have the basics down, we need to deepen them.” Dan Gregory, associate provost for research and dean of graduate education, said, “Our international agenda is in its infancy. We’re just starting. We’re going to be in a very different place in five years.” 

Amid dizzying growth in communities ringed around north Houston, the newest expansion of the 78,000-student Lone Star College System will add just 300 to 350 students—in Jakarta, Indonesia. It is a modest enterprise by Texas standards but is in keeping with other Lone Star efforts to internationalize the education it delivers at its six colleges to all students—2,000 of whom are international. 

The architect of this expansion is Chancellor Richard Carpenter, who as a foster child in Louisiana foresaw a future painting houses before a music scholarship to a community college altered his personal trajectory. He became at 29 the country’s youngest college president in a Kentucky community college and ran systems in Nevada and Wisconsin before becoming Lone Star’s chancellor in 2007. He is a veteran of several economic development missions abroad led by governors and has seen how much interest there is among foreign leaders in building U.S.-style community colleges of their own to expand opportunity. “They look at it like they discovered gold,” said Carpenter, who sits on the board of Community Colleges for International Development, Inc. “We are American ambassadors. We take the American dream and plant it around the world.”

Magnet for International Students

Lone Star, founded in 1972, was North Harris Montgomery Community College District before adopting its current name in 2007. Lone Star’s enrollment stood at 49,000 in 2007. Its growth surge was fueled by the recession that sent unemployed workers to community colleges to improve their job prospects. Local voters approved a $420 million bond issue for expansion in 2008, and in 2012 Lone Star opened a sixth campus, University Park, in office space that once was the headquarters of Compaq computers. But a half-billion dollar bond issue was rejected in May 2013, which may apply the brakes to future growth.

Houston, a global center for the oil and gas industry, remains a powerful magnet for international students. Houston Community College enrolls 5,800, more than any other two-year college. Lone Star was fourth in 2011–12 with 2,000 and has had as many as 2,500. They pay $5,000 a year in tuition, a quarter of what University of Houston charges. “What a gift to get a solid education here and transfer that to a four-year university,” said Nithyanantha J. Sevanthinathan, Lone Star’s chief international officer who heads strategic global partnerships, and “Nithy” to everyone. 

Internationalizing the Faculty

Lone Star committed itself to an international course when it established an International Programs and Services (IPS) office in 2004. Nithy, the first director, formulated the framework and implementation. In 2008 IPS began awarding $4,000 Faculty International Exploration (FIE) awards to encourage faculty to internationalize the content of their courses and create education abroad programs. Fifty-five faculty have shared $270,000 in awards. The first went to then-band director James Stubbs, who visited jazz festivals in Europe and returned the next summer with students who performed at the famed Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland and in Italy. “We felt like celebrities,” said Stubbs, now dean of arts and humanities at Lone Star-Kingwood.

Only 41 students studied abroad in 2011–2012, even with the college offering 15 scholarships up to $2,000. “Program cancellations due to low enrollments have been the biggest challenge,” said Malaysian-born Nithy. Six of ten courses offered for summer 2013 were cancelled. Lone Star-North Harris Art Professor Eric Sims has tried unsuccessfully to run an art appreciation program to Spain, but said, “I haven’t given up. Many of these students have never been out of Houston. This is a life-changing experience.”

Stirring Imaginations

Still, Lone Star faculty have taken students to Italy, China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania, and the FIE awards are a powerful stimulant for faculty imaginations. Lone Star-CyFair Psychology Professor Lori Richter and Adjunct Professor Davida Rogers took 16 students in June 2013 to Tanzania, where they studied orphans and children at risk, performed service, and took a safari in the Serengeti. Richter, a former Peace Corps volunteer in The Gambia who also lived in Kenya, said, “I just want our students to experience my experience. I want them to feel like the whole world is open to them.”

Christopher Garcia, 19, a business student and the sole male in the Tanzania group, saved money from several jobs to go. “I’ve been looking at study abroad since I got to Lone Star,” said Garcia, who helped organize a community service project last spring in Houston that drew more than 300 volunteers. Garcia aspires to become an international businessman and when he does, “I want to be culturally sensitive.

Like Richter, Lone Star-Montgomery Spanish Professor Norseman Hernandez, who grew up in poverty in Honduras, embodies a passion for education abroad. “I was one of the kids selling food to people on buses. It’s been a long way for me to be here,” said Hernandez, who’s led students to Mexico twice and Chile once.

“My classes aren’t just about uno, dos, tres, and Ola! Como está? They’re about the world,” said Norseman, who as a boy dreamed of being a pilot. He uses Google Earth in his classes and assigns students to make presentations on different parts of the world. “I also learn. It’s like I’m traveling and I’m there, too,” he said. “I’m not in a cockpit, but I get to go wherever I want now.” 

“I’ve been looking at study abroad since I got to Lone Star,” says Garcia, an aspiring businessman. “I want to be culturally sensitive.”

International Education Conferences

The pride of Lone Star’s international programming is the International Education Conference it has held each spring since 2004 where prominent speakers address global issues and Lone Star’s own professors give workshops on their international  explorations. The conference sprang from a Title VI international studies grant that the North Harris campus won in 2002. “Everything international comes from that grant,” said Anne Albarelli, dean of academic affairs at North Harris. She and Theresa McGinley, dean of instruction in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Business and Economics Division, spearheaded that effort and today serve on the conference planning committee and the IPS Council. 

Lone Star has spent $60,000 on the conferences over the years. The keynote speaker at the 10th conference in April 2013 was Middle East expert Mark Kimmitt, a retired brigadier general and U.S. State Department official. Lone Star has also piggybacked with the World Affairs Council of Houston to host such figures as Lech Walesa, the former Polish president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. McGinley, whose parents survived World War II in Poland, said she always brought international perspectives to her U.S. history courses. Today more than 70 Lone Star courses carry an international studies designation.

Nithy is the impresario of the conferences. He was an international student once who came to Minnesota to pursue opportunities largely unavailable to Malaysia’s Hindu minority. With Fulbright support, he earned a peace studies degree and two MAs while organizing bicycle treks across the United States, South America, and Africa that schoolchildren followed online. “My dream was to journey the whole world on a bicycle,” said Nithy, whose father was a shipyard laborer.

Saving Vietnamese Parents Money and Visiting Wall Street

The largest number of international students come from Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Nepal. Some live with relatives in Houston and commute to Lone Star. The six campuses are more suburban than urban. “They look like (international students’) image of what an American college looks like,” said Melvin Anthony of Lone Star-CyFair, one of 14 international student advisers.

That is the route second year student Chi Cao, 20, followed, journeying from Danang, Vietnam, four years ago to live with an uncle in Houston while she completed high school and enrolled at Lone Star. “I decided to go to Lone Star to save my parents money,” she said. They are going to be saving a lot more. In April 2013 she won a $30,000-a-year scholarship that the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation awards to top community college students. Cao is headed to Texas A&M University and looking forward to buying textbooks for the first time instead of reading reference desk copies in Lone Star’s library.

Cao, a finance major who hopes to help Vietnam develop its financial system, revived a moribund international club at Lone Star, won class office, and was on a Model United Nations team that convened in New York. “As an international student, if you only have grades, it’s not going to help you get into a good school. You have to be involved in school and get this on your resume,” she said. Cao got to visit Wall Street on the New York trip. “It inspired me,” she said.

Naziat Khan, 24, was also on that Model UN team, which represented Bhutan, a Hindu country in the Himalayas. Born in Bangladesh and raised in Texas, Khan, who is Muslim and wears a hijab, said it was hard at first “to think like a Bhutanese.” Now she’s convinced that the best way to resolve problems is to “step into somebody else’s shoes.”

Expanding Overseas Without Taxpayer Dollars

Lone Star will offer dual degrees in Jakarta in a partnership with the Putera Sampoerna Foundation. Classes will be taught in English by Lone Star and local faculty. The venture came about after Nithy met a representative of the Foundation at a State Department-sponsored conference. Putera Sampoerna is an Indonesian industrialist whose foundation was looking for a four-year U.S. college to partner with its new Universitas Siswa Bangsa Internasional. Nithy convinced the foundation executive that Lone Star was worth a look. Sampoerna himself visited and liked what he saw.

Carpenter traveled to Jakarta three times and Nithy four times in advance of the opening. “We sat with the people in Jakarta and said, “We have a lot of expertise. We have the curriculum you need, we have instructional designers, we have technology and IT infrastructure, but we don’t take taxpayer money outside of our neighborhood,” said Carpenter. The foundation agreed to cover Lone Star’s costs up front, including salaries and expenses for two faculty and an administrator, with the expectation that Lone Star will repay that after the college starts generating profits.

Getting Used to Accents

Shah Ardalan is president of Lone Star’s sixth and newest campus, University Park. An electrical engineer who was born in Kurdistan, Ardalan was formerly the system vice chancellor and chief information officer. He has a patent pending on a digital career planning system that has won plaudits from the U.S. Department of Education. Ardalan wants to make University Park, which offers upper division classes in partnership with five Texas universities, “a model as the innovative college for the twentyfirst century.” 

Ardalan believes Lone Star should cast an even wider net for international students. “I want to be a reflection of what the real world is. It’s good for (international students) and good for my American students, too,” he said. When a Texas student complained about a professor’s accent, Ardalan told him to get used to it “because you’re going to hear more and more accents. When you pick up the phone, you cannot expect everybody to talk with the ‘nice’ accent you were raised with.” No one else had trouble understanding the professor, Ardalan noted. 

Dreaming in English

Ita Jervis spoke almost no English when she moved to Houston from Ecuador in 2001. She enrolled immediately in ESL classes, graduated summa cum laude from Lone Star and the University of Houston, and today advises international and ESL students at Lone Star-Kingwood. “What I love about Lone Star,” Jervis said, “is that we act. It’s not just words, it’s actions. We’re not waiting for tomorrow. Everyone works together as a team to do the best for our students.”

She often tells students what she told a classmate who addressed her in Spanish when both were ESL beginners: “Right now our mission is to speak English, so let’s practice speaking English within ourselves, because the faster we learn the language, the better we can achieve our goals.”

Her husband, who worked for an oil company and spoke English, told her that she’d know she was speaking the language, not just translating words, when she dreamed in English. The night that happened, she woke up and “just started jumping, I was so happy,” recalled Jervis.

“What I love about Lone Star,” Jervis said, “is that we act. It’s not just words, it’s actions. We’re not waiting for tomorrow. Everyone works together as a team to do the best for our students.”

She also counsels students to believe in themselves. “The first thing that happens when you come to a different country is that you lose your self-confidence, whether you are educated or not, poor, middle class, or rich. You feel stupid,” she said. One day, she assures them, they’ll be dreaming in English. 

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.