Goucher College’s picturesque campus, on 290 leafy acres just north of Baltimore, plays well in college-admissions materials. Officials at this private liberal-arts institution, however, hope students will also be attracted by the opportunity to get away.
Two years ago, Goucher began requiring all students to earn some academic credit abroad, one of possibly just two American colleges to make overseas study mandatory.
Goucher officials wanted to “convey in no uncertain terms that a cross-cultural experience is critical,” says Eric Singer, associate dean of international studies. They also hope that the requirement, which comes with a $1,200 voucher to help defray some of the expense, will make the college distinctive to prospective students.
The Goucher experiment is still in its infancy — the college will welcome the third class to enroll under the requirement this fall. And several colleges, like Kalamazoo, in Michigan, and Dickinson, in Pennsylvania, have succeeded in sending nearly all their undergraduates abroad without such a requirement.
But with academic, business, and political leaders in agreement that international study is one of the best ways to produce globally literate citizens, administrators at other institutions say they are closely following Goucher’s experience as they seek to increase their own foreign-study participation rates.
“We have to look at what’s happening — or not happening — on campuses to find more ways to make study abroad available,” says Allan E. Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit organization involved in international exchanges. He notes that 55 percent of collegebound high-school seniors in a recent survey said they planned to study overseas, but just 1 percent of American students actually do so.
In many ways, Goucher’s experience magnifies the challenges other colleges have faced as they seek to expand international study.
Administrators here have wrestled with concerns over cost and capacity as they seek programs of sufficient variety and quality to accommodate growing demand. In this first phase, at least, Goucher has found itself relying on short, faculty-led trips as it begins the slow process of vetting longer-term programs. Some faculty members and students, however, have questioned the educational value of such brief stints abroad. And a number of professors say they sometimes feel in over their heads as they struggle to be both academics and travel coordinators.
Faculty buy-in is important, international-education experts say. Without it, foreign study risks becoming disconnected from the rest of the college experience.
“The number of students abroad itself, that’s just the input,” says Brian J. Whalen, president of the Forum on Education Abroad, a consortium of American and overseas colleges and study-abroad providers. “The real measure is the impact on the institution and on what students are learning.”
Citizens of the World
At Goucher, which was established in 1885 as a women’s college, an international outlook may be in the institution’s DNA. The college’s founder, John Franklin Goucher, was a Methodist minister who traveled the world, opening more than 120 schools in countries including China, India, and Japan.
“He was a citizen of the world, before it was such a buzzword,” says Marilyn S. Warshawsky, an alumnus who is writing a biography of Mr. Goucher.
Goucher’s current president, Sanford J. Ungar, embodies that spirit, says Ms. Warshawsky, who was chairwoman of the Board of Trustees when the former journalist was hired in 2001. Mr. Ungar worked as a Washington and foreign correspondent and ran the Voice of America under President Bill Clinton.
Over a cup of rooibos, an African herbal tea, in an office lined with mementos of international travel, Mr. Ungar says he proposed the requirement, which was approved by a faculty vote, because of his conviction that students must have broader knowledge of the world to be fully educated.
“No number of cross-cultural reading assignments or trips to the museum or lectures by wise and wonderful people has the same effect on young people as a study-abroad experience, even a brief one,” he says. “They say so themselves.” Indeed, a national survey of student engagement supports Mr. Ungar’s statement.
A growing number of colleges now expect students to have a significant international or intercultural experience during their undergraduate years.
Beginning this fall, students at Arcadia University in suburban Philadelphia will have to complete a new “global perspectives” requirement by going abroad, studying at a domestic institution such as a historically black college, or doing independent study in a multicultural community.
Lee University has had a similar requirement since 1998 and during the most recent academic year sent 540 students from the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains overseas. Soka University of America, possibly the only other institution to make study abroad mandatory, requires all 400 undergraduates to study Chinese, Japanese, or Spanish, and to spend a semester overseas during their junior year.
Nor is the trend limited to the United States. Macquarie University, in Australia, will soon require students to participate in international experiential learning.
While the approaches may vary, institutional commitment is critical to the success of any effort to expand study abroad, says Mark H. Salisbury, a doctoral student in higher education at the University of Iowa.
Mr. Salisbury is one of the authors of a recent paper that suggests that colleges may be able to increase study-abroad participation rates by fostering “diverse interactions” between students and encouraging them to participate in cocurricular activities, like workshops on intercultural development. Low-income students’ intent to study overseas is 14 percent higher if they have such experiences.
The Right Model?
Certainly, a mandatory study-abroad program like Goucher’s might not be the right approach for every institution. It may not work for a community college that enrolls large numbers of working adults and low-income students, for example, or a public university under legislative pressure to graduate students on time or whose state support is tied to on-campus enrollment totals.
In fact, a proposal in 2006 by the then-chairman of the Kansas Board of Regents to require students to study abroad was never seriously pursued because of concerns about its cost and impact on graduation rates, Kip Peterson, a board spokesman, says.
Similarly, some students, such as those with medical problems or families they must support, may not be suited to go abroad.
“We should do as much as we can to remove barriers to studying abroad,” says John K. Hudzik, vice president for global engagement and strategic projects at Michigan State University. “But if we force students into the experience, it might have the opposite effect.”
Mr. Ungar, the Goucher president, agrees that the college’s approach may not be the answer to the broad national challenge of getting more Americans to study overseas.
“We’re not trying to save the world or save a generation of students,” Mr. Ungar says. “We’re just trying to make Goucher a more international place.”
Two years in, Goucher has begun to see its hard work pay off. The number of Goucher students studying overseas is clearly on the rise, from 227 in the 2005-6 academic year to 294 in 2007-8, a 30-percent increase. Of the two classes required to do international study, 132 sophomores, or roughly a third of the class, and 39 freshmen have used vouchers to go abroad.
Many foreign-study participants, like Rebecca A. Schwartz, who graduated last month with a degree in psychology, were not bound by the requirement, which only applied to entering classes, but nonetheless felt encouraged to study abroad.
“Because Goucher has become known as the study-abroad campus,” she says, “I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity.”
Ms. Schwartz spent three weeks during a school break this winter studying inequality and social policy in South Africa. Students worked with nongovernmental organizations and stayed with host families in impoverished rural villages. After they returned to the campus, they wrote papers on aspects of HIV policy based on their on-the-ground research.
Ms. Schwartz was so moved by the experience that she later raised $400 to buy toiletries, school supplies, and other basic necessities to send to some of the African organizations. “It was a really big challenge for me to go into the unknown,” she says. “But I think I now feel more connected to the goals of the school.”
Skeptics, however, question the value of such short-term programs, saying that in many of them students spend most of their time with other Americans and have little opportunity to immerse themselves in the local culture.
“They’re chaperoned field trips,” says Eric Lukoff, former commentary editor of The Quindecim, Goucher’s student newspaper.
About 57 percent of the Goucher students who went abroad during the past year did so on three-week summer or winter-term programs. Notably, though, the number of students going abroad for a semester or more has increased rapidly, by more than 70 percent, over the past three years.
Many institutions, including some with high participation rates, send the majority of their students overseas on short, faculty-led trips. Study-abroad directors say these programs make it easier for students who have had difficulty finding the resources or the time for a longer international experience.
They also can serve as a steppingstone to a longer overseas study, says Laurence Basirico, dean of international studies at Elon University, which sends about 750 students, about 70 percent of those who go abroad each year, on short-term programs.
Advocates for such programs say that they work if they are carefully structured and have a solid academic foundation. “We don’t want them to be something out of Lonely Planet,” says Lesa D. Griffiths, director of the Center for International Studies at the University of Delaware. Her office offers faculty members grants to develop programs in underrepresented regions of the world or fields of study. At Elon, Mr. Basirico has proposed pairing each short-term program with a one-credit pre-departure course.
Most faculty-led programs at Goucher already have a prerequisite preparatory course in the semester before students depart. For example, students who took Steven DeCaroli’s course on China, in China, last June spent seven weeks during the spring semester learning basic Mandarin and reading works that examine what it means to be an outsider in a foreign culture. They also had to take a course in Asian thought taught by Mr. DeCaroli, an associate professor of philosophy.
“I want, when they’re there, to get beyond the oohing and the aahing and make it more thoughtful,” he says.
Value of the Voucher
But such experiences don’t come cheaply. Mr. DeCaroli’s three-week China course cost students $3,800; the travel-abroad voucher covered just a third of that.
Goucher administrators say they cannot afford to increase the dollar amount of the voucher, which is paid out of general revenue, anytime soon. The college expects to spend about $480,000 a year on vouchers when mandatory study abroad is fully phased in, says Mr. Singer, the international-studies dean. Goucher, which has an endowment of $217.8-million, is raising money during its current capital campaign to support international programs, scholarships for study abroad, and faculty development of overseas courses.
The voucher program has received some criticism on campus from those who think it should be awarded based on financial need.
“It makes no sense,” says Jeffrey Myers, an associate professor of English and chair of the faculty. “We give the voucher to affluent students who don’t need it and to poor students for whom it’s not enough.”
College officials, for their part, say the one-time voucher sends an important signal to students about the importance of studying abroad and that additional scholarships are available for some students to help defray costs. They also point out that while students must pay for the short-term trips out of their own pockets, those on semester- and yearlong programs generally pay Goucher tuition and receive their regular financial-aid packages.
Some students complain that Goucher has too few approved longer-term study-abroad programs or exchange agreements with foreign universities, just 20 in total. By comparison, the college offers about 30 short-term programs annually. Many of the longer programs also have language requirements or a specific academic focus, limiting their appeal.
Helena Touhey, a political-science major from Rhode Island, says she looks forward to spending part of her junior year abroad but felt hemmed in by her options. Mali seemed interesting but she didn’t want to study art, while her Spanish was not strong enough for an immersion program in Argentina.
Several of her friends plan to go on non-Goucher programs, but Ms. Touhey says her parents “would have my head on a post” if she forfeited her financial aid to do so. She finally was able to win a spot to study sustainability in an English-language program in Costa Rica next spring, but she calls the process stressful.
Goucher officials say they want to increase the number and variety of study-abroad options but vetting potential partners, particularly to determine the compatibility of their academic offerings, takes time.
Relying on Faculty
At Goucher a great deal of the responsibility for expanding foreign study has fallen on the shoulders of faculty members. Professors have the option of taking a small stipend or an equivalent course-load reduction in exchange for leading a short-term program, but most juggle study abroad with their teaching and research obligations.
“It can be a bit exhausting,” admits Cynthia E. Kicklighter, an assistant professor of biological sciences who spent last Christmas in her office preparing to lead a program in tropical marine biology in Honduras.
While some faculty members welcome the autonomy to plan their own courses and travel agendas, others wish for more administrative support in creating short-term courses.
“I’m not a travel agent,” says Mr. Myers, who has led a short-term program to Greece and will teach one in England this winter.
Robert D. Slocum, a professor of biological sciences, argues Goucher should have phased in the requirement to ensure the college could handle the pressures.
“The faculty running these trips are facing complex logistical and liability issues that we, as a community, do not fully understand,” he says. “Supervising a large group of students in a foreign country is not like teaching in a classroom at Goucher.”
At the same time, Mr. Slocum says, it is difficult for students in structured majors like biology to study abroad during the regular semester. Biology students must spend their first two years taking core courses, he points out, and are required to spend their senior year doing independent study with a faculty member to earn academic honors.
Other institutions have found ways to integrate foreign study into the curriculum.
At Arcadia, for example, each department has developed “pathways” to studying abroad, which lay out overseas-study options for each major, including potential sequences of courses to take, at home and abroad, equivalent courses at partner institutions, and, for education majors, options for fulfilling student-teaching requirements in a foreign country. Meanwhile, Kalamazoo College frontloads most of its required course work into the first two years, freeing students to spend their junior year overseas.
“We’ve been doing it so long, it’s practically in the water,” says Joseph Brockington, the college’s associate provost for international programs.
Out on a Limb, Happily
At Goucher, foreign study may not be in the water, but it’s in the air. Ms. Touhey, the political-science student, says her classmates spent much of the last semester buzzing about where to spend their junior year. “It seemed like all people were talking about was study abroad,” she says.
Mr. Ungar, the president, says he expects the requirement will attract not only students interested in foreign study but also faculty members with a commitment to international education. Ms. Kicklighter, for example, spent three years in Japan teaching English before graduate school and says that the opportunity to lead overseas-study trips was one of the reasons she chose Goucher for her first teaching post.
Enrollment applications are up about 35 percent from the year before the requirement went into effect, although it is hard to know how much of that can be attributed to the study-abroad commitment and how much to the national rise in college-age students or an increase in Goucher’s popularity for other reasons.
There will be challenges as the study-abroad requirement matures, Mr. Ungar says, like finding more quality overseas programs and reintegrating large numbers of returning students back into the college, which has just 1,472 undergraduates. But, he says, those aren’t bad problems to have.
“I’m comfortable being out on this limb,” he says.
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 54, Issue 41, Page A1