As Higher Ed Goes Global, Ethics Come to the Foreground

By Ian Wilhelm

Randy Lyhus for The Chronicle

For international educators, 2012 may well be remembered as the Year of Scrutiny, when perennial questions about overseas programs became more pointed. Is money or mission driving international efforts? Do global partnerships uphold academic standards and institutional values or undermine them?

In the United States, some missteps by a handful of American colleges helped trigger the soul-searching. For example, the State University of New York’s Empire State College was criticized for allowing an Albanian university to deliver diplomas in its name while allegedly having little say in the foreign institution’s operations. And at North Dakota’s Dickinson State University, a state audit said a dual-degree program that enrolled mainly Chinese students was acting essentially as a diploma mill. While those were isolated incidents, accreditors took note, with some urging universities to be more watchful of standards when creating new academic programs abroad.

International programs also attracted the attention of federal agencies. The Department of Homeland Security surprised educators by suggesting that university-run English-language institutes, which serve primarily international students, need to earn separate accreditation. The department has tried to clarify the issue, but observers said the suggestion, along with a dispute between universities and the State Department about teacher visas and accreditation at Confucius Institutes, sent a clear message: Expect greater federal oversight of programs for foreign students and scholars.

About 80 American institutions house Confucius Institutes, which are Chinese-government-sponsored language and culture centers. In May the State Department said the 600 Chinese-language schoolteachers affiliated with those centers would have to leave the United States because of visa problems. After objections from educators and Chinese diplomats, the agency said it would resolve the issue without requiring the instructors to leave.

Concerns about international activities also came from within academe. In April the faculty at Yale College, which houses Yale University’s undergraduate programs, passed a resolution that sought to make sure Yale’s plan to build a liberal-arts college in Singapore would uphold principles of civil liberty, nondiscrimination, and political freedom. The vote was largely symbolic and didn’t impede Yale’s plans, but it echoes unease expressed by scholars at Duke University and New York University, both of which are also building campuses abroad.

The Most Ever

To be sure, despite the air of caution, colleges say international work remains high on their agendas. Half of all colleges have put internationalization among their top five strategic priorities, according to a survey by the American Council on Education. And some international efforts, like the recruitment of foreign students, have continued to grow. The number of international students enrolling in American colleges and universities reached an all-time high of 723,277 in 2010-11. The increase was heavily reliant on two countries, China and Saudi Arabia, and colleges sought new markets, like Brazil, where the government has pledged to provide scholarships for more than 100,000 undergraduates to study abroad.

The influx of foreign students has been a financial boon for colleges and has diversified their student populations. But this year offered fresh evidence that these students are having trouble fitting in on campus. A study of more than 450 students found that one in three foreign students said they had no close American friends. On the academic side, administrators and professors say some students from China are ill-prepared for the American classroom and lack adequate English skills. Such concerns have heightened the debate around the use of independent recruiting agents overseas, some of whom have been known to write student admissions essays and engage in other fraudulent practices.

Elsewhere in the world, university finances dominated the headlines. Austerity measures in European countries like Greece, Italy, and Spain forced cuts in public spending on higher education, leading to hiring freezes and concerns that talented faculty would leave. In China, threats of an economic slowdown led to questions about whether the nation’s universities would continue their building boom—and whether the valuable pipeline of Chinese students to the United States would suffer as a result.

Protests Over Tuition

In some countries, debates flared over whether to increase tuition to cover budget shortfalls. In Quebec, a plan to raise tuition by what may seem like a modest amount—an increase of $1,625 over several years—triggered widespread student protests that led the Canadian province to suspend the spring semester.

Britain moved ahead with its own plan to raise tuition caps, and the Conservative-led government also made changes in its student-visa system. Universities supported some of the moves, like an effort to clamp down on bogus colleges, but fought others, saying they will discourage international students from enrolling. France had a similar debate, which was decided, for now, by an election. Shortly after coming to office, President François Hollande annulled a controversial measure that imposed tough visa restrictions on foreign students.

Given the growth of international education and the serious concerns such growth has raised, some educators sought to right what they saw as a listing ship. In April the International Association of Universities issued a statement urging universities to put “academic values” front and center in their internationalization efforts or risk unintended adverse consequences. Those might include diminishing the study and use of foreign languages by promoting English as the primary language of instruction, hurting the development of a country’s university system by building branch campuses there, and draining top talent from abroad and fueling xenophobia by aggressively recruiting international students.

With American universities seeking to tap into new markets to recruit international students, and major overseas academic projects set to open—NYU, for example, will enroll its first undergraduate class in Shanghai in the fall of 2013—undoubtedly the discussion around ethics and values will continue into the new year and beyond.