A majority of American academics who responded to a Chronicle survey said they had considered working at a foreign university, but less than 20 percent of those who expressed interest were actively seeking a long-term foreign post. And about half of all survey respondents said they wouldn’t even know how to go about looking for a university job in a foreign country.
The disconnect between academic employees’ professed openness to international work and the reality of their inexperience was among the chief findings of a Chronicle survey this fall of 2,900 university administrators and faculty members. In total, The Chronicle asked 30,623 faculty members and administrators who are subscribers to take the online survey, and 9 percent responded. Most of them, or 1,973, were faculty members. Over all, the respondents are demographically representative of American faculty members, although women and those who work at four-year institutions are slightly overrepresented. SimpsonScarborough, a higher-education marketing firm, administered the survey and analyzed the results.
The Chronicle wanted to gauge Americans’ interest and experience in working at foreign universities at a time when higher education both here and abroad has become more international in scope. American college leaders talk about the need to internationalize their campuses. And the job market for faculty members is increasingly global as many foreign universities, in their search for top talent, look to hire American scholars.
But while the survey found that many Americans say they are interested in foreign jobs, not many have spent significant time working abroad or are seriously pursuing such work.
According to the survey, 88 percent of the respondents have valid passports and 54 percent have traveled outside the States in the last year. But only 9 percent have ever held a foreign university job for at least a year.
The findings are consistent with a recent survey of 1,084 American faculty members, which found that American professors’ experience in working abroad and in collaborating with foreign peers is limited. Martin J. Finkelstein, a professor of higher education at Seton Hall University who helped complete that survey, says American professors may feel like he did before he saw some Asian universities up close.
“I’ve always thought, Things are better in the U.S. than anywhere else, why move?” he relates. But after visiting the University of Hong Kong, he says he realized that “Asia is where the money is.” He adds: “It’s the new frontier. I just didn’t know enough.”
The Chronicle survey asked American academics why they would be interested in jobs abroad and which regions of the world they find most attractive. It found that personal reasons to pursue foreign jobs, including a lifelong desire to live abroad and be immersed in another culture, are more important than professional ones. (Among the professional issues that are important to faculty members is the ability to pursue a unique research opportunity.) Personal issues also stand out as among the chief concerns when academics consider working abroad. Those concerns include the perceived expense, being isolated from family and friends, and not knowing the language.
American scholars who actually work abroad, however, often find that things like salary and language are not a problem. For example, almost none of the more than two dozen American faculty members and administrators who talked to The Chronicle about their foreign university jobs said they spoke the language of the country where they worked. And many reported that their salaries were higher than in the United States and that their expenses were subsidized by their institutions.
Interestingly, the foreign universities that are offering some of the most lucrative jobs to American academics are situated in regions of the world that are among the least attractive to U.S. college employees. According to the Chronicle survey, those employees are least interested in working in Asia and the Middle East and most interested in jobs in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. The findings suggest that universities in Hong Kong, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates that are spending lots of money trying to recruit American scholars may face a public-relations problem.
Madeleine F. Green, the American Council on Education’s vice president for international initiatives, acknowledges that very few American academics choose to make careers abroad. But she says that could change. For one thing, public institutions in the United States are suffering budget cutbacks and hiring freezes. At the same time, she notes, young faculty members these days seem more concerned about living an interesting and balanced life than in doing everything by the book.
“Their advisers would tell them, Don’t do anything internationally until you earn tenure,” she says. “But there is a new generation of faculty saying, I’m going to do what is interesting. There is more to life than hunkering down until I earn tenure.”
