Colleges take a hard look at how well they’re preparing students for careers in a global economy
Portland State University has certain hopes for its students. They will learn to function well in a multilingual and multicultural environment. They will understand the world beyond America’s borders. They will gain the confidence to work with people and institutions in other countries. And they will develop those skills without having to leave Portland’s city limits.
Virtually every college today feels the pressure to prepare its graduates for an increasingly international world, one in which an understanding of other cultures, economies, and political systems is critical for success. Traditionally, American higher education has relied on study-abroad programs to supply students with many of those perspectives, but institutions are starting to take a hard look at what they’re teaching their students on the campus, and realizing they’re coming up short.
Employers agree. In a survey conducted for the Association of American Colleges and Universities, more than 60 percent of employers polled said recent graduates lacked the skills to succeed in a global economy.
Last year the Committee for Economic Development, a nonprofit group of business and academic leaders, noted that demand for graduates with strong international skills was outstripping supply.
In response, many colleges and universities, including Portland State, are instituting new international-education requirements or seeking to infuse a global perspective in once-insular disciplines, like engineering and some of the sciences. They are using technology to connect with classrooms abroad and trying innovative ways to involve their international students and professors more deeply in campus life. They are also connecting with internationally oriented local businesses and community groups to provide service-learning opportunities with an international flavor.
“To think that, in the 21st century, students can somehow ignore the connections that exist in almost every dimension — social, political, and economic — is absurd,” says Roy Koch, Portland State’s provost. “You can’t do that and be an effective citizen.”
Internationalizing the college experience is a huge challenge for any institution, but it is particularly daunting for a place like Portland State. A commuter campus where many students are first-generation collegegoers struggling to make ends meet, the university must use its resources strategically. Students are less interested in taking a grand tour of Italy or becoming global-studies majors than they are in learning the skills needed to start a solid career in the regional economy. And that economy is increasingly international: Nearly one in five Oregon jobs is tied to global trade and services.
Local businesses are as focused on finding globally aware graduates as the university is in producing them. Douglas M. Fieldhouse, president and chief executive of Vesta Corporation, an electronic-payment company headquartered in Portland, says that within his own multinational company, cultural misunderstandings have sometimes slowed deals or led to tensions between co-workers from different backgrounds.
“All other things being equal,” Mr.
Fieldhouse says, “if I have two candidates, hands down, I’m going with the one who has an international perspective.”
Portland State has been openly discussing internationalization since a previous president listed it as one of the institution’s goals back in 2000. As at many universities, though, individual faculty members and departments seem to have moved ahead more quickly than the campus as a whole, as various campuswide committees have formed and then disbanded. This fall Mr. Koch appointed a dozen faculty members, students, and administrators to a new Internationalization Committee that will come up with specific ways to add a global perspective to students’ education.
At the same time, Portland State officials are working to define the skills a globally competent student should possess. While they find much to agree on in principle, articulating the particular proficiencies students should have, and determining how those skills should be measured, has proved more challenging.
On one point the university is already clear: Internationalization should be a goal for all disciplines and departments. Students should see how globalization affects their fields of study, Mr. Koch and many of his colleagues say, and faculty members should not view such efforts as optional add-ons or something to be left to the international-studies or foreign-language departments.
“There’s always the tendency to assume it’s going to be taken care of elsewhere,” says Duncan A. Carter, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a member of the Internationalization Committee. “And it isn’t.”
Internationalization committees are hardly unique to Portland State. Institutions as diverse as Appalachian State and Princeton Universities, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have recently assembled panels to assess their international-education programs and focus.
On some campuses, students are the loudest voices for change. A student-led group at the University of Virginia last month called on the institution to expand its international offerings on the campus and to reorganize the undergraduate program of study, particularly during the freshman year, to focus more on other countries and cultures.
A Coherent Approach
A campuswide strategy for internationalization is critical to developing a coherent approach, experts say.
“For too long, we’ve been focused on pieces of it, instead of looking at what it means to be a global university,” says William I. Brustein, associate provost for international affairs at the University of Illinois and president of the Association of International Education Administrators.
Broadly speaking, new strategies lean toward either infusing the entire curriculum with an international perspective or creating a set of internationally focused courses that all undergraduates must take. Appalachian State, in North Carolina, has opted for the latter, overhauling the general-education curriculum to emphasize making “local to global connections.” Students will be required to take a series of courses exploring that perspective.
Other colleges are also undertaking internationalization efforts in ways that mesh with the institution’s mission, reflect its strengths, or respond to key needs of students, businesses, and the community.
Bellevue Community College, near Seattle, started requiring its nursing majors to sign up for a course in intercultural communications after administrators realized that local hospitals needed graduates who could communicate with increasingly diverse patients, doctors, and hospital staff.
Fairleigh Dickinson University has taken advantage of its Teaneck, N.J., campus’s proximity to New York City by sponsoring discussions with United Nations representatives, most recently with the ambassadors of Sudan and Syria. Recordings of such talks are available for faculty members to use in their courses.
Portland State has tried to build on its mission of community engagement by crafting courses that combine service learning with very short trips abroad.
Julia O’Neill, a 26-year-old single mother who attends Portland State part time, enrolled in one such course this year, which explored the impact of globalization and questions of sustainability along the U.S.-Mexico border. Leaving her daughter, Adelle, 2 ½, for a semester-long study-abroad experience “just wasn’t an option,” she says.
Students spent five days on the border, where they met with the Minutemen, the staunchly anti-immigrant group, visited a camp for young Mexicans picked up trying to illegally cross into the United States, and went to a maquiladora, a Mexican manufacturing plant that makes products to be imported by the United States.
The course “gave me a broader sense of my place in the world, of the United States’ place in the world,” Ms. O’Neill says.
Persuading the Faculty
Any university that is trying to add an international focus to every discipline knows that nothing happens unless faculty members share the goal. How to make that happen is one of the biggest issues administrators wrestle with.
Madeleine F. Green, vice president of the Center for International Initiatives at the American Council on Education, says most faculty members are not resistant to internationalization efforts, just “agnostic.” In many cases, they simply have not thought about the international dimensions of their discipline or they worry that doing so could detract from their scholarship and teaching.
Perhaps most critically, at many institutions, they see little reward for internationalizing, she says.
That is beginning to change. The College of DuPage, a two-year institution outside of Chicago, hands out grants of up to $3,000 to faculty and staff members to study abroad, conduct international research, or attend conferences overseas.
Dickinson College takes a comprehensive approach to globally orienting its faculty, offering international research grants, encouraging professors to lead study-abroad programs — and stopping the tenure clock in the process — and providing summertime language-immersion classes. International experience is also considered in hiring decisions.
Since 2003, Portland State has awarded annual “internationalization mini-grants,” many of which pay for course development. This year, for example, Margaret C. Everett, an associate professor of anthropology, used her $1,100 award to help develop a course that studied the relationship between health and migration, in particular the prevalence of diabetes among migrant workers from Mexico. Students spent two weeks in August working with public-health organizations in Oaxaca, the birthplace of many of Oregon’s migrant workers, then returned to Oregon to write final research papers.
But planning such courses can be a burden for faculty members, who frequently have to squeeze them in while balancing their regular teaching load.
“I’ve never worked so hard on a course,” Ms. Everett admits.
Building on Strengths
As Portland State wrestles with such big issues as how to reward faculty members and revamp course work, professors are moving forward with their own efforts. Faculty members in the international-studies and computer-science departments are talking about creating a course that would meet the growing demand for translating Japanese computer games. The business school is meeting with local companies that work in China about creating a specialized M.B.A. program for their workers.
Ms. Everett and some of her students want to continue the work they began in Oaxaca back in Oregon, perhaps through a class that applies the health-education lessons they learned in Mexico.
“We have a wealth of connections in the international community,” she says. “We have to find ways to build on our strengths and take advantage of what we have, to make those connections across campus.”
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 54, Issue 10, Page A35
