August 18, 2014
Global Educators’ Worries: Student Experience, Faculty Freedom
As colleges try to become more international, new questions are being asked this year about how well that effort is serving students, both foreign and domestic.
In 2012-13, more than 800,000 students from overseas were enrolled in colleges in the United States, up from roughly 564,000 in 2005-6. As their numbers continue to rise, educators want to find out just how satisfied the students are with their college experience.
Research released by Nafsa: Association of International Educators this year showed that retention of foreign students is a growing issue. A nationwide survey sponsored by the association suggested a gap between why foreign undergraduates leave college before earning degrees and why administrators think they do.
The factors most cited by the students were all financial: access to jobs or internships, affordability, and availability of scholarships. Yet the college administrators who work with the students attributed their decisions to drop out or transfer to a variety of reasons, including finances, academics, English-language problems, and the desire to attend an institution that is a “better fit.”
Concerns about retention were perhaps made more pressing by changes in where foreign students, both undergraduate and graduate, are coming from.
For the second year in a row, applications to American graduate schools from China fell slightly, according to the Council of Graduate Schools. In contrast, applications from India surged 32 percent, leading some graduate schools to wonder if India is the new engine of enrollment growth.
“It’s all India,” Debra W. Stewart, the council’s president, said when the report was released in April. “India is huge.”
At the same time, the pipeline from South Korea, the third largest sender of students to the United States after China and India, is shrinking at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Today, fewer South Koreans study in the United States than did five years ago.
The causes of the changes include the development of Korea’s own higher-education system and questions about how beneficial a foreign degree is in the tough Korean job market. Such trends are not isolated to Korea, and some international educators and student recruiters warn that similar factors could impede the flow of Chinese students, who account for almost 30 percent of the international students in the United States.
Job seekers who spent years studying abroad may lack the connections to find work in their home countries. And the popularity of studying abroad could be undermining its appeal to employers, as graduates of U.S. institutions no longer stand out.
New Study-Abroad Goals
Colleges’ focus has also been on how to get more American students to study overseas. While this goal is perennial, it received fresh attention this year thanks to several new efforts.
For example, in March the Institute of International Education started a push to double the number of study-abroad students—to 600,000—by 2020. While the number of American students who have an overseas academic experience is growing, the percentage of students who study abroad largely remains stagnant. Only 1.4 percent of all American college and university students studied abroad in 2011-12, the most recent year for which data are available. More than 240 American colleges and universities have signed up to support the project, known as Generation Study Abroad.
As part of the effort, the institute also wants to get a better understanding of why students from minority groups don’t tend to study abroad. The American Council on Education is focused on a similar issue at the institutional level. With support from the U.S. Department of Education, the council spent more than a year examining the internationalization challenges of historically black institutions. It worked with seven colleges to assess their current efforts and to develop strategies to globalize their curricula and campuses.
The focus on HBCUs reflects a broader concern, of whether internationalization efforts tend to benefit only an elite group of students and institutions. “Are we really serious about global learning for all?” Patti McGill Peterson, presidential adviser for global initiatives at the American Council on Education, has asked. “It’s an equity question.”
Political Engagement
Farther from home, an incident at Peking University, one of China’s top universities, raised new questions about academic partnerships in authoritarian countries.
Last fall Xia Yeliang was fired as a Peking economics professor because of his political beliefs, according to the scholar and his allies. (The university contends Mr. Xia’s contract was terminated because of poor teaching.)
A group of professors at Wellesley College, which has an exchange program with Peking, objected to Mr. Xia’s dismissal and sent an open letter to Peking administrators to protest the move. They argued that because of the relationship between the two institutions, they needed to respond to what they saw as a threat to the academic freedom of a “colleague.”
The decision by the professors to take their concerns directly to a foreign institution was significant since most faculty members aim protests about overseas programs at their own college leadership.
American university programs in the Middle East also received scrutiny. New York University, for one, was criticized for not doing more to ensure labor rights during the building of its campus in Abu Dhabi. After The New York Times reported worker abuses, the university pledged to investigate.
Such scrutiny is likely to continue as more universities open campuses overseas. Duke University, for example, is expected to start classes at its China campus in the fall, and a handful of faculty members have been critical of the plan. Questions about how to make sure foreign students have a positive college experience and their domestic peers have access to international opportunities will keep being asked, as colleges struggle to understand what internationalization can and should mean for students.
