Aimee Thostenson, assistant director of international admission at St. Catherine University, in Minnesota, had never visited Japan before last June. But she was fascinated by Japanese culture, and her family had housed a Japanese exchange student in her youth.
So when Ms. Thostenson received an award from the Fulbright International Education Administrators Program, she jumped at the opportunity.
She was one of six administrators who visited Japan last year as part of the Fulbright program, which seeks to help American higher-education officials learn about other education systems. The Fulbright program also sends administrators to Germany, India, and South Korea.
Ronald T. Lambert, director of career services at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, also participated in the trip. He had already spent time in Asia but says Japan was a blank spot in terms of his knowledge, and he hoped to learn about recruiting and employment practices there.
“They keep you incredibly busy,” Mr. Lambert says. “Our days were packed with meetings. ... It was so much about learning the educational structure, the philosophy, the culture.”
The Fulbright mission in Japan is operating amid what have some have described as a calamitous decline in travel to the United States by Japanese students. The number of those on study-abroad trips in the United States has fallen from 47,000 a year in the late 1990s to 30,000 in 2008.
“We’re modestly trying to help,” says David H. Satterwhite, executive director of the Japan-United States Educational Commission, which administers the Fulbright program.
In the program, administrators who visited Japan met with government officials who discussed their desire to increase the number of international students at a time of population decline in the country. To accomplish their purpose, Mr. Lambert says, colleges in Japan must work to attract either students who are able to speak Japanese or more faculty members who are able to speak English.
The Fulbright-sponsored administrators also had the opportunity to visit educational institutions, from elementary schools to colleges, as well as “escalator” schools, which educate students from a young age through college. Also on the itinerary were Japan’s “cram schools,” which prepare students for difficult university entrance examinations. “Sort of like Kaplan on steroids,” Mr. Lambert says.
The visitors also toured a women’s college, which Ms. Thostenson compared with her own women-only institution, St. Catherine. In the United States, she says, women’s colleges seem to have more senior leaders who are women.
Now, the administrators say, they will take lessons from the trip back to their respective colleges. Mr. Lambert says he will have a better understanding of Japanese students who come to the United States for graduate school, and can better inform American students who are thinking about going to Japan for work.
Ms. Thostenson says she hopes not only to bring more Japanese students to St. Catherine but also to bring perspectives from her visit to a campuswide internationalization council, which works to improve study-abroad opportunities and overseas partnerships.
“Actually talking to the people about the issues that they’re facing, it really creates that sense of common purpose,” she says of her trip to Japan. “To bring that back to my own institution has been very helpful.”
