U.S. Foreign-Language Enrollments Are Falling. Not at This University.

Henry Crawford had big dreams four years ago as a high-school senior at a 350-student Christian institution in Dalton, Ga. He would apply to the United States Military Academy, earn a degree in a STEM field, and maybe see a bit of the world while serving his country.

West Point is a long shot for anyone, and Crawford, who goes by “Hutch,” instead landed 75 miles from home at the University of North Georgia at Dahlonega, his backup school. There he discovered an aptitude for learning Chinese, one of a trove of foreign languages the university offers. His interest in East Asia has already taken him to China, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan, and he will return this summer for a second study-abroad visit to Beijing before collecting his diploma.

At a time when many colleges are cutting back on language programs, North Georgia is moving in the other direction, adding Portuguese this fall to the dozen tongues it already teaches. The university has methodically built up its foreign-language offerings by tapping streams of money that flow from the U.S. Defense Department and foreign cultural foundations, treating each new grant as seed money for the next language in its master plan.

A report published in February by the Modern Language Association suggests that public colleges with robust foreign-language ambitions are outliers in a nation that increasingly considers higher education as a synonym for job training. Enrollment in language courses other than English fell 9.2 percent between 2013 and 2016 at American colleges, the MLA report shows. Even after some periods of stability, overall enrollments per 100 students are half what they were in 1960.

Christopher Jespersen, dean of North Georgia’s College of Arts and Letters, credits persistence, timing, and some luck for the university’s success in bucking the trend.

“We leveraged our standing as a senior military college, and once we had the faculty in place the program really began to grow,” he said. “Once you have the students enrolled you get the tuition revenue, then you can come back around and after a couple years go to the provost and say it’s time to transition these faculty onto university funds,” he adds, because the end game is to make the programs sustainable on their own.

Chinese Expansion

In 2005, North Georgia College & State University, as the institution was called at the time, had a program that combined English with the only three foreign languages offered — Spanish, French, and German — in a department called language and literature. First English was split out to create the department of modern languages, Jespersen said. The next year, Mandarin Chinese was added.

As one of six senior military colleges in the country, the university now has about 5 percent of its students in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. Adding Chinese helped serve both the ROTC cadets and the university’s civilian students. In addition, it positioned North Georgia to apply for U.S. Department of Defense grants that support the teaching of “strategic” languages.

Jespersen said North Georgia’s big break arrived in the form of Chi-Hsuan Catterson, a native Mandarin speaker from Taiwan who was hired part time to teach Chinese-language classes. She focused on total language immersion in the classroom, and eventually went full time and helped build the program from a minor to a major.

That gave the university access to a Defense Department program called Project Global Officer, better known as Project GO, which provides scholarships for ROTC cadets to study “critical languages” like Chinese. Project GO, which is part of the Defense Language and National Security Education Office, also supports language instruction for ROTC members at non-military institutions like Boston University, Indiana University at Bloomington, the University of Florida, and the University of Montana.

In the decade since its founding, Project GO has funded more than 4,500 students in 19 critical languages, studying in 27 countries including the United States, according to a 2017 federal report.

In that same period, North Georgia has been bolstered by more than $3.2 million in Project GO money, helping the university expand its Summer Language Institutes and study-abroad opportunities. Top students can eventually qualify for prestigious outside awards, including Gilman, Boren, and Fulbright scholarships.

From there, the university pursued the support of another Defense Department project, the Language Flagship, a component of the National Security Education Program.

In 2011, North Georgia was minted as a flagship in Chinese through a pilot program that included two other universities. The designation was renewed twice, meaning that by 2020 the institution will have received about $2.7 million in grants. North Georgia is the only ROTC program in the country to earn the flagship designation in any language.

Flagship colleges must demonstrate a long-term “institutional commitment” to foreign languages, requiring tenured faculty, a dean, and an adherence to other guidelines. Besides Chinese, the Language Flagship supports programs around the United States in such languages as Arabic, Farsi/Persian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish.

With the renewed grant for the Chinese flagship at North Georgia, Jespersen said, the program was able to provide some $125,000 in scholarships to qualified cadets like Hutch Crawford to fund their capstone and summer programs.

Immersion Strategy

When officials from North Georgia decided to expand their language offerings in 2006, they embarked on site visits to Middlebury College and Concordia Language Villages near Bemidji, Minn. There they realized that the most effective thing they could do was to continue hiring more faculty like Chi-Hsuan Catterson.

“We get a lot of native language speakers in the classroom, people who are really focused on a communicative approach like speaking and listening, then we add reading and writing,” Jespersen said. “It’s less of a literature approach.”

He adds that the goal is to have faculty members use as little English as possible in the classroom, and to get them certified through programs like the Oral Proficiency Interview, also known as OPI, a nationally recognized method of assessing spoken-language skills. Some of the flagship and Project GO money has funded training programs to help North Georgia faculty gain OPI certification, said Daniela Martinez, director of sponsored programs in language at the university.

D. Brian Mann, head of the department of modern and classical languages, says it’s not a zero-sum game when adding new languages at the university. In his department, there’s no “bean counting,” he says, meaning that faculty don’t have to worry that adding new languages will take resources away from ones that are already offered.

He says he and his colleagues make it work by converting grant funds into “hard state money.” This means North Georgia will take grants, then invest in the programs themselves using tuition revenue and university funds. Mann adds, “You can’t do that unless you have senior administrators backing you.” He joined North Georgia in 2005 along with Jespersen, and since then the language program has grown from seven faculty members to 71, with 50 of them being full-time.

“We just kind of played a gamble,” Mann said, when faculty were concerned over how newer languages might cut in into their enrollment figures. In their projections, “we said that we think a rising tide is going to raise all boats.”

Likewise, Jespersen notes that students tended to acquire multiple interests in different languages while studying abroad, so one language program might help a related one succeed. “Students who were in our Arabic program, when they went to Morocco, came back and said, ‘I think I need to pick up some French,’” he said, since both ROTC and civilian students realized that people in the area were bilingual and trilingual. He says the same thing has happened in East Asian countries, where students might study Chinese, but later want to learn Japanese and Korean.

Critical Mass of Students

Along the way, North Georgia’s language fortunes were further improved by the shifting winds of Georgia higher-education policy. Between 2011 and 2017, the state merged 14 public colleges into seven. In 2013, North Georgia College & State University was merged with Gainesville State University to create the four-campus University of North Georgia. The consolidation resulted in a critical mass of students and faculty at the mostly commuter Gainesville campus, which has more than 8,000 total students, all civilians, and Dahlonega, which has about 800 Army ROTC students out of 7,000 total students, Jespersen said.

“We split out Spanish because it was so much larger than all the other languages,” Jespersen said of the influx after the merger. Next fall, when Portuguese is added, the program will be pooled into the Spanish department. The other languages will remain in the department of modern and classical languages.

“We felt like if we were really going to dedicate ourselves to a number of different languages, let’s allow Spanish to focus on what it needs to do,” Jespersen said, “and then allow all these other faculty in for Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Korean, German, French, and so forth to develop their pathways as well.”

The university’s enrollment in Chinese, which began at 28 students in 2006 and had grown to 78 students by 2009, before the merger, surpassed 200 for the first time in the fall of 2013. Three years later, according to the MLA database, it stood at 250. In comparison, other senior military colleges saw their enrollments in Chinese decrease between 2013 and 2016. The Citadel had 29 students enrolled in 2016, down from 54 in 2013, and Texas A&M, in the same period, dropped to 106 students from 135.

Also in 2016, the Japan Foundation, a cultural institution sponsored by the Japanese government, awarded North Georgia a $400,000 grant so that it could introduce a Japanese concentration. Japanese has enrolled more students at Virginia Tech and Texas A&M, where it has been offered longer, but North Georgia enrolled 95 in the program’s first year. This spring, the Qatar Foundation International awarded a $39,000 grant to the university for its already well-enrolled Arabic program.

Jespersen, the dean who spearheaded the language program more than a decade ago, said that out of all the languages the University of North Georgia offers, none are having declines in enrollment. Even the European languages long offered at North Georgia — Spanish, French, and German — have seen strong gains, for which the merger is partially responsible. Between the fall of 2013 and the fall of 2016, enrollments increased 288 percent for Spanish, 126 percent for French, and 229 percent for German.

Looking to further capitalize on its success, North Georgia is angling to earn the flagship designation for its Russian program. It would be the first ROTC program to have two language flagships. Jespersen said the university has twice been denied grants by the Korea Foundation, but he plans to keep trying. When the university applied to be a Chinese flagship back in 2007 — the year that all the growth started — that initial application was also denied.

A Reluctant Student

For Hutch Crawford, the Army ROTC cadet from Dalton, Ga., North Georgia’s broadening strength in foreign-language education has been a passport to international travel. At the beginning, Crawford concedes, he was a reluctant beneficiary. The summer before his freshman year he realized there was no escaping the two semesters of foreign language required under the university’s core curriculum, so he decided to dispense with the pain early and quickly.

He signed up for Chinese classes through the Summer Language Institutes. He would spend nine hours in the classroom five days a week and notch two semesters’ worth of language credits in two months. If he survived, he’d be done with it. No more Chinese.

As it turned out, Crawford fell in love with the language and, more importantly, Chinese culture. Now he can translate a report on the South China Sea, watch movies without too much help from the subtitles, and enjoy Chinese hip-hop, which he once found hilarious but now follows with great interest. After becoming an international-affairs major, he stuck with the program partly because he knew East Asian studies would look good on a military résumé, but also because he excelled in it and found it personally useful.

Four years after embarking on his course of study, he reflects on how learning about China has changed his perception of its relationship with the United States.

“People all over the world are just trying to be happy and have a safe and stable life,” he said. “People want to raise their kids and take care of them. It doesn’t matter what country you’re from, but we get caught up in our own worlds and our own languages and see stuff that’s foreign and say it’s wrong and different.”

The tension between the two countries, in his mind, has grown too hostile, and that hurts everybody.

“If I can work hard and learn about the Chinese perspective through their language, not just so I can say stuff I want to say, but so I can learn to listen, I’ll hopefully be involved in improving relations.”