Latitudes

Here are some key takeaways from this year’s AIEA meeting

Global-education leaders have a lot riding on the outcome of November’s presidential and congressional contests. More than ever, they seem aware of the ways that policy priorities, as well as partisanship, can shape their jobs.

For instance, two years after the Biden administration ended the China Initiative, the federal inquiry into academic and economic espionage, there are questions about how prescriptive Washington will be when it comes to regulating research security. Balancing the desire for openness of knowledge exchange with the imperative to protect scientific secrets has long been difficult, and the political appeal of getting tough on China, at once America’s main research rival and its key academic collaborator, could further upset the equilibrium. If former President Donald J. Trump was to retake the White House, it could give momentum to efforts to restart the China Initiative itself.

Likewise, many international educators said they had trepidations about what a Trump administration 2.0 could mean for policies for international students, including visa rules and the future of Optional Practical Training, the popular but contested post-graduation work program. In their first term, it took Trump officials time to figure out how to navigate the federal bureaucracy, more than one attendee reminded me — the travel ban against students and other visitors from predominantly Muslim countries, for one, faced legal challenges, and it was nearly a year and a half before the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a modified version of the executive order. This time around, they could know how to better exercise the levers of power.

Politics was far from the only subject at the AIEA meeting. Here are a few other themes that struck me:

Issues like diversity and sustainability are moving to the center of conversations among international educators. It wasn’t so long ago that such topics would have been seen as peripheral, but there’s growing awareness that the field has to grapple with the effects of global mobility on the climate and inequality of access to international opportunity. I was particularly struck, during a session on antiracism, that many audience members framed their responsibility not just to be empathetic allies, but to take ownership for ensuring diversity and inclusion in international programming.

That’s not to say there were solid answers to these thorny questions. But there’s a more insistent dialogue.

When it comes to staffing, the international-office door keeps revolving — and that’s a problem. There was a lot of commiserating among conference-goers about the difficulties in both recruiting and retaining talented employees.

During the pandemic, many international offices were hit by layoffs, and burnout led some experienced staffers and administrators to leave the field. But today’s job woes seem to go beyond Covid’s aftereffects. Among the concerns I heard: smaller applicant pools; the difficulty of building camaraderie and community among hybrid work forces; the lack of clear pathways for promotion and career progression; travel fatigue; and the implications of the “passion tax,” the expectation that new hires will accept low pay to do a job they love.

When preaching international education’s value, it can be difficult to get beyond the choir. At the conference, everyone was singing from the same hymnal about the academic, cultural, social, and economic benefits of global experiences. But international ed may not be a priority for, or is ill understood by, campus leaders, the local community, students, and even faculty members.

During one session, a trio of former college presidents offered advice to senior international officers about how to make their case. Find outside advocates, they urged. Set goals that are measurable and doable. Identify creative ways to connect what you do to the broader agendas of college presidents. “Make yourself indispensable,” advised Harvey Kesselman, a former president of Stockton University, in New Jersey.

That’s just a taste of what’s in my notebook. I’ll be returning to these issues in future reporting and would be interested in hearing your perspectives. Are there subjects from AIEA I didn’t highlight but that left an impression? As always, drop me a line at karin.fischer@chronicle.com.

A need-based approach to study abroad

Bartecki, executive vice president for marketing and college relations at the nonprofit study-abroad organization, compares the typical education-abroad office to a store. High-need students, he said, “might just be window shopping, because they think, that’s not for me. Or if they go in, they’re not buying anything because it’s just too expensive.”

Before the pandemic, IES Abroad had awarded about $6 million a year in financial aid. But Bartecki and Susan Thomas, associate director of financial aid, questioned whether the funds were going to students with the greatest need. Research suggests that students who are typically underserved by study abroad — those who are economically disadvantaged, first generation, or from underrepresented minority groups — see bigger academic benefits from having an international experience, graduating on time, and with higher grade-point averages, than their peers.

IES Abroad decided to take a hard look at how it was allocating its financial-aid dollars. The guiding principle, Thomas said, was “what does equity of experience look like?”

The result is the organization’s new high-impact aid commitment. During a yearlong pilot, financial-aid applications from participating colleges increased 194 percent. Among students with the highest need, applications were up 120 percent.

How they did it: IES Abroad brought in a consultant to examine its financial-aid policies and identify several problem points: The organization wasn’t awarding scholarships until late in the application cycle, and it was “top-off aid,” meaning that it supplemented assistance students were getting from their college or other sources to meet their total expenses. Not knowing how much aid they would get made planning tough for students and could discourage them from going abroad.

While IES Abroad plans to increase its fundraising, the group focused on ways to redistribute the financial aid it already allocates. It had been giving $2,000 grants to public colleges for each student in its programs, and it cut that amount in half. The reallocation gave the organization about $1 million more for need-based aid in the pilot program.

IES Abroad changed the way it calculates aid, tying it to federal financial aid. Advisers can tell students upfront how much financial assistance they are likely to receive based on the amount their families are expected to pay toward their education, according to details on their Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. Students with the highest need, those with no expected-family contribution, could receive $7,000 from IES Abroad.

Under the new system, IES Abroad said it would notify students of scholarship awards within five days of their application. The organization also simplified its financial-aid application so that it can be filled out in about 10 minutes, eliminating a required essay. The form allows students to provide additional information, Thomas said, so that they can let IES Abroad know if their families’ financial situation has changed because of illness or job loss.

How it’s going: IES Abroad recruited a dozen partner colleges, including both public and private institutions, for its pilot and worked closely with them to make sure its new approach would complement their financial-aid policies.

Three times as many students at pilot institutions filled out financial-aid applications than in the prior year. Participation in IES Abroad programs by students who were eligible for Pell Grants rose by 106 percent.

While increasing post-pandemic participation in study abroad may account for some of the growth, the rise in financial-aid applications from pilot institutions was much greater than from those not taking part in the program. According to IES Abroad data, applications from non-pilot colleges doubled during the same period.

Jamilah Rashid, a study-abroad program manager at Howard University, which was part of the test run, praised the new program’s “transparency and depth of the funding model. Students know very early on whether or not the program will be viable for them.”

What’s next: IES Abroad will expand the need-based-aid program to students at all 250 colleges that are part of its consortium for the spring of 2025. (The application cycle for those programs opened earlier this month.) Based on the pilot, IES Abroad has a good estimate of student need, Bartecki said, but “if we get too many students and have to give away more, that’s a good thing.”

FAFSA fix offers only a temporary solution

A system error was preventing parents who are undocumented immigrants from contributing to or submitting their portion of the online FAFSA application.

But as my colleague Eric Hoover wrote, the multistep process, announced last week, is cumbersome and confusing and won’t give colleges enough information to make firm financial-aid offers to affected students. A permanent fix won’t be ready until later in March, officials said.

Around the globe

Alabama lawmakers are considering a proposal to permit undocumented students who graduated from high schools in the state to attend public colleges. If passed, the bill would undo a prohibition enacted in anti-immigrant legislation more than a decade ago.

China has become Russia’s primary collaborator on scientific research after the country’s invasion of Ukraine led to its academic isolation.

A group of research-intensive European universities is calling for more student mobility in the region and greater investment in campus-based research and innovation.

More than one-fifth of unemployed Ghanaians have college degrees, according to new government statistics.

Zimbabwe, which has outlawed same-sex relations, could ban scholarships to gay and lesbian students, with the country’s vice president calling scholarships “predicated on the same aberrations both unlawful and criminal, and a grave and gross affront on our national values and ethos as a Christian nation.”

New “hijab enforcers” have been deployed to ensure that female students and staff and faculty members at the University of Tehran wear headscarves, in keeping with Iranian law.

College students can receive temporary deferments from Myanmar’s new compulsory military conscription, but there are concerns that young people will leave the country to avoid military service.

Students from fast-growing countries in South Asia are increasingly looking to study elsewhere in the region if they go abroad.

Just one percent of American college students study abroad. That’s detrimental to American competitiveness, this opinion piece argues.

And finally …

More than five decades ago, a team of table-tennis players became the first Americans to visit mainland China since the Communist government had come to power.

The University of Virginia revisited ping-pong diplomacy, offering a short-term study-abroad course during the January term that retraced the American team’s stops, in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai, and studied the role of sports diplomacy in U.S.-China relations.

The students played in exhibition matches with Chinese college students, met champion table-tennis players, and were hosted by Chinese and American government officials. They also took part in academic seminars.

While the number of Americans studying in China has plunged in recent years due to the pandemic and political tensions, Virginia had no problem recruiting students, receiving more than 40 applications for a dozen spots. The students who traveled abroad came from a wide cross-section of disciplines, and two have already expressed interest in returning to China for additional study. Their full costs were paid for by American and Chinese donors.

Stephen D. Mull, Virginia’s vice provost for global affairs and a former U.S. ambassador and State Department official, said the idea for the study-abroad program came about as college leaders considered how to restart academic exchanges. The 1971 trip had been an “international sensation” and had helped lay the groundwork for the resumption of full diplomatic relations between the two countries, said Mull, who was one of the teachers for the January course. It seemed to offer a model for “overcoming difficulties in U.S.-China engagement,” and when Virginia proposed the idea for the trip to Chinese officials, it was met with enthusiasm.

“In the heart of China, a symphony of revelations played out — lessons in culture, life, people, and the profound journey of self-discovery,” Abdallah Aljerjawi, a nursing student who took part in the program, wrote in a blog post.

“Instead of allowing ‘differences’ to be stumbling blocks, let them be the driving force propelling us into the profound depths of our shared humanity.”

Thanks for reading. I always welcome your feedback and ideas for future reporting, so email me at karin.fischer@chronicle.com. You can also connect with me on X or LinkedIn. If you like this newsletter, please share it with colleagues and friends. They can sign up here.