For college presidents, international experience is not required
When it comes to broader institutional agendas, international education can find itself jockeying for attention.
Little more than a third of colleges said international education was among the top priorities in their strategic plans, according to a 2022 survey by the American Council on Education. A decade earlier, half of colleges said it was on their front burner.
There are many reasons that international education may find itself fighting for relevance: The political and policy environment in the United States for anything global has been tough in recent years. College leaders have fires to put out at home, including campus protests and attacks on diversity offices and programs.
But another possible cause: Almost half of college presidents report having no overseas experience, according to a survey of college leaders, also by ACE. Just 15 percent studied abroad, and only 8 percent have had an international grant or fellowship for research or teaching, such as a Fulbright scholarship. Five percent were deployed overseas as part of military or civilian government service.
“The problem is both significant and systemic,” said Patti McGill Peterson, a former president of Wells College and St. Lawrence University.
In his recent doctoral dissertation, Samba Dieng, senior internationalization officer at Louisiana State University, examined four colleges and found that presidential buy-in — from articulating a vision to allocating resources — matters in international-education efforts. “Successful internationalization requires outstanding vision and leadership,” he wrote.
Peterson, who studied abroad as a first-generation college student, knows that firsthand. In her second presidency, at St. Lawrence, she threw her weight behind encouraging overseas study and internationalizing the curriculum.
But Peterson is the exception rather than the rule. International expertise is rarely part of the presidential job description, said Carolyn J. Stefanco, president emerita of the College of Saint Rose. The role of senior international officer, the top administrator for global education, is not a common stepping stone to the college presidency. In the current climate, search committees are looking for adept financial managers, talented fundraisers, and nimble political operatives as their next leaders. “So many other things are urgent that international experience doesn’t make the list,” she said.
Despite such pressing imperatives, Stefanco, who works as a higher-education leadership consultant, said international skills and exposure during college will be critical to graduates’ long-term success. “You would think after the pandemic, we’d understand that the biggest issues we face as Americans are global,” she said.
Presidents of community colleges, which often struggle to give students international opportunities, were less likely than leaders of other types of institutions to have overseas experience, the ACE survey found.
Today’s crop of college presidents is more global than when ACE last conducted the survey, six years earlier. Back then more than half reported no overseas experience.
Greater change may be more difficult, experts said. That’s because, long before they even aspire to college presidencies, there are few incentives for professors to gain international experience. American colleges do attract foreign-born scholars and researchers; about 6 percent of American faculty members are on temporary visas, according to the U.S. Department of Education, an undercount of international faculty because that metric does not include permanent U.S. residents or naturalized citizens born overseas.
Yet higher education’s promotion and reward structures infrequently prize — or even recognize — international engagement. ACE found that only 12 percent of colleges have guidelines for considering international experience in promotion and tenure decisions. More than half of colleges said they rarely or never count a global background as a plus-factor in hiring decisions.
Stefanco, a historian, was a Fulbright scholar in Croatia. But higher ed’s practices and policies can discourage faculty members, especially early-career academics, from engaging in international research and teaching, she said.
On lists of institutional priorities for international education, faculty development ranks far below other activities, like recruiting foreign students and sending Americans to study abroad. It’s a vicious cycle, said Peterson, who also was a Fulbright administrator and an adviser to ACE on global education. “When it comes to creating a pipeline, there isn’t a magic answer,” she said. “I wish there were.”
If college presidents don’t come to the job with a global orientation, international educators can work to shift their thinking, Stefanco said. That can mean explaining the value of international education to fit with broader institutional goals, both academic and financial.
And there’s another group to educate, she said — the people who often hire college presidents, the trustees.
