By Dr. Allan E. Goodman
President and CEO, Institute of International Education
I chose to start with Jefferson because without his foresight I might have needed my passport to enter Louisiana and because he was so darn smart. I have, however, discovered, at least one exception and that concerns his attitude toward Americans studying abroad.
Jefferson only had the benefit of two years of college (at William and Mary) before he was apprenticed to a lawyer. But he spent some five years abroad as our second minister to France. America's most famous home, the magnificent Monticello, might never have been constructed if Jefferson had not traveled and studied the art and architecture of Europe. The American rice export industry, similarly, might never have prospered without Jefferson's search for seeds of improved strains to send back to farmers in the Carolinas. And it was in the salons of Paris that he fire-tested his ideas about human rights and democratic governance.
However, Jefferson was a strong opponent in educational circles of sending young Americans abroad. As he wrote a friend, once in Europe American students were all-too-likely to develop "a fondness for luxury and dissipation, become fascinated with the privileges of the European aristocrats," and find themselves, as he put it, "…drawn into a spirit of female intrigue, destructive of [their] own and others' happiness." So concerned was Jefferson by these prospects that he founded the University of Virginia, in part, to attract (and save from damnation) the Americans who would, at the time, normally have gone to Europe. Jefferson also believed that if American schools were not as good as the ones in Europe, the leadership of the nation should make it a top priority to develop at least one that would be. He supported George Washington's efforts to persuade the Congress to create a national university for just such a purpose and when that was not to be, he poured mind and soul into constructing an "academical village" at Charlottesville where selected European scholars could come to teach young Americans.
Some 216 years later, Jefferson would be pleased by what else has been built. The United States is the educational destination of choice for the world, and for at least the last 50 years Americans have not needed to study abroad to get a world-class education. But by not encouraging them to do so now, ironically, we are also assuring that they will leave college without the one thing needed for success in the 21st century: the ability to think and work on a global basis.
As incredible as it may seem in an age when the United States is the sole superpower and global policeman, most Americans have a hard time finding their way in the world. Seventy-five percent of those polled by the Gallup organization could not locate the Persian Gulf, fifty percent failed to locate South Africa, and twenty-five percent could not identify the Pacific Ocean. And at the university where I served as a dean before coming to the Institute, I just learned that a grand total of 6 out of some 350 entering students to the School of Foreign Service passed infamous "map of the modern world" examination, which is a graduation requirement. Last year, the total that passed the exam was 4.
While the United States is the number one destination of students from other countries, according to the Institute's "Open Doors 2000" report (which we publish with support from the Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs), half of the 500,000 foreign students that study here do so in only 100 institutions. Nation-wide, international students account for less than 4 percent of total enrollment. This means that most Americans are in school with other Americans and that in most classrooms there is no international perspective. This state of affairs promises to handicap the very generation that will be most challenged by globalization.
For Louisiana, the proportion of international students is under 3 percent. The 6300 international students in your state last year, however, spent $137 million in tuition, lodging and living costs. In the United States as a whole, international students spent over $13 billion, making higher education the fifth largest export of services according to the Department of Commerce. And no one yet calculates the value of the business that comes our way over the years as a result of the relationships that begin in school, the allies on whom U.S. diplomats later draw in solving world crises, or the benefits to the health and well-being of our society that come from the discoveries that international students make in our laboratories.
The encounter in a seminar discussion or in a research task force an American might have with a foreign student introduces not only different and more ways of working on and solving a problem but also entirely different ways of thinking. Such interaction has the capacity to introduce the idea that civilization matters and that there may be more than one of them at work in the world and especially the workplace. I also know that no one who studies abroad remains unchanged by the experience and that it provides for relationships that pay personal, professional and commercial dividends for many years.
An appalling small number of Americans, however, actually study abroad. Last year, the 120,000 (of which 1054 were from Louisiana institutions) who did so for credit amounted to less than one percent of all Americans enrolled in colleges and universities. Despite the fact that many colleges and universities now have the aspiration to be full players in globalization in their mission statement, there is little prospect that American students' stunningly limited contact with the world and opportunity for immersion in another culture will increase substantially without dramatic action.
Some trend lines, in fact, are even pointing in the wrong direction. According to a new report on "Internationalization of U.S. Higher Education," undertaken by the American Council on Education as part of a Ford Foundation project, for example, the number of students enrolled in foreign language courses has declined by fifty percent since the high-water mark of 16% in the 1960s. In the same time period, the number of colleges and universities that required the study of a foreign language for admission also declined from one-third to one-fifth. In the sixties, almost 90 percent of the 4-year colleges in the United States had a language requirement for graduation. Today the figure is under 60 percent and well under 10 percent for those who actually require the student to take college level courses rather than pass a proficiency exam. This is, perhaps, a reflection of trends in the faculty where, as a number of reports have found, "United States scholars are less likely than most other world scholars to regard international activity as important. They are the least likely to work abroad, collaborate with scholars abroad, or express interest in literature from abroad."
It is ironic, as I said earlier, that the isolation of the American student is occurring at a time when this is neither good for business nor for education.
To assure the competitiveness of the generation facing an age in which, as Vaclav Havel put it, "everything is possible and nothing is certain," we need to change the definition of an educated person to include study outside America not as a luxury or an option but as a core requirement. The educational exchange programs like Fulbright and the new Gilman and FreemanAsia scholarships that encourage Americans to study outside their own culture are thus the leading edge of a paradigm shift that will have an even greater impact in this century than they did in the last. Perhaps more than anything else they hold the key to whether or not the generation of Americans we are now educating will prosper in an age when the most critical success factor for countries as well as companies are people whose minds are open to the world.
