"Man's struggle to be rational about himself, about his relationship to his own society, and to other peoples and nations involves a constant search for understanding among peoples and cultures -- a search that can only be effective when learning is pursued on a worldwide basis."
--Senator J. William Fulbright

The most critical success factor for nations as well as companies in what is left of this century and in all of the next is people whose minds are open to the world. This can only happen, as Senator Fulbright observed in a classic speech in 1977, through international education because it "can turn nations into people and contribute as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations." These transforming qualities are especially needed today.

As Vaclav Havel so aptly observed, we are living in an era where everything is possible and nothing is certain. This condition predominates in world politics largely because power is being dispersed not only across nations but across cultures. What governments as well as companies can do, consequently, is determined by an ever-widening set of constituencies, and each has more influence over decisions than ever before. What these constituencies demand is increasingly being determined by what they know about and how they see their place in the world. Between CNN and the Internet, few lack access to the images and information that depict the benefits as well as the costs of globalization. As a result, isolationism has so far had limited political appeal and only a handful of states appear bent on closing their societies to the world.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that the universality of the dollar, the English language, and the Internet makes us all think we are closer and more secure than we are.

What is especially troubling is that fostering the pursuit of learning on a genuinely worldwide basis is proving increasingly hard for government programs to do in what USIA Director Duffey has aptly called "an era of frugal diplomacy."

It is also an era in which American educational institutions are themselves finding it increasingly difficult to fund foreign students as well as Americans seeking to study abroad.

While the U.S. government will maintain its leadership role in supporting flagship initiatives such as Fulbright, Humphrey, and the National Security Education Program, it is clear that the future of these programs will require enlarging the circle of private sector stakeholders as well. But for most of this decade, such sources of philanthropy have contributed only one out of every nine dollars in grant aid to international programs. The best and brightest foreign students, moreover, are now being aggressively recruited by many other countries, and until this conference was convened there has been little public or private discussion among U.S. stakeholders about the potential impact of this trend. If we want to continue to train the future leaders of other nations, and expose them to the values and professional networks of our society, we cannot continue to take for granted the flow of foreign students to U.S. campuses, or underestimate the intellectual, strategic and financial resource they represent.

While foreign governments (especially in Europe, Asia, and Latin America) are developing sophisticated and well-funded strategies to increase the international mobility of their students and faculty members, there is no parallel strategy or resource pool to encourage and facilitate international academic mobility by Americans. Despite the obvious advantages a global perspective brings to future professionals, there are also strikingly less in the way of resources to encourage American students to spend part of their academic career abroad. The increasing complexity of core curricula, moreover, makes it genuinely more difficult for students and their mentors to fit a year of study abroad in to even a traditional liberal arts program. Many academic advisors, as a result, are reluctant to make the case that study abroad is an indispensable route to achieving the understanding of other societies that will be required for professional competence and competitiveness in the future.

I have also observed that despite the wide circulation that Senator Fulbright's speech received through its publication in the Harvard Business Review, few American corporate leaders have ever articulated the importance of "worldwide learning". And, in any case, the message has not filtered down to the front line recruiters on U.S. campuses or those in the human resources departments who handle entry level hires. And yet no major business today can expect to survive without managers who are knowledgeable about and able to work across nations as well as cultures.

More foreign students still pass through our open doors than those of any other country, making the United States the world's most sought-after and diverse educational region.

But the numbers of foreign students coming here have been flat for several years, and visas for studying in America have become harder and more costly to get. In the face of severe budgetary pressure, the U.S. government's contribution to the Fulbright and Humphrey fellowship programs have declined by 20 and 42 percent, respectively, since 1994. Overseas advising offices which provide free access to information about U.S. higher education for millions of students around the world have faced years of reduced budgets.

The problem is not just one of federal funding. In the July-August issue of Change, CIES Executive Director and IIE Vice President Patti McGill Peterson and Professor Philip Altbach of Boston College wrote that "'internationalize' may be closer to a buzz work than a deep-seated reality for most colleges and universities....In an era of tight budgets, most institutions lack the financial resources for major international initiatives. And institutions with a lot of international activities often lack the coherent strategic direction that provides connective tissue across them."

All of us, in fact, can cite recent instances at universities where requests for more resources to teach foreign languages or support area studies programs have come out last in budget reallocations. And on the campuses where there exist stand-alone schools of international affairs, many of their deans are finding that university presidents and provosts no longer regard such programs as the jewel in the crown.

Faculty also do not appear convinced about the value of overseas experience and scholarship. Senior scholars often discourage younger faculty members from applying for Fulbright or other fellowships that would place them abroad for periods longer than a few months. Earlier this year, the president of Duke University, Nan Keohane, noted in a speech at Oxford University that we have become "...quite parochial. Since English is the dominant language of international scholarship...there is little incentive for American scholars to learn other languages. Because American scholarship is recognized as preeminent in many fields, there is little incentive to be current in the work done in other countries for many faculty members."

Compared to our colleagues in the European Union, the proportion of Americans who have had an international academic sojourn is remarkably low. While the absolute numbers continue to climb, less than 1% of American college students receive credit for study abroad, according to Open Doors data. What is equally troubling is that nearly a third of all those Americans who do study abroad head only for English-speaking countries. A continuation of these trends will not make America competitive in the world because it does not open minds far enough to enough new possibilities. This makes it even more important to assure that there is a steady flow of foreign students to American campuses. The presence of foreign students in the U.S. classroom represents perhaps the only chance for most American students to hear an international perspective and learn how to interact with persons from a foreign culture.

State governments, many of which are developing sophisticated marketing strategies to woo foreign investment, have virtually ignored the foreign investment brought to them in the millions of dollars by international students, an investment that yields long-range benefits when those students return home and become corporate or government leaders making decisions about where to invest abroad in the future. Only a handful of states (such as Massachusetts and Oregon) have developed a coordinated academic recruitment strategy abroad to parallel their substantial investment in Foreign Trade offices and high-level delegations to woo corporate investors abroad. The economic crisis that started in Asia but is spreading across many other countries should serve as a wake up call that we cannot take for granted those flows of foreign students to our shores, and that urgent attention is needed to retain America's pre-eminent role as the higher education magnet for so many talented students around the world.

There is, in sum, work for all of us here to do.

The U.S. government as a whole needs to insure that the flagship programs remain healthy and their budgets increase to a level that assures students and scholars the support they need to undertake their studies. This requires a new, bipartisan consensus about the importance of international educational exchange. Embassies also need to remain in the picture and facilitate the dissemination of information about and access to U.S. higher education, so that students from all around the world continue to see American academic institutions as their destination of choice. State governments and state-supported academic institutions should be sure that the immediate and long-range benefits of training international students are clear to legislators and to the voters who elect them. Academic leaders, from the President to the Provost to the Admissions office must clearly articulate the value of international students on campus and the value of study abroad for U.S. students Deans and professors have to push students to seek out programs that take them across cultures as well as oceans, and then develop curricula that actually build on what was learned after they return to campus. Corporate leaders have to start speaking up -- especially to business school deans and prospective MBAs -- about the importance of pursuing learning on a worldwide basis.

And together we have to help make the case that international educational exchange is one of the surest ways left to make the world a less dangerous place.