Plenary Address

NAFSA Region VIII Symposium

International Education Week, November 19, 2004

Franklin in Paris: Lessons for International Education Week

By Dr. Allan E. Goodman

President and CEO, Institute of International Education

Most Presidents, when given the choice, have always wished to be in Philadelphia. I am glad I am here but want to speak today about why I wish the spirit of Benjamin Franklin were elsewhere.

A few weeks ago, I paid a call on the French Ambassador in Washington. As I got off the elevator to his post-modern suite, the first thing I saw was a bust of Franklin. “A man of modern times and for new thinking,” Jean-David Levitte remarked, “to us, he is still all what we admire about America.”

Franklin was our first ambassador to France. He was also one of the first Americans to promote study abroad for the very young – in this case, for his two grandchildren, Benny and Temple, who came with him to Paris in 1776 (and alternated between schools in France and Geneva). Within weeks of arriving, Franklin was the subject of important paintings, kitsch, a new hairstyle, and so much in demand that, as his daughter wrote at the time, his face had become “as well known as that of the moon.” No American diplomat since has had quite the same effect – or positive reception -- and if 70% of adult Americans with a college education cannot name the president or Russia today or the job that Kofi Annan holds, even fewer could name our current ambassador to France.

Historians generally agree that Franklin the negotiator did as much for our young country as any of the generals who won the battles of the War for Independence. What may be less well known is that during his time in Paris, so many people approached him about emigrating to America that he published what is arguably the first guide to study abroad here. His pamphlet, “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” was published in 1784 in English and French and re-printed many times.

Franklin would have approved of what you are doing today to make sure that our doors remain open. And without your efforts, many fewer students and scholars would be here. You are not alone, of course, and your work is getting important recognition.

An extraordinary thing happened on the way to the end of the 108th Congress, for example. A few minutes after 9am on 6 October, Senator Richard Lugar gaveled the Foreign Relations Committee to order and apologized for starting early. He explained that later in the morning he and his colleagues would have to depart to attend some 16 roll call votes – and that he did not want to cut short the time the Committee would devote to the topic at hand.

That topic was student visas.

“These temporary visitors,” the Senator began, “provide enormous economic and cultural benefits to our country …. and are also one of the most successful elements of our public diplomacy.”

The fact that the United States has friends abroad today is in no small part due to the fact that in the past half century, some hundreds of thousands of students from other countries were able to study here. Our tradition of academic open doors is the reason that so many Nobel Prizes have ‘made in the USA’ embedded in them, for it was the research that scientists from everywhere were able to do in our universities and laboratory that often led to their breakthrough discovery.

And last year, international students contributed over $13 billion to the U.S. economy through the payment of their tuition and living expenses. This is one of the few positives in our balance of payments and is, as Senator Lugar pointed out, “roughly equivalent to the amount of medical equipment and supplies exported annually by the United States.”

Here in Philadelphia, international students contributed more than $200 million in their payment of tuition, fees, and living expenses. This is more than the revenue generated in 2003 by the Philadelphia Eagles. ($190 m)

Earlier this week, in celebration of International Education Week, IIE released our annual statement on international student mobility, Open Doors. The findings show a very complex picture in terms of international student flows to the U.S., one in which declining numbers in some institutions are offset by increases or steady enrollments in others. The number of international students enrolled in U.S. higher education institutions decreased by 2.4% in 2003/04 to a total of 572,509. The 2.4% drop follows a minimal increase in the previous year (.6%) preceded by five years of steady growth. The drop in enrollments is the first absolute decline in foreign enrollments since 1971/72, although several years of minimal loss were reported in the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. An increase of 2.5% at the graduate level partially offsets the 5% decline in the number enrolled in undergraduate institutions.

International student enrollments tend to have periods of sharp increases, followed by short plateaus. The latter result from many factors: internal turmoil in major sending countries, regional and world economic slowdowns, currency crises, rising tuitions at U.S. colleges and universities, competition from higher education authorities in other countries (especially those in the UK, Australia, and France), foreign government policies urging students to stay home or go elsewhere (Malaysia, China, Saudi Arabia), as well as visa policy changes. All of these reasons are at work today.

For several years, the largest sending country has been India. Recently, the Hindustan Times of New Delhi ran an editorial (on 9/11) that makes this clear in a particularly interesting way. The editorial begins by noting that the U.S. is still the destination of choice and that “new visa procedures are speed bumps rather than red lights.” It continues: “Indian students have high acceptance rates and processing delays have fallen in the past two years.” But then the editorial notes that “the UK, New Zealand, and Australia are all wooing Indian students,” that U.S. universities “have become exorbitantly expensive,” and that due to globalization, “the bonus of having a good shot at US citizenship matters less these days” since an increasing number of Indians are returning home to work.

The challenge all of us face is to make sure that this year’s decline does not turn into a trend.

No other country on earth has America’s capacity. While we are facing organized and government-supported competition, the 39 higher educational institutions in Australia and New Zealand’s 26, have real limits. The same is true even in the UK, which has some 259. At last count, the US has 4070 higher educational institutions and today, 50% of all international student enrollments are in just 80 of these colleges and universities. And with just five countries accounting for 75% of all international enrollments in the world, one of the other things we are learning is that education is still not very international. It would be enormously less so without America.

Our country is also still trying to find the right balance between secure borders and open doors. If we could take one more strategic step, it would be granting visa approval for a student’s entire period of study. It would reduce the number of cases that a consular official has to review and lessen the anxiety of students that if they need to return home in mid-degree, they would not face the prospect of being unable to return or delay at the start of a new semester.

The international educational opportunities that America stands for benefit our society and the world. Some of the international students here today – and who want to come tomorrow – will win the Nobel prizes of the future. In the process, they may discover a cure for cancer, a vaccine against HIV/AIDS, or become the leaders of the governments upon which success in all the wars we face – against poverty, disease, and terrorism – will ultimately depend.

These are all wars that Franklin – and his friends in France – would have wanted America to win.