International Education:
From Ground Zero to Global Understanding

By Dr. Allan E. Goodman, President and CEO
INSTITITE OF INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION

One of the best and now most timely books written about the city where IIE is headquartered -- and where NAFSA had its first office as part of ours on Fifth Avenue -- is by E. B. White. This Is New York contains the following passage:

The subtlest change… is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes … can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges… . The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

It may surprise you to learn that this was written in 1949, as White juxtaposed the dawn of the Atomic era with the construction of the United Nations headquarters building, which he called "the greatest housing project of them all … to clear the slum called war."

In whichever context you choose to think about ground zero, I was struck by the fact that we have not come all that far in solving the problem of war - and much else -- since 1949. One reason has to do with international education - or more precisely with just how little of it there still is.

Those of us engaged in international education tend to forget just how few ever have the opportunity. International students account for less than 1% of enrollments in higher education in all but 20 counties today.

And despite the global responsibilities and involvement of the U.S., only 7% of students in college now actually study a foreign language. There are still many places in our country where they do not encounter people from cultures beyond their own. And, as you all know by now, less than 1% study abroad.

The consequence of these trends is a degree of ignorance that serves us poorly as a society.

So the statistics that really caught my eye over the past year were in public opinion polls: 77% of adult Americas could neither name the president of Russia nor identify Kofi Annan as the Secretary General of the United Nations; 65% favor "temporarily sealing U.S. borders and stopping all immigration … during the war on terrorism;" and 60% told the Gallup organization that they believed the US already possessed a fully-functional missile shield that could keep them safe from terrorist threats involving the use of weapons of mass destruction.

Part of the reason our citizens are so out of touch with the world is that international education is not yet one of the ingredients that most people regard as essential to education. This puts all of us in the field on the front lines of the struggle to open minds to the world and to make it a less dangerous place. This is the first time in the history of the field where there is such a conjunction for us. And how we respond will no doubt have a tremendous impact on whether or not the next generation is prepared to think and work on a global basis.

Ahead lie at least three immediate challenges.

The first is about who get access to international educational opportunities. Only 17% of the Americans who study abroad annually do not look like me. This figure has been static for a decade. As we now know from the results of two years of applications for the Benjamin Gilman Scholarships and the FreemanAsia program, there is in fact huge demand for the opportunity across all sectors of our society. The primary inhibitor is funding. Finding more public and private sources of help is at the core of the real challenge here and central to broadening the pool of Americans who can benefit from study abroad.

The second challenge involves defending the student visa.

We need to do this by getting the facts out about the issues. Part of this involves correcting the media about how many of the 9/11 terrorists came on what kind of a student visa. We need to make it clear that students and scholars at accredited colleges and universities are among the most closely screened and documented of all international persons coming into the United States - and that we have been working with government for years to provide the information they require. We need to affirm that we are ready and willing to implement the new reporting requirements. And we need to shine the flashlight where it belongs. Namely, on the INS which has been unable to develop a system that can work or meet the deadlines set by the post-9/11 legislation, on the poor coordination among security agencies and their databases, and on the underfunding and understaffing of the U.S. Consular service as highlighted in a recent report from the General Accounting Office.

And finally, we need to articulate the ways in which our communities benefit from the international students who live in them. We most often do this by citing the numbers. Last year, international students spent over $12 billion in tuition, room and board, and incidentals making education our nation's fifth largest export of services. Revenues from international students in the Buffalo area amounted to more than that city realized from an entire season of the Buffalo Bills; the same is true when you compare international students at Hopkins, UMBC, and the other schools in the Baltimore metropolitan area against the balance sheet from the Orioles.

There is also another way to bring the point home. I thought about this recently, when I took a neighbor to have an MRI in order to determine where her cancer needed to be excised and what body parts could remain. The two physicists who pioneered and won Nobel Prizes for their work on nuclear magnetic resonance both had grants - and from the Institute -- that made international study possible at pivotal points in their careers. And when one day we read about a cure for cancer or a vaccine against HIV/AIDS, there will probably be a foreign graduate student or scholar at one of the laboratories not far from here at the center of that breakthrough. To date, of the 48 alumni of the Fulbright Program and other grantees of the Institute that have won Nobel Prizes, 26 of them did so in the sciences contributing in so many ways to the technologies and cures that make human progress possible.

The third challenge involves truly integrating the academic experiences students have abroad into their curriculum.

At the Institute, we have focused on the sharing of best practices by creating the Andrew Heiskell Awards. Last year's winners (Juniata College, San Diego State University, University of Missouri-Columbia, and Montana State University) created new courses as well as space in the curriculum for study abroad, and found ways to share the international experience of faculty and students well beyond the campus. What we learned in the process is that students need to know that educators think study abroad is important and that we have thought about ways to facilitate their building on and applying what was gained. The sad fact is that study abroad still does not fit well into the standard academic disciplines. As the president of the Social Science Research Council recently observed, "We need to figure out modes of peaceful co-existence and even cooperation for disciplinary and interdisciplinary projects, area studies and non-area studies, work on global economics and on the plurality of transnational cultural projects… . We need to articulate - in Washington discussions and with deans and provosts - why it is important to support a wide and diverse range of international studies in American universities."

As a fallen-away dean, I wished in retrospect that I had paid more attention to the programs of the persons who directed the office of international programs across the hall from my office instead of assuming that they and their students would take care of themselves. What I should have realized is that the folks who run OIPs are pros and know the good programs, and where they need help and involvement is in making sure that when students return they get the credits that they earned and find academic space in their remaining program to turn the overseas experience into one that results in a further broadening and deepening of their understanding of the culture where they just lived. It would have been helpful, too, I suspect if I had helped the OIP to organize events under my auspices (as opposed to theirs alone) that featured returning students and allowed them to share something about their experience with others who might not get the chance. And when the faculty in-gathered to discuss revisions in the core curriculum, I should have realized that a NAFSA professional needed to have a place at the table since over 50% of our undergraduates by then were studying abroad.

Events like 9/11 remind us that we cannot remain ignorant as well as safe.

For September 11th ended what Henry Kissinger called the prevailing view that we were in an age of risk-less global relations. It is not clear what is going to replace that prospect. During previous eras of war, borders were closed and students and scholars did not travel. Thanks to you, things are different. Your dedicated service in the field of international education makes me profoundly hopeful because it is sustaining and helping to increase international student mobility. The mentoring you do day-in and day-out makes an enormous difference. And, in fact, all the wars we have to win -- against terrorism, poverty, HIV/AIDS -- require just the kind of mutual understanding that NAFSA and the Institute which I am privileged to lead promote.

International education is central to what can make our world safer and more secure. It does this, as Senator Fulbright once observed by transforming nations - and those who build and work in their towers - into people.