It took some families in a barrio of Managua, Nicaragua, by surprise when U.S. and  Nicaraguan college students showed up at their door asking what they knew about HIV/AIDS prevention. But soon the students were familiar faces. The nursing students from Fairfield University in Connecticut and the social work and Teaching English as a Second Language students from Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) were part of a project called Cuidemos Nuestra Salud (Take Care of Our Health). The project began in 2009 and now continues every year to improve the health of preschool children and their families in the impoverished Barrio Ayapal. 

Vilma Alvarez, UCA professor of social work, had connected with community leaders the year before when she sent her students to the barrio to perform service. At the time, UCA and Fairfield, both Jesuit institutions, were no strangers to one another. Fairfield faculty had research ties there that stretched back to the 1990s, and the university began sending Latin American and Caribbean studies students on short trips in 2000. In 2004 the universities signed a collaborative agreement that established a semester-long study abroad program at UCA and also provided a full scholarship for a UCA student to attend the sister school in Connecticut each semester.

In for the Long Haul

Lydia and Philip Greiner, nursing professors and spouses, decided the sister school partnership presented a perfect opportunity to enrich the learning experience for undergraduates in her public health class, students who usually do prevention work in low-income neighborhoods in Bridgeport, a few miles from the Fairfield campus. Now some would spend spring break in 2009 learning about and addressing the challenges and needs in Ayapal. 

The Greiners had laid the groundwork in an earlier visit where they met Alvarez and Marisol Morales Vega, the community leader and director of a preschool, Amigos por Siempre, for the barrio’s three-to-five-year-old children. Morales “was really clear. She said, ‘You’re not just coming once. That’s been done before. People have come, they promise, and they leave. I’m not interested in that.’ We made a commitment that we were in for the long haul,” Lydia said.

Listening First

They also committed to listening to the community first before deciding what to do. A dozen Fairfield nursing students were paired with UCA social work students and a student who could translate, and they went door-to-door asking families about their most pressing health concerns. Later Morales called a meeting with parents active in the preschool to discuss the results. The answer was clear: HIV/AIDS education was what people wanted most.

“They felt people were very stigmatized and there was a lot of misinformation. They asked us to produce a homegrown DVD that people could watch in the privacy of their homes because Marisol said they would not come to an event about HIV/AIDS,” said Greiner. The Fairfield contingent returned home but continued to collaborate with the UCA students by e-mail and Facebook. They also enlisted help from other Fairfield students with video-making skills. They produced a four-minute video with images from Nicaragua and a draft script that was translated into Spanish and vetted by Morales and some of her school parents. A UCA student at Fairfield narrated the final version.

Lydia Greiner returned in 2010 with a dozen more students and, with the same UCA students, distributed 400 copies of the DVD to families throughout the barrio. Subsequently Fairfield has sent students and faculty to Nicaragua twice a year, fulfilling their public health nursing requirements while working on priorities such as cardiovascular health problems and promoting hygiene in a barrio that floods easily and does not always have running tap water.

Finding the Link Between the Barrio and Bridgeport

Greiner and other faculty take both traditional college-age nursing students and older adult students who are switching careers. Greiner said she has seen some students who had a passing interest in public health nursing “become passionate about it,” including Colleen Grady, now an emergency room nurse in Boulder, Colorado, who went on that first trip in 2009.

“My Spanish skills were terrible. It was such a blessing to have the UCA students there to help translate,” said Grady. “One thing that I will always remember is when one of the UCA students told me how sad she was to see how people in the barrio were living. She lived nearby, but was unaware of the hardships in the barrio. It made me think about how easily we can become disconnected to people in our own cities and neighborhoods.”

“After this trip I knew that I wanted to volunteer as a nurse internationally, but I also felt the importance of taking care of people in my own community,” said the 31-year-old Grady, who has subsequently volunteered with a nonprofit called Blanca’s House in El Salvador and Liberia.

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Professor Jessica Planas, who has made three of the trips, said she impresses upon her students the similarity of challenges facing the poor whether in Managua or Bridgeport. “Many of the families that we work with in Ayapal deal with the same issues that my patients back home deal with,” including lack of money to buy medicine and low literacy levels, she said. “And these 
issues will be encountered by all my students, regardless where they choose to practice nursing.”

Internationalizing the UCA Students’ Education

Speaking through an interpreter, Professor Alvarez said, “What we have in common is the community work.” While the Fairfield contingent comes for just a week, the work “is continuous,” with her students and the community leaders continuing to promote preventive health measures year-round. The added value for her students “is the intercultural experience and the interdisciplinary approach.”

UCA psychology student Maria Christina Aguirre, who spent the fall 2012 semester at Fairfield, said working in Ayapal “was a beautiful experience. The people were very thankful.” 

UCA has 8,000 students, most on government-funded scholarships to the Catholic institution. Laurie Cordua, UCA’s director of academic cooperation and internationalization, said, “Having this relationship with Fairfield is very important for us. Our students don’t have the means to have a study abroad experience. This gives them the opportunity of having an intercultural experience, of sharing, of working in teams with students from the United States that otherwise they wouldn’t have. It’s really an internationalization experience at home, locally.”

Mirroring the University Mission

Sixty percent of Fairfield’s 5,000 students study abroad for a semester, year, or shorter periods, or perform service in five countries. The university’s strategic plan speaks about producing young men and women “committed to diversity and the promotion of justice” and “prepared to engage with the world around them as competent and informed global citizens.”

President Jeffrey von Arx, S.J., said, “It is no longer sufficient to measure globalization by the numbers of students getting on a plane.” The partnership with UCA and Ayapal crosses “language and cultural divides to effect real and lasting change,” he said, and stands as “an exemplar of how the university lives out its mission.”

Fairfield, which enrolls students from other U.S. universities in its semester-long program at UCA, has also invited nursing faculty and students from other schools to join the work in Ayapal, and it is planning to send its own nurse practitioner graduate students to work in a rural health clinic in January 2014 in Santa Maura, Nicaragua, a mountain region where coffee is grown. January is the harvesting season when the clinic nurse has her hands full treating an influx of 3,000 migrant workers. 

So the partnership is growing despite challenges that include the paucity of bilingual nursing students and faculty at Fairfield’s end as well as the time constraints of academic requirements in both institutions. Despite those impediments, both sides regard their collaboration as a model for communitybased work. Neither has the complete answer, but by working together they are making a difference in people’s health in barrio Ayapal.

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Fairfield University

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When the University of South Florida reorganized its international programs, it squeezed into two words the name of the wide-ranging operation: USF World. Karen Holbrook, senior vice president for global affairs and international research, describes USF World as “a mindset, a culture, a strategy, and a reality” as well as the particular branches of its international operations nestled in the Patel Center for Global Solutions. Holbrook, a biologist and former president of Ohio State University, answered a call from USF President Judy Genshaft to come to Tampa in 2008 for a short period to watch over its burgeoning research enterprise. Five years later she’s still there, arriving in her sports car at the Patel Center at dawn and staying late. “It’s really fun, probably more fun than anything I’ve ever done,” said Holbrook. “I’ve really, really enjoyed being at USF World.” Her idea of fun includes spending hours on a cruise designing an intricate schemata for USF’s quest to become a global research university, with circles within circles and boxes crammed with goals, metrics, and strategies. A vision plan she drafted is 380 pages and a PowerPoint presentation to the Faculty Senate contained 120 slides. “I go through them fast,” she said. 

USF is going fast. Built on a World War II practice bombing range and opened in 1960, what was largely a commuter college now is a system institution with 48,000 students and $411 million in research grants and contracts. All freshmen must live on the green campus lined with graceful live oak trees. It has weathered $125 million in state budget cuts. The out-of-state tuition of $16,260 (Floridians pay $6,330) is a draw for the 2,368 international students, and more are coming through a new partnership with INTO University Partnerships, the British recruiting enterprise that places students from China and elsewhere into intensive English and academic pathway programs at allied universities (Colorado State University, another Simon Award winner, is another INTO school). On a campus where Floridians once comprised 96 percent of students, USF aims to double international enrollments to 10 percent by 2018. “We’re doing it to enhance the quality and moreover the relevance of the educational experience,” said Provost Ralph Wilcox. “We believe we’ve got something to offer international students, but they also have an incredible amount to bring to us.”

Serving the Needs of a Global Community

Genshaft, president since 2000, is carrying out her third strategic plan, each more globally focused than the preceding one. That is only natural for Tampa Bay, she said, home to 480 multinational corporations as well as Florida’s busiest port and MacDill U.S. Air Force Base, headquarters for U.S. Central Command (CentCom) and Strategic Operations Command. Genshaft said one business leader told her pointblank that his company cannot alone teach employees “tolerance, cultural knowledge, and the value of international activities. You’ve got to do it and then they’re better employees for us.” The military, too, relies on USF’s help to bring academic perspectives to grappling with the world’s trouble spots and resolving problems peacefully instead of using “kinetics,” as retired three-star Marine Lt. General Martin Steele, associate vice president for veterans research and executive director of USF Military Partnerships, delicately put it. 

Learning Mandarin in Tampa Bay and Qingdao

USF secured a Confucius Institute in 2008 by promising to recruit its first tenure-track professor of Mandarin. Eric Shepherd got the job. “It was unfathomable to me that at that time we had 40,000 students and basically no Chinese language program beyond an introductory class taught mostly in English,” he said. Now the Department of World Languages offers a Chinese minor, and 200 students attend classes taught by three professors and three instructors. “We came along a little later, but we’re quick learners,” said Genshaft.

Shepherd, a master of the Chinese storytelling performance art called Shandung “fast tales,” sends students to Qingdao University and Ocean University of China for up to 18 months of classes and internships. “They learn how to work at a professional level,” he said. “If they’re an international business major, they learn to do international business in Chinese. If they’re a chemistry major, they’re learning how to do chemistry in Chinese.”

As an undergraduate Victor Florez, 23, now working for the Confucius Institute, finished fourth in a monthlong, nationally televised “Chinese Bridge” language contest for international students. Florez, a Miami native of Colombian ancestry, came to college with a strong desire “to learn a language that was completely alien to me.” Mandarin fit the bill. “My first year I studied three hours a day,” said Florez. “If you put in the work, it’s inevitable that you’ll come out speaking fluent Chinese.”

Ambassadors for Education Abroad and a Gateway in the Student Center

Some 2.5 percent of USF students graduate with an international experience. Some 844 earned credit abroad in 2011–2012. Holbrook wants to grow that number exponentially. Genshaft and her husband donated more than $1 million to endow Passport Scholarships of $2,500 to $5,000. USF World recruits returning undergraduates to serve as “GloBull Ambassadors” for education abroad (the Bull is the university mascot), and the professional staff has grown from 5 to 11. Since the Patel Center sits at a distance from the heart of campus, USF World opened a satellite study abroad office in Marshall Student Center. “We needed to be more central to be able to catch and serve the students. We call it the Gateway Office,” said Amanda Maurer, director of education abroad. Maurer underscored the importance of the GloBull Ambassadors in convincing fellow students to pursue education abroad. “We can say it ourselves five or six times, but if a student goes up there and says, ‘You’ve really got to do this; it changed my life,’ they listen,” she said.

A new Global Citizenship program rewards up to 200 freshmen and sophomores who study global issues with $2,000 scholarships for education abroad. Anthropologist Karla Davis-Salazar, who has excavated Mayan ruins in Honduras, led the first cohort to Panama in 2013. Despite tight budgets, the provost found $400,000 to fund the Global Citizenship initiative. “Part of my goal for the future is (finding out) why more students aren’t interested. What do we need to do to open their minds?” said DavisSalazar, now an associate dean.

The international services staff also has expanded from six to nine. The INTO partnership will bring more Asian students to Tampa. USF also draws students from Latin America, including 60 undergraduates from Venezuela. Among them are engineering students Ana and Juan Lopez Marcano, siblings who said the courses and workload are harder back home but the research opportunities much greater at USF. Ana, 19, who was president of her high school class, hopes to design biomedical devices. “I really like it here,” said her 20-year-old brother, aspires to land a job at a tech giant such as Microsoft and learn “the cool stuff.” 

Establishing the USF Brand in Far Places

Roger Brindley, associate vice president for global academic programs, sees his job as “brand profile development writ large.” He works on expanding international partnerships. “For the life of me I can’t understand why people in India have heard of Harvard, but not South Florida,” quipped Brindley, a British-born expert on early childhood education. USF World now has two people in Delhi who work on recruiting students as well as finding new research opportunities and promoting economic development. USF has more than 40 faculty members of Indian heritage and 240 students from India.

“For the life of me I can’t understand why people in India have heard of Harvard, but not South Florida.”

The university provides grants up to $12,000 to faculty to generate research, scholarship, and “creative activity” with counterparts at five partner universities in Ghana, China, and the United Kingdom. Its Ghana Scholars Program, which brings faculty from the University of Ghana and the University of Cape Coast to USF to complete dissertation work, recently received an honorable mention Andrew Heiskell award from the Institute of International Education.

These partnerships are vital to USF’s achieving its goal of becoming globally engaged, said Brindley. No one “thinks becoming globalized is switching on a light. A generation from now the only relevant universities, in our opinion, will be globally engaged. We have a responsibility to do that work and be one of the universities that succeeds.”

Faculty Interests Drive Internationalization

Michael Churton has witnessed the changes as a longtime professor of special education with a deep international bent. An authority on distance learning, he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malaysia in the 1970s. To honor the memory of a friend killed in Vietnam, he flew to wartime Saigon and applied for a teaching job just before the government fell. He has made Southeast Asia a focus of his career, studying disabilities among indigenous people in Borneo as a Fulbright Scholar, coordinating a USF partnership with the University of Malaysia-Sarawak, and working with Vietnam’s education ministry on e-learning courses for medical students. He is an honorary professor at Hanoi Medical University and has travelled to Vietnam a dozen times and to Malaysia 20 times.

When he joined the USF faculty in 1994, “there was no support from any place” for such work overseas, he said. “It was faculty members on their own. Slowly, as a new administration and new people came in, the evolution began and now we’re much farther along.”

“USF World has greatly enriched the possibilities for faculty and students. I can’t tell you how much they have helped us to stretch ourselves,” said education psychologist Darlene DeMarie, who established a model child care center at the University of Limpopo on a Fulbright in South Africa.

More than 120 Peace Corps volunteers have earned master’s degrees under the tutelage of James Mihelcic, a civil and environmental engineering professor, first at Michigan Tech and since 2008 at USF. Mihelcic, a prolific researcher, was recruited to be a 21st Century World Class Scholar, a distinction created by the Florida legislature. He finds low-tech solutions to water and sanitation problems in developing countries and heads a multi-university consortium that recently won a $3.9 million National Science Foundation grant to recover energy, water, and nutrients from wastewater.

Mihelcic said the Peace Corps volunteers in his master’s program are equipped to tackle complex sanitation problems. “It’s a scarce skill set,” said Mihelcic. “The Peace Corps has had trouble attracting and retaining engineers overseas.” Cohorts of 20 students spend two semesters at USF studying not just environmental engineering, but anthropology and global health. “Part of our job is to get students to understand you can do a lot of behavioral change besides the technological solutions,” he said.

Still Building “Who We Are”

In separate conversations, administrators and faculty alike describe USF in terms that suggest a large canvas still being painted. As Davis-Salazar, the anthropologist, put it, “We are still building who we are.” It is a collegial undertaking. At the helm of USF World, Holbrook has displayed a prodigious capacity for organizing and putting forward her own ideas, but she said they are “only the starting point. What’s exciting is other people’s ideas.” More than 100 faculty are involved in workgroups fleshing out USF’s international vision plan and coming up with metrics to gauge the university’s progress. “We want people to know about it and be excited about it,” Holbrook said. “When you do it by yourself, it’s just out there for everybody to attack, and that’s what I hope everybody will do.”

“There’s no doubt that the needs of international students are on the minds of most people at the university.”

The words have been backed up with dollars and actions. Wilcox, the provost, said, “We have invested and created a budget for USF World in difficult times.” Even with a 25 percent, $104 million cut in state appropriations over the past four years, “we had the focus, the discipline, and the strategic appetite to say the world is important and USF World is important.”

“This is a high-energy university,” said Wilcox. “This is an incredibly ambitious set of goals….We all realize that being a 50-something-year-old institution if we aspire to the level of achievement we do, we’re going to have work harder than other, older institutions because they want to improve and get better, too. We’re not going to sit still. There’s so much more to do.”

The ties that bind both the international and the multicultural student services offices at St. Cloud State University (SCSU) are particularly strong, reflecting the conviction of campus leaders that it is incumbent upon them to prepare students for a world far more diverse than the central Minnesota communities where the overwhelming number of undergraduates grew up. The multicultural student services office is deeply involved in the arrangements for education abroad programs in South Africa, Laos, and Thailand that are aimed especially at students of color who trace their ethnicities to these parts of the globe.

President Earl Potter III said his institution is the leader among the 31 institutions in the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system—which is separate from the flagship University of Minnesota—“in developing curricular and co-curricular learning opportunities in support of multiculturalism and internationalism. We approach these two aspects of awareness as part of the same continuum, with distinctive characteristics but connected through the imperative of educating our students for life.” 

A partnership with Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU) in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, dates back to 1995, when Professor of Ethnic Studies Robert Johnson, History and African Studies Professor Peter Nayenga and Director of Multicultural Student Services Shahzad Ahmad began a semester-long program on comparative race relations. “It is a transformative personal experience,” said Johnson. Ahmad, a Pakistani-born SCSU alumnus, said, “It engages a very different set of students who typically have not participated in study abroad.” 

Now SCSU sends students to South Africa for two to three weeks over spring break as well. Junior Tashiana Osborne, 21, went as a freshman. Osborne, a leader in the National Society of Black Engineers, said it “was like a flashback” to the segregation era in the United States “even though I never witnessed that.”

SCSU also sends faculty and staff to South Africa for professional development, and nursing students for clinical practice. Nearly 600 students, faculty, and staff have made the journey since the partnership began. SCSU spends $500,000 a year making such international study and research opportunities possible.

In-State Tuition for International Students

Under the leadership of Potter, a no-nonsense former Coast Guard captain, Provost Devinder Malhotra, an Indian-born economist, and Associate Vice Provost for International Affairs Ann Bos Radwan, who directed the Fulbright Commission in Cairo for more than 20 years, SCSU is now seeking to make international study, research, and experiences an integral part of life for all 17,600 students and 900 faculty. This is taking place on the heels of wrenching budget cuts and a reorganization that eliminated 26 of 200 academic programs.

SCSU ranked 13th among master’s level institutions in Open Doors 2012, with 1,250 international students. The largest contingents come from Saudi Arabia (180) and China (170), but the campus also draws 131 students from Nepal and an equal number from African nations. One lure is that international students effectively pay in-state tuition simply by volunteering twice each semester at cultural events on campus or in the community. That shaves $6,000 off annual tuition and “makes us very competitive,” said Radwan, who calls it “a champagne education at beer prices.” 

Malhotra said that when he came to St. Cloud in 2009, he found “an institution in quest of an identity. Regional comprehensives are in an awkward position within the hierarchy of higher education. We are not RI (research) nor are we community colleges, but nobody tells us what we are,” he said. Still, that meant it was well poised to define a new identity.

Frank Diagnosis of Strengths and Weaknesses

Potter said there had been some strategic planning and talk about becoming “a global university” before his arrival in 2007, but it was merely “a stake in the ground with nothing underneath.” What was really needed, he decided, was “action planning.” Potter commissioned an International Vision Task Force composed of a dozen faculty, deans, administrators, and staff. The report they produced in 2011 contained some unsparing language: the past approach to internationalization had been “unsystematic”; education abroad programs were weak, with too many students going on island programs taught in English; domestic and international students stayed to themselves within “mono-cultural” groups; international activities were largely “decorative”; and partnerships with universities overseas were “idiosyncratic,” not strategic. The task force laid out a vision and strategy for SCSU “to be recognized as the most innovative comprehensive university for international education,” with faculty winning grants for international research and businesses vying to hire graduates because of their international understanding and experience. 

The university also pared a prolix mission statement to 13 words: “We prepare our students for life, work, and citizenship in the twenty-first century.” Potter said, “It was important to be clear and direct, and to anchor our future work.” Imparting global and cultural understanding is one of four pillars of what SCSU calls its learning commitments to students (the others are active and applied learning, community engagement, and sustainability).

“We have to ask ourselves how do we create a curricular design and delivery (system) that recognizes the rapidly increasing globalized nature of our society and economy…and gives our graduates a sense of awareness and ability to operate in such a world.”

Malhotra said it isn’t just a question of sending more students abroad or boosting international enrollments. “We have to ask ourselves how do we create a curricular design and delivery (system) that recognizes the rapidly increasing globalized nature of our society and economy…and gives our graduates a sense of awareness and ability to operate in such a world.”

Breaking Out of the Minnesota Bubble

Eighty-eight percent of undergraduates are Minnesotans. About 400 students a year study overseas. By graduation, 13 percent have had an international experience. An added challenge in meeting the global citizenship goal is that many students are transfers who spend just two years at SCSU. Mikhail Blinnikov, a Moscow-born geography professor and director of the Global Studies program, said, “Our job is to catch them early.”

Seventy percent of Minnesotans trace their ancestry to the Scandinavian countries and Germany. But Minnesota is also a state with a welcome mat out for new immigrants and refugees, including Hmong who fled Laos after the Vietnam War and more recent arrivals from Somalia. “My classroom looked a whole lot more Scandinavian when I came in 1980,” said Professor of Communications Studies Roseanna Ross.

Still, Minnesotans “have a very strong affinity for their state,” said Professor of Geography Gareth John, who has known tourism majors to turn down great jobs that would have required them to relocate. 

“The presence of international students “really enriches the community in St. Cloud,” she said. Too many Minnesota students “stay in their safe little bubble. I think they are missing out.”

Graduate student Amy Lindquist came from small-town Spicer, Minnesota (population 1,167), and seized every opportunity at SCSU to internationalize her education. Lindquist taught intensive English classes filled with students from China and the Arab world, and won a Fulbright assistantship to teach English to high schoolers in Bulgaria. She spent another year studying at Universidad de Concepción in Chile and now is eyeing a career in international education. The presence of international students “really enriches the community in St. Cloud,” she said. Too many Minnesota students “stay in their safe little bubble. I think they are missing out.”

Strategy and Serendipity

Radwan, an economic historian, has drawn on her extensive experience in the Middle East to deepen the university’s existing international partnerships, forge new ones, and look for more opportunities overseas. “We’ve sorted the world into the areas that the State Department uses—Europe and Eurasia, South and Central Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific—because that’s where the funding usually is. We’re looking at each and asking, ‘What do we do in this area?’”

Potter stressed the need to think strategically about partnerships, but allowed there is “a bit of serendipity” in all of them. “Nepal for years has been one of the largest sources of international students on this campus. I can’t tell you how we got started, but the numbers become their own justification for relationships.” Potter has been a commencement speaker at Pokhara University in Nepal. In May 2013 SCSU sent five students and a professor to study social and environmental issues in Nepal’s mountain regions. “We’re beginning to do things in Nepal that we would not have chosen to do without this long-term pipeline of students,” the president said. 

Supporting China’s “Angel” on Mission to Improve Special Education

SCSU has had relationships of long standing in China, but Professor of Special Education Professor Kathryn Johnson opened a new chapter by enlisting the university’s support for Chunli “Angel” Zhao, who has overcome enormous odds to become a champion for disabled children in her homeland. She was born with brittle bone disease and dwarfism and raised in Yangshuo, a scenic fishing village that then-President Bill Clinton visited in 1998. Angel’s parents were told by local officials to keep the teenager out of sight. Later an American ex-pat, Chris Barkley, took Angel under his wing, taught her English, and hired her as receptionist for an eco-friendly mountain lodge he built in Yangshuo.

Johnson, once a UNICEF consultant in Beijing, met Angel there in 2011, brought her to St. Cloud as an intern in the Educational Leadership program, and made it her mission to arrange for Angel to meet Clinton at last. The costs of attending a Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York almost proved prohibitive, but Potter told Johnson he would pay for it. “We got there and it was magical,” said Johnson. The former president not only greeted Angel, but brought her up on stage and promised support for her efforts to build a model school and teacher training center in Yangshuo. Angel “could have been a victim of circumstance, but now she is the leading advocate for people with disabilities in China,” Clinton said.

Finding Roots and Relatives in Laos

SCSU has sent more than 250 students, most of them children of Hmong refugees, to Laos and Thailand over winter breaks. That program is led by Political Science Professor Shoua Yang, a refugee himself. Many Hmong youth in Minneapolis and elsewhere still struggle with adjusting to U.S. life. The high achievers who make it to college “don’t understand their heritage, culture, and how their parents just struggled in the past. It’s the missing piece of information in their past,” said Yang.

The winter 2012 class filled in that piece for Allen Yang, 21, a junior majoring in information systems, and his freshman brother who met their grandmother and uncle for the first time. “It was a really emotional experience,” said Yang, president of the Hmong Student Association. “It’s really about finding your identity, which is what every college student does.” Now Yang encourages as many Hmong-Americans as possible to visit Laos, including his parents, who are planning a homecoming 40 years after fleeing as newlyweds.

A Lesson From Nepal

Chemistry Department Chair Lakshmaiah (Ram) Sreerama taught biotechnology at Tribhuvan University in Kirtipur, Nepal, as a Fulbright Scholar in 2010–2011. He said only half-jokingly that he gets more respect from his students since winning the Fulbright. Sreerama grew up in Bangalore, India, and still recalls the impact on his life by a U.S. professor on a Fulbright who gave a science lecture at his high school. “He gave me all kinds of ideas. That was always lingering in the back of my mind,” said the biochemist.

Sreerama marveled at how much Tribhuvan’s graduate students achieve in rudimentary laboratories. That has allowed him to raise the bar for chemistry majors. “I tell them, ‘Look at all the resources and the technologies you have. How come we can’t accomplish that?’ I use that all the time—and they like it, they absolutely like it.”

An Internationalization Push Still in Infancy

SCSU also won a 2013 Andrew Heiskell Award for a wide-ranging partnership and student exchange program with Universidad de Concepción in Chile that was launched in 2001 by Robert Lavenda, professor of anthropology.

Notwithstanding all the laurels, administrators and faculty alike concede there is much to be done. Some but not all the dozens of recommendations in the visionary plan laid out in 2011 are being implemented, including adding more language study to education abroad programs and offering both homegrown and third-party opportunities. 

Business Dean Diana Lawson, a member of the International Vision Task Force, said the university now has “a manageable framework” for international activities, and once a governance structure is “cemented in the institution, it will be easier to expand the scope and scale of what we do.” Likewise, Radwan said, “Now that we have the basics down, we need to deepen them.” Dan Gregory, associate provost for research and dean of graduate education, said, “Our international agenda is in its infancy. We’re just starting. We’re going to be in a very different place in five years.” 

Amid dizzying growth in communities ringed around north Houston, the newest expansion of the 78,000-student Lone Star College System will add just 300 to 350 students—in Jakarta, Indonesia. It is a modest enterprise by Texas standards but is in keeping with other Lone Star efforts to internationalize the education it delivers at its six colleges to all students—2,000 of whom are international. 

The architect of this expansion is Chancellor Richard Carpenter, who as a foster child in Louisiana foresaw a future painting houses before a music scholarship to a community college altered his personal trajectory. He became at 29 the country’s youngest college president in a Kentucky community college and ran systems in Nevada and Wisconsin before becoming Lone Star’s chancellor in 2007. He is a veteran of several economic development missions abroad led by governors and has seen how much interest there is among foreign leaders in building U.S.-style community colleges of their own to expand opportunity. “They look at it like they discovered gold,” said Carpenter, who sits on the board of Community Colleges for International Development, Inc. “We are American ambassadors. We take the American dream and plant it around the world.”

Magnet for International Students

Lone Star, founded in 1972, was North Harris Montgomery Community College District before adopting its current name in 2007. Lone Star’s enrollment stood at 49,000 in 2007. Its growth surge was fueled by the recession that sent unemployed workers to community colleges to improve their job prospects. Local voters approved a $420 million bond issue for expansion in 2008, and in 2012 Lone Star opened a sixth campus, University Park, in office space that once was the headquarters of Compaq computers. But a half-billion dollar bond issue was rejected in May 2013, which may apply the brakes to future growth.

Houston, a global center for the oil and gas industry, remains a powerful magnet for international students. Houston Community College enrolls 5,800, more than any other two-year college. Lone Star was fourth in 2011–12 with 2,000 and has had as many as 2,500. They pay $5,000 a year in tuition, a quarter of what University of Houston charges. “What a gift to get a solid education here and transfer that to a four-year university,” said Nithyanantha J. Sevanthinathan, Lone Star’s chief international officer who heads strategic global partnerships, and “Nithy” to everyone. 

Internationalizing the Faculty

Lone Star committed itself to an international course when it established an International Programs and Services (IPS) office in 2004. Nithy, the first director, formulated the framework and implementation. In 2008 IPS began awarding $4,000 Faculty International Exploration (FIE) awards to encourage faculty to internationalize the content of their courses and create education abroad programs. Fifty-five faculty have shared $270,000 in awards. The first went to then-band director James Stubbs, who visited jazz festivals in Europe and returned the next summer with students who performed at the famed Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland and in Italy. “We felt like celebrities,” said Stubbs, now dean of arts and humanities at Lone Star-Kingwood.

Only 41 students studied abroad in 2011–2012, even with the college offering 15 scholarships up to $2,000. “Program cancellations due to low enrollments have been the biggest challenge,” said Malaysian-born Nithy. Six of ten courses offered for summer 2013 were cancelled. Lone Star-North Harris Art Professor Eric Sims has tried unsuccessfully to run an art appreciation program to Spain, but said, “I haven’t given up. Many of these students have never been out of Houston. This is a life-changing experience.”

Stirring Imaginations

Still, Lone Star faculty have taken students to Italy, China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania, and the FIE awards are a powerful stimulant for faculty imaginations. Lone Star-CyFair Psychology Professor Lori Richter and Adjunct Professor Davida Rogers took 16 students in June 2013 to Tanzania, where they studied orphans and children at risk, performed service, and took a safari in the Serengeti. Richter, a former Peace Corps volunteer in The Gambia who also lived in Kenya, said, “I just want our students to experience my experience. I want them to feel like the whole world is open to them.”

Christopher Garcia, 19, a business student and the sole male in the Tanzania group, saved money from several jobs to go. “I’ve been looking at study abroad since I got to Lone Star,” said Garcia, who helped organize a community service project last spring in Houston that drew more than 300 volunteers. Garcia aspires to become an international businessman and when he does, “I want to be culturally sensitive.

Like Richter, Lone Star-Montgomery Spanish Professor Norseman Hernandez, who grew up in poverty in Honduras, embodies a passion for education abroad. “I was one of the kids selling food to people on buses. It’s been a long way for me to be here,” said Hernandez, who’s led students to Mexico twice and Chile once.

“My classes aren’t just about uno, dos, tres, and Ola! Como está? They’re about the world,” said Norseman, who as a boy dreamed of being a pilot. He uses Google Earth in his classes and assigns students to make presentations on different parts of the world. “I also learn. It’s like I’m traveling and I’m there, too,” he said. “I’m not in a cockpit, but I get to go wherever I want now.” 

“I’ve been looking at study abroad since I got to Lone Star,” says Garcia, an aspiring businessman. “I want to be culturally sensitive.”

International Education Conferences

The pride of Lone Star’s international programming is the International Education Conference it has held each spring since 2004 where prominent speakers address global issues and Lone Star’s own professors give workshops on their international  explorations. The conference sprang from a Title VI international studies grant that the North Harris campus won in 2002. “Everything international comes from that grant,” said Anne Albarelli, dean of academic affairs at North Harris. She and Theresa McGinley, dean of instruction in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Business and Economics Division, spearheaded that effort and today serve on the conference planning committee and the IPS Council. 

Lone Star has spent $60,000 on the conferences over the years. The keynote speaker at the 10th conference in April 2013 was Middle East expert Mark Kimmitt, a retired brigadier general and U.S. State Department official. Lone Star has also piggybacked with the World Affairs Council of Houston to host such figures as Lech Walesa, the former Polish president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. McGinley, whose parents survived World War II in Poland, said she always brought international perspectives to her U.S. history courses. Today more than 70 Lone Star courses carry an international studies designation.

Nithy is the impresario of the conferences. He was an international student once who came to Minnesota to pursue opportunities largely unavailable to Malaysia’s Hindu minority. With Fulbright support, he earned a peace studies degree and two MAs while organizing bicycle treks across the United States, South America, and Africa that schoolchildren followed online. “My dream was to journey the whole world on a bicycle,” said Nithy, whose father was a shipyard laborer.

Saving Vietnamese Parents Money and Visiting Wall Street

The largest number of international students come from Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Nepal. Some live with relatives in Houston and commute to Lone Star. The six campuses are more suburban than urban. “They look like (international students’) image of what an American college looks like,” said Melvin Anthony of Lone Star-CyFair, one of 14 international student advisers.

That is the route second year student Chi Cao, 20, followed, journeying from Danang, Vietnam, four years ago to live with an uncle in Houston while she completed high school and enrolled at Lone Star. “I decided to go to Lone Star to save my parents money,” she said. They are going to be saving a lot more. In April 2013 she won a $30,000-a-year scholarship that the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation awards to top community college students. Cao is headed to Texas A&M University and looking forward to buying textbooks for the first time instead of reading reference desk copies in Lone Star’s library.

Cao, a finance major who hopes to help Vietnam develop its financial system, revived a moribund international club at Lone Star, won class office, and was on a Model United Nations team that convened in New York. “As an international student, if you only have grades, it’s not going to help you get into a good school. You have to be involved in school and get this on your resume,” she said. Cao got to visit Wall Street on the New York trip. “It inspired me,” she said.

Naziat Khan, 24, was also on that Model UN team, which represented Bhutan, a Hindu country in the Himalayas. Born in Bangladesh and raised in Texas, Khan, who is Muslim and wears a hijab, said it was hard at first “to think like a Bhutanese.” Now she’s convinced that the best way to resolve problems is to “step into somebody else’s shoes.”

Expanding Overseas Without Taxpayer Dollars

Lone Star will offer dual degrees in Jakarta in a partnership with the Putera Sampoerna Foundation. Classes will be taught in English by Lone Star and local faculty. The venture came about after Nithy met a representative of the Foundation at a State Department-sponsored conference. Putera Sampoerna is an Indonesian industrialist whose foundation was looking for a four-year U.S. college to partner with its new Universitas Siswa Bangsa Internasional. Nithy convinced the foundation executive that Lone Star was worth a look. Sampoerna himself visited and liked what he saw.

Carpenter traveled to Jakarta three times and Nithy four times in advance of the opening. “We sat with the people in Jakarta and said, “We have a lot of expertise. We have the curriculum you need, we have instructional designers, we have technology and IT infrastructure, but we don’t take taxpayer money outside of our neighborhood,” said Carpenter. The foundation agreed to cover Lone Star’s costs up front, including salaries and expenses for two faculty and an administrator, with the expectation that Lone Star will repay that after the college starts generating profits.

Getting Used to Accents

Shah Ardalan is president of Lone Star’s sixth and newest campus, University Park. An electrical engineer who was born in Kurdistan, Ardalan was formerly the system vice chancellor and chief information officer. He has a patent pending on a digital career planning system that has won plaudits from the U.S. Department of Education. Ardalan wants to make University Park, which offers upper division classes in partnership with five Texas universities, “a model as the innovative college for the twentyfirst century.” 

Ardalan believes Lone Star should cast an even wider net for international students. “I want to be a reflection of what the real world is. It’s good for (international students) and good for my American students, too,” he said. When a Texas student complained about a professor’s accent, Ardalan told him to get used to it “because you’re going to hear more and more accents. When you pick up the phone, you cannot expect everybody to talk with the ‘nice’ accent you were raised with.” No one else had trouble understanding the professor, Ardalan noted. 

Dreaming in English

Ita Jervis spoke almost no English when she moved to Houston from Ecuador in 2001. She enrolled immediately in ESL classes, graduated summa cum laude from Lone Star and the University of Houston, and today advises international and ESL students at Lone Star-Kingwood. “What I love about Lone Star,” Jervis said, “is that we act. It’s not just words, it’s actions. We’re not waiting for tomorrow. Everyone works together as a team to do the best for our students.”

She often tells students what she told a classmate who addressed her in Spanish when both were ESL beginners: “Right now our mission is to speak English, so let’s practice speaking English within ourselves, because the faster we learn the language, the better we can achieve our goals.”

Her husband, who worked for an oil company and spoke English, told her that she’d know she was speaking the language, not just translating words, when she dreamed in English. The night that happened, she woke up and “just started jumping, I was so happy,” recalled Jervis.

“What I love about Lone Star,” Jervis said, “is that we act. It’s not just words, it’s actions. We’re not waiting for tomorrow. Everyone works together as a team to do the best for our students.”

She also counsels students to believe in themselves. “The first thing that happens when you come to a different country is that you lose your self-confidence, whether you are educated or not, poor, middle class, or rich. You feel stupid,” she said. One day, she assures them, they’ll be dreaming in English. 

Only nine community colleges across the United States enroll more international students than the 1,500 at Green River Community College, and those others are all much larger and in bigger places than Auburn, Washington, a suburb 20 miles south of Seattle. Green River enrolls 8,000 students on a wooded, hilltop campus and two branch campuses. This happened neither by accident nor overnight.

The story of how all these international students got there is a tale that starts a quarter century ago when the board of trustees approved then-President Rich Rutkowski’s plan to create an international programs division under the guiding hand of then-dean of students Mike McIntyre. “World peace through education was always part of my philosophy,” said McIntyre, now retired as executive vice president for instruction and student affairs. Rutkowski, a pragmatic former business manager, saw early on how internationalizing and “looking outward’ could redound to the benefit of the college and a community with a surging immigrant population and where many owe their livelihoods to exports. 

Their first big step was striking a deal to open a small campus in Kanuma, Japan, in 1990 bankrolled by a Japanese politician and magnate who had earlier built a branch for Edmonds Community College campus in Kobe. The arrangement with Green River fell apart in less than a year—Edmonds would close shop seven years later amid a financial scandal—but “it was a launch pad” for Green River’s international activities, said Rutkowski, who retired in 2010 after 27 years.

“The freedom in the early days was unbelievable. Anything was possible,” said McIntyre, who still keeps a hand in cultivating Green River’s international partnerships. Despite the branch’s brief existence, Green River’s name now was known in Japan— classes had been heavily advertised in the Tokyo Metro—and students began journeying to Green River for intensive English classes. When former ESL head and then-executive director of international programs Ross Jennings asked for $10,000 for an exploratory, three-month solo trip to China, McIntyre and Rutkowski said yes. Jennings, now vice president, made fast inroads, convincing dubious U.S. consular officers it wasn’t risky to issue visas for Chinese students to enroll in community colleges. McIntyre said, “We more or less opened China up for community colleges.”

A Running Start

Fast forward 15 years and today 559 of Green River’s 1,500 international students are from China, including teens as young as 16 finishing high school and working on an associate degree at the same time. They enter through a Washington State-authorized program that allows 11th and 12th graders—local or international—to earn both a high school diploma and a college degree. This has not been without controversy. Some faculty are at odds with President 

Eileen Ely over the youngest international students’ maturity, English skills, and readiness for college work. But college officials say the young students who advance out of ESL are earning the same stellar grades—3.5 GPA on average—as older international students. The top sending countries after China are Vietnam, South Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan.

A track record of success in student transfers to universities and extensive support services are the principal reasons Green River draws international students in droves, college leaders said. Arrayed on pegs around the wall of Jennings’ office in the McIntyre International Village (four gray, one-story buildings including ESL classrooms) are colorful baseball hats from dozens of those schools, including Indiana University, University of Washington, University of California-Berkeley, Cornell, and Ohio State.

Home Stays and On-Campus Housing

The college issued bonds in 2003 and partnered with a private developer to build its first student apartments, something most community colleges lack. It is a strong selling point for parents nervous about sending their teens to a distant country. Some 340 local and international students dwell in the 87-unit Campus Corner Apartments, which has a lounge and other amenities but no cafeteria. Many others live with 400-plus host families, while some rent and share apartments and houses on their own.

For $650 a month, the host families provide meals and a room of the student’s own and drive them to campus if there is no bus route. Cyndi Rapier, director of international housing, tells townspeople that “if you’re doing it for the money, don’t do it. You have to value the international experience and value opening your home to these students.” The vast majority do. Deb Casey, vice president of student services, said the students she has hosted from France, Denmark, Egypt, and Afghanistan “have been amazing. It’s been a great experience for my daughter.” Rapier said some students she hosted came back to attend her sons’ weddings.

A Program Within a Program

A staff of more than 50 (including 30 full-time) works with international students. “We’ve become a destination point because of the way we treat our students,” said Ely. “We don’t have the sunshineall-the-time that California has, but we can almost guarantee that a student can get into a four-year institution.” Ely, a Seattle area native who previously headed a Nebraska college, added, “We get accused of handholding the student too much, but I don’t think you can handhold enough.”

Green River, like all 1,600 U.S. community colleges, is an open access institution that offers career and technical courses as well as academic classes. About half its students are on the college transfer track to which most international students aspire, and half of all first-time, full-time freshmen graduate or transfer within three years. Jennings said international students transfer at much higher rates. “What we’ve been able to do is create a program within a program. Our job is to put them on a transfer track and make sure we monitor that every step of the way.” He said 10 percent of students wash out during intensive English, but most transfer.

“I felt like something was missing. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.”

“We’re not unmindful of the fact that they don’t really come to Green River to come to us. They come to get into USC, Washington, Indiana” and other universities, he added. 

Strong Returns on International Education

The main campus is literally in the woods a few miles from restaurants and shops in downtown Auburn, which can be a shock for students from metropolises with millions of people. Green River is considering adding student housing to a branch it has opened in nearby Kent in the middle of an “urban village” teeming with shops and restaurants and on a commuter rail stop. It already offers ESL classes there.

Green River’s investment in Kent has been made possible by the large returns the college has generated from its investments in educating international students. Vice President for Business Affairs Rick Brumfield said that since 1988 the Office of International Programs has generated more than $109 million in gross revenues that netted the college more than $53 million.

That money “has allowed Green River to maintain and expand classes, programming, services, and capital projects that support all students who study at Green River,” he said. “This has been particularly critical during difficult economic times and with the decline in state funding of public higher education.”

Teaching Service and Activism

The international students who come to Green River get not only grades on their transcripts but notations of how much community service they performed. Martha Koch, manager of international student activities, said there is never any shortage of volunteers for projects her office organizes. “They’re at the food bank, they’re planting trees, they might be removing invasive blackberries or helping at the Seattle marathon,” said Koch, jokingly adding, “We could be breaking rocks and they’re like, ‘Yeah! Let’s do it.’” She encourages students to keep a portfolio and show their service certificates to universities when they apply for admission and scholarships.

Yu Sato arrived from Tokyo in 2010 at age 18 for intensive English classes. At first she stuck to her studies and hung out with friends, but “I felt like something was missing. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.” She threw herself into activities and wound up as vice president of student government. The diminutive Sato, who wants to become a research veterinarian, also got a Chihuahua that she carried everywhere, à la Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde. Now the 4.0 student is carting it around her new school, the University of California, Berkeley.

Koen Valks, 19, of Amsterdam, Netherlands, arrived at age 17 to do a gap year on a Fulbright-arranged program before starting at a Dutch university, but stayed for a second year and now has transferred to American University as an international relations major. He was one of Green River’s five “international student ambassadors.”

The son of a former diplomat, Valks aspires to follow in his father’s footsteps. He expressed gratitude to Green River for teaching him how to work with people from many different countries and cultures, a skill “I’m going to use the rest of my life.”

An aspiring electrical engineer, Ugo Nwachuku, 19, of Lagos, Nigeria, also came to Green River at 17. “I don’t think I would have had the right attitude and mental state to carry on and be a good student if I’d gone straight to university,” said Nwachuku, who won a scholarship to Drexel University. This “prepares you for a whole lot of situations in life.”

Studying in Japan and Australia

Education abroad is a tough sell at Green River, as it is at most community colleges due principally to financial reasons, but programs to Japan, Australia, and New Zealand are popular. Sixty-four students studied abroad in 2011–2012. Gary Oliveira, who teaches photography, led Green River’s own 10-week study program in Japan four times. “Many do it on financial aid and loans. A lot don’t get help from their parents,” said Oliveira. “I’ve had students who brought a lunch on every field trip and did whatever they could to cut costs.” 

Among the most popular and longest running is the 10-week education abroad program that history Professor Bruce Haulman, now emeritus, has led to Australia and New Zealand each winter since 2001. It draws 30 students, including some from other Washington community colleges. Haulman had to turn students away from a popular London program in the 1990s. He applauded the support he got from college leaders. “It’s an entrepreneurial model. If you want to do something and it’s not going to have a negative financial impact, why not try?” Haulman said.

Development Works Open a New Chapter

As vice president of international programs and extended learning, Edith Bannister, newly retired, cultivated partnerships with schools in Denmark, France, Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, China, Finland, and Iceland.

Her spouse, Barry Bannister, director of international development, has opened a new international chapter for Green River by undertaking projects for the U.S. State Department. The Australian educator and management consultant has worked on international education projects across Asia and the Middle East for the World Bank and other clients.

Since 2007 Green River has won $1.5 million in U.S. State Department grants to host students from developing countries each summer. Green River is the only community college among four institutions offering the Study of the United States Institutes for Student Leaders (SUSI) program on women’s leadership. Female students from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan took classes in summer July 2013, and in the past students have come from the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India to study communications, human rights, the U.S. Constitution, and gender. Edith Bannister, who directs the project, said, “It’s helped internationalize the faculty.” 

“World history professor Michelle Marshman called it “an absolute gift” to have these students in her classes.”

World history professor Michelle Marshman called it “an absolute gift” to have these students in her classes. Barry Bannister, Marshman and sociology instructor Louise Hull led a workshop in Delhi, India, in December 2012 for 40 past SUSI participants. Marshman stays in touch with them by e-mail and Facebook and got firsthand accounts on the Arab Spring from students in Egypt. “Learning is a twoway street,” she said.

Green River, located in a valley that is a hub of the aviation industry, has provided classroom training for future pilots and air traffic controllers in partnership with institutions in China and Japan.

Soon after veterinary pathologist Tony Frank became vice president for research at Colorado State University in 2000, he was asked by the then-president to accompany him to South  Korea. “I wasn’t horribly enthused,” recalled Frank. “I’d been very focused on my own lab and had almost no connections to international activity. I really didn’t see what value I was going to add or how it was going to have a big impact.” But Frank returned from Seoul “an absolute convert,” won over to the idea that forging strategic partnerships with universities overseas could expand Colorado State’s reach and pay large dividends for its scholars, researchers, and students. “To be honest, I spent a lot of time kicking myself after that for having missed as many opportunities as I had over the years,” said Frank, who went on to become provost and, in 2008, president. He now has logged 12 international trips. 

The land-grant institution, established in 1870 when Colorado was still a territory, is working hard not to miss opportunities these days. It has close partnerships with 17 universities in 11 countries including a new Joint Research Institute with East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai and a robust dual-degree program with the Foreign Trade University in Hanoi, Vietnam. It has stepped up recruitment of international students to the picturesque Fort Collins campus in the foothills of the Rockies. In 2008–2009 there were fewer than 900 international students. Today there are more than 1,650, including a recent influx of more than 400 in its new intensive English and academic preparatory program called INTO Colorado State University. 

CSU is following a script laid out in a 2007 internationalization strategy. Leaders speak of “building the brand” and improving lives “throughout Colorado and the world.” Tom Milligan, vice president for external relations, who spearheads the branding push, said, “Being a global institution is part of how we want to think and talk about ourselves and position ourselves. We’re different from other medium-to-large-size public institutions. The things that we’re good at, like water, biomedicine, and veterinary medicine, we’re as good as anybody in the world.”

Links Around the World

Vice Provost for International Affairs James Cooney said, “The heart of our internationalization strategy from the beginning has been to link specifically to institutions around the world, get our faculty involved with those institutions, and develop joint research.” The hiring of Cooney in 2007 to a new position with elevated stature was also part of that strategy. The political scientist was lured to Fort Collins from Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

One aspect of Colorado State’s story is familiar to public universities almost everywhere: steep state budget cuts, amounting to $36 million or 28 percent over three years before a $6 million bump up this year. Only federal stimulus funds spared Colorado’s universities steeper cuts. The National Science Foundation ranked Colorado last among research universities in state funding per student. Colorado State relies on state money for less than 10 percent of its $911 million budget. It conducted $376 million in research in 2012. 

"President Tony Frank came late to international work but now pursues it with a convert’s passion."

The $220,000 that Cooney’s office had been given to expand education abroad, strategic partnerships, and other activities was shaved by $40,000. But its budget and staff kept growing thanks to $330,000 in added revenues from the spurt in international enrollments and new partnerships in China and elsewhere. “We feel we have one of the best models for working with China,” said the vice provost. China pays for up to 30 faculty to travel to China for research collaborations and steers talented students from a dozen high schools to CSU. Colorado State, for its part, gives each an $8,000 scholarship. It opened a five-person recruiting office at East China Normal University and recently cut the ribbon on a Confucius Institute specializing in water issues. 

A New Pathway “Into” the University

Colorado State is one of four U.S. universities partnering with INTO, a for-profit British company that forms partnerships with universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and China to recruit students and place them in intensive English and “academic pathways” classes with extensive support that lead to regular undergraduate and graduate studies. Provost Rick Miranda said, “We’d like to have more students come from South America, from Europe, from Malaysia and Indonesia. We don’t want to skew things too much toward China.” INTO has moved into renovated Spruce Hall, CSU’s oldest building. Many students live with domestic students interested in world affairs on a floor of a dorm designated the Global Village.

Haotian “Stewart” Wu, a senior business administration major from Hefei, China, is a live-in mentor there. He transferred to CSU as a junior from Anhui Agricultural University on a 2+2 program. He spent summer 2012 as a paid INTO “ambassador” traveling around China marketing CSU at education abroad fairs. The outgoing Wu has friends on the football team and attends games. Football “is pretty boring, but actually I learn a lot” about U.S. culture, said Wu.

The Office of International Programs teams with the athletics and alumni offices to offer a “Football 101” class where international students learn the rules, try on helmets and shoulder pads, tailgate, and attend a game. “They get a real kick out of it,” said Mark Hallett, senior director of International Student and Scholar Services. As many as 200 turn out and “scream with excitement” at kickoff. 

Grooming Gilman and Fulbright Scholars

Colorado State has also stepped up its education abroad offerings and, by raising funds from colleges, departments, donors, and providers, tripled scholarships to $150,000. Director of Education Abroad Laura Thornes said more than 800 students took classes for credit, and 500 took part in noncredit experiences in 2012–2013. Most went to Western Europe, but 115 studied or worked in China and Japan, 25 went to Kenya, and 17 to South Africa. One in six students has studied abroad by graduation. “If we could get to 25 percent, that would be our ideal,” said Thornes.

A push to encourage Colorado State students to apply for Benjamin Gilman International Scholarships paid immediate dividends. Two dozen won Gilmans in 2012 and 2013, more than the previous four years combined. The awards of up to $5,000 go to students who receive need-based Pell Grants. “We worked with all the diversity offices on campus to make them more aware of the Gilman,” said Thornes. Faculty and staff volunteers read and critiqued students’ essays. Accounting major Sabiha Dubose said her Gilman to study in Antibes, France, was “truly a blessing.”

“We worked with all the diversity offices on campus to make them more aware of the Gilman.”

A similar push is underway for Fulbrights. Karen Gardenier, the Office of International Programs’ assistant director for academic programs, works with representatives from each of CSU’s eight colleges. Fewer than a dozen students applied in past years and only a handful won. “We’re hoping to get those numbers up and create more of a culture on campus for Fulbright,” said Gardenier. That effort includes small stipends for faculty to handpick and groom prospects. CSU also increased incoming Fulbrighters in the past five years from five to 35 annually.

International and Arabic studies major Brooke Lake is spending six months in Morocco and Jordan improving her Arabic before graduation. Lake, who volunteers as a cultural mentor to international students, did charity work in Egypt over an earlier summer, which “kick started my passion for the Middle East.” This all took her family by surprise. “They had no idea who their daughter was. My mom was like, ‘Who are you?’” recalled Lake, but now “she loves it.”

Making Music Together

There is a musical quality to CSU’s partnership with East China Normal University. After President Frank heard a concert in Shanghai, he set in motion a collaboration between the two universities’ musicians. East China’s opera director Cao Jin and Todd Queen, chair of music, theater, and dance, quickly “hit it off,” said Queen, a tenor who sang and taught master classes at the Shanghai institution. Twenty-five ECNU students and faculty came to Fort Collins in 2010 and with CSU’s orchestra and choir they performed Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, with its “Ode to Joy,” a universal anthem for freedom. “It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” said Queen.

Mezzo-soprano Carol Perry sang in Shanghai in 2011. The experience was invaluable, she told a college publication. “In the performance world, we have to adapt to other cultures quickly. Not every production or rehearsal will be in your language. You need to be present in the culture you’re in,” she said. Most recently, Chinese and Colorado State students performed The Yellow River Cantata in CSU’s concert hall.

It is not the arts alone bringing CSU and ECNU together. They created a Joint Research Institute for New Energy and the Environment in 2011, with each committing to spend $300,000 annually for three years on the search for clean alternatives to fossil fuels. Wei Gao, a professor of ecosystem science and sustainability who directs the CSU China Programs office and Confucius Institute, also leads this research institute, which works on land, water, air quality, and climate issues.

Playing Pachelbel and Parsing P&G Financials

Since 2008, 32 economics and business faculty have taught compressed, four-week courses at Foreign Trade University (FTU) in Hanoi, Vietnam, which is “trying to reform its curriculum to mimic ours,” said economics professor Robert Kling. “It has really contributed to the internationalization of our faculty and had the unanticipated effect of giving our department more of a sense of community.” Vietnam’s education ministry pays CSU $23,000 for each course taught.

Thirty Vietnamese students spend their senior year at CSU and earn dual degrees. One is Phong Nguyen, who could be found one afternoon in a theater lobby of Lory Student Center playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D on a grand piano. The dual-degree program “is considered the best in our university,” Nguyen said. Classes at CSU were “more practical and down to earth,” added Nguyen, who liked working in teams to analyze a Dell bond issue and a Procter & Gamble financial report. “We’re learning from each other and from doing the projects.”

FTU is a CSU strategic partner. Many of those partnerships have been forged in rapid succession since 2008. Chad Hoseth, director of international initiatives, said CSU is now assessing all 17 and considering changes. “This is a list that evolves to meet the needs of our faculty and students,” he said.

Protecting Tigers and People

Protecting natural resources is a passion at Colorado State and much of that work is conducted on an international scale. Nearly 90 Indian Forestry Service officers have trained at CSU. Social psychologist Michael Manfredo heads the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources, which deals with finding ways for people to enjoy nature without trampling on it. Managing wildlife and natural resources “is 10 percent biology and 90 percent managing people,” said Manfredo, just back from working on an effort to reduce tiger-human conflicts in Dehadrun, India.

The department also offers a Conservation Leadership Through Learning master’s degree that involves a year of classes in Fort Collins and a second year of field work in Mexico. Seven of the first 21 students were international, and the program is expanding to Peru, New Zealand, and Kenya. In the field, Manfredo said, “everybody is a learner. The professors are learning new ways of thinking (just) as the students are.”

Manfredo said the elevated stature of the Office of International Programs helped get that program off the ground. “It sure makes it easier when you’ve got someone appreciative and supportive of what you’re doing,” he said.

Prairie Populism Writ Large

Robin Reid, director of the Center for Collaborative Conservation in the Warner College of Natural Resources, spent 20 years in East Africa conducting livestock research. Support from the top at CSU, she said, “is sparking connections all over the place. It’s causing this cross-campus set of energy and activities that is good for (everybody).” Research ecologist Paul Evangelista, who has worked in Ethiopia for 14 years, said CSU has long fostered his interdisciplinary work. 

Hoseth, the international initiatives director, said, “Our genetics are collaborative.” Case in point: when the College of Business hired its own study abroad coordinator, they placed her in Laurel Hall with the rest of the international program staff.

Hallett, the ISSS director, said, “There’s a bit of the prairie populist about this campus. It’s a land grant, outward-focused (institution) with a lot of idealism,” and now it’s doing extension work writ large on the international stage. 

The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) runs the country’s second largest study abroad operation, sending 2,800 students a year off to earn credits in other countries. It has found that those who study abroad are more likely to graduate. But it bumps up against the same barrier that confronts other institutions, large and small: students are more likely to study abroad if their families have the means to help them afford it. Eighteen percent of all UT Austin undergraduates study abroad, but only 8 percent of those are the first generation in their family to attend college.

To close that gap, the study abroad office launched a First Abroad Initiative in 2010 that has since changed its whole approach to convincing newcomers to college to include overseas study in their plans and helping them afford it. It began by creating a $4,000 study abroad scholarship that is promised to a select group of stellar first-generation students while they are still weighing admission offers to UT Austin. The prospective students are told the Hutchison International Scholarship will be there for them to use any time over the next four years.

The initiative provides more than money. Working with academic support programs, academic advisers, and colleges across the 52,000-student campus, the study abroad program also arranges close mentoring of the Hutchison students that starts even before they matriculate. Some 65 high school seniors are offered the $4,000 scholarships each year; about half accept the admissions offer and become eligible to use the money.

That was only phase one. The next step came in 2011 when UT Austin Study Abroad began awarding $3,000 First Abroad scholarships to another group of first-generation freshmen and sophomores interested in education abroad. Those awards, too, come with mentoring and other support, and the students are given two years to put them to use. Students cannot receive both a Hutchison and First Abroad award, but they are eligible for other scholarships, including $2,000 from the Coca Cola Foundation if they study in China.

Overall, as of January 2014, 248 students had received Hutchison or First Abroad awards and 48 had already used them, but many still have time. Two-thirds of the first cohort of Hutchison scholars and 80 percent of the initial group of First Abroad winners wound up studying abroad. And there’s evidence these first-generation students are persisting in college at higher than average rates.

Convincing Students Before They Can Say No

The scholarships and the mentoring are intended to get these first-generation students thinking early about education abroad and help them choose courses and chart an academic path that will allow them to graduate on time. The early planning also allows students to marshal additional resources and, in some cases, convince skeptical families that education abroad is affordable and makes sense for their daughter or son. The students receive “the most in-depth support we have ever given,” said Margaret Storm McCullers, the coordinator of curriculum integration and special projects.

Putting money on the table was paramount to opening first-generation students’ minds to study abroad. “We had this idea that if money was the thing stopping students from talking with us, then the scholarship was a way to get them to talk before they could say no,” said Heather Barclay Hamir, former director of study abroad. “It really has been a complete overhaul in our thinking.”

These new scholarships were funded largely by a spurt of revenue from an endowment. The College of Liberal Arts and McCombs School of Business added scholarships of their own for first-generation students. The initiative made an extra $220,000 a year available on top of other scholarships for study abroad. All told, UT Austin awarded nearly $1 million for education abroad in 2012–2013.

The infusion of extra scholarship money from endowment funds will be spent by 2017. After that, the International Office expects to have at least $130,000 a year and it is raising funds to supplement that. The goal is to keep awarding 50 to 65 Hutchison and First Abroad scholarships a year.

Lessons Outside the Classroom

Ngan Nguyen, 22, a senior from Houston, “always thought it would be too expensive to study abroad.” But when the nutritional sciences major got an e-mail about the First Abroad scholarship, she changed her mind and signed up for a semester at Seoul National University in South Korea. Nguyen, whose family emigrated from Vietnam when she was a toddler, had been a fan of Korean television dramas since high school and studied the language in college.

In Seoul Nguyen took classes taught in English with Korean and other international students. Apart from the course content, the aspiring pharmacist said she learned a valuable lesson in “how to balance my schedule with working hard in school and then also going out and exploring the country,” including skiing and singing karaoke. “I came back thinking I should keep that (balance) up and this semester I got my first ever 4.0.”

Senior Lorena Watson, 22, became a study abroad peer adviser after returning from a faculty-led program in Santander, Spain. She remembers in high school pitching all the study abroad brochures colleges sent with recruitment letters. “I really didn’t know what study abroad was” before the offer of a Hutchison scholarship came in the mail. “My thing was, ‘Well, if I’m going to this school, why would I want to leave and go somewhere else?’ I didn’t grasp the value of it until I was awarded the scholarship.”

Watson, an education major from Dallas, learned to “be completely myself … and to slow down” while living with a host family that summer in Santander. “My host mother said, ‘You’re so young and pretty and intelligent, you should just enjoy life.’ It’s not the thing we hear in America. What we hear is … to use those attributes until you make it to the top.”

Convergence of Diversity and International Interests

The First Abroad Initiative fostered or deepened partnerships between study abroad and other academic and support offices on campus, especially the Longhorn Center for Academic Excellence, part of the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. One of the fruits of that partnership was a four-week course in May 2013 in Beijing on social entrepreneurship led by Longhorn’s Leonard Moore and Ge Chen. Three-quarters of the 38 students who went were African American, Asian American, or Hispanic and nearly threefifths were first generation.

“Our interests converged,” said Moore, an associate vice president and history professor who teaches a popular course on the Black Power movement. “While we were thinking of ways to help black and Latino kids become competitive globally, the study abroad office was working on these access programs to diversify their programs.” More than half the class received Coca-Cola Foundation scholarships. “We had remarkable support,” said Moore.

This spring, without the lure of extra scholarship money from Coca-Cola Foundation, Moore and Longhorn Center colleague Darren Kelly took 43 students to Cape Town to learn about urban economic development in South Africa and work with children in poor townships. Moore said Beijing and Cape Town were chosen over more traditional destinations to give first-generation students “a truly transformative experience” and “a competitive advantage over their peers.” He’ll take another class to Beijing in May 2015.

Joshua Rosales, a sophomore accounting major from San Antonio, blogged, “I always thought that I had it rough while struggling with school and finding a way to afford it,” but after this experience I realized “how privileged I am compared to the rest of the world.”

“We’ve learned a lot about working with very high-need students,” said Barclay Hamir, who recently became Boston University’s executive director of study abroad. “If money is their biggest worry, this gives us enough time to figure out how they can stay on track academically, do something that captures their interest, and make it work financially.”

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University of Texas at Austin

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When 23-year-old Alfred Murerwa Kimathi returned to Nairobi from a two-week workshop at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, on global water issues, he enlisted fellow Kenyatta University students to prod their university to construct a wetland to mitigate discharges from its own sewage treatment plant. Raw sewage is a dire problem throughout the Kenyan capital, where an aging sewer system serves fewer than half the population of 3 million and many live in squalor without toilets. The effort undertaken by Kimathi and other environmental planning students was a small step in the right direction.

“The workshop had a big positive impact on me,” said Kimathi, who was one of seven Sustainability Fellows selected from research universities in Brazil, Russia, India, China, Turkey, South Korea, and Kenya and flown to Virginia for the July 2013 workshop. They joined George Mason students in an intensive course taught by Dann Sklarew on “Water Management for Environmental Sustainability.” In addition to classroom work, the fellows took field trips to explore the Potomac River watershed, visited the Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation in Front Royal, Virginia, and met with experts from international agencies, the World Wildlife Fund, and Water.org (formerly WaterPartners International).

That workshop was an outgrowth of a 2012 agreement by the eight universities to form a Global Problem Solving Consortium to work on big dilemmas that cross national boundaries, from clean water to food security to climate change. George Mason has been the driving force behind the consortium, with then-Provost Peter Stearns leading the charge. “We have in our strategic plan a deep commitment to global education. This is right at the heart of what we want to be doing,” said Stearns, a social historian who recently retired.

Diving Deeper Into Partnerships

George Mason first invited to its Fairfax campus a senior administrator and faculty member from each partner—University of Brasília in Brazil, University of Delhi in India, Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Istanbul S‚ehir University in Turkey, Kenyatta University, Tsinghua University in China, and Yonsei University in Korea. It already had ties with all of these institutions, but hoped to magnify the impact of earlier collaborations and move in new directions, including joint degrees and team-taught courses.

Anastasia Likhacheva, an economist at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and expert on disputed waterways that cross national boundaries, gave a lecture to Sklarew’s workshop via an online hookup from Shanghai. “It was perfectly organized,” she said. “It was really amazing to discuss Russian water strategies (with students) from the U.S., Europe, Africa, and Latin America. It was as international an experience as possible.” Likhacheva also lectured at a food security workshop, as did Sklarew by videoconference.

Sklarew is a professor of applied ecology and sustainability who once led a learning network for a United Nations project addressing transborder issues among countries sharing watersheds along the Nile and Mekong rivers, the Black Sea, and other bodies of water. He asked the international fellows to research beforehand a water problem in their own countries, then had them work in small teams with Mason students to examine solutions and make presentations. Mason had its own fellow in the group. A dozen other Mason students taking Sklarew’s class for credit also took part. “They were all saying, ‘Wow! This is a lot more than I thought I’d get out of summer school,” he said. George Mason now selects eight to 10 of its own students each year as Global Problem Solving Fellows, who pursue research, participate in international events on campus, and receive $500 study abroad scholarships.

Continuing the Dialogue on Social Media

Mayank Jain, a University of Delhi math and IT major, has stayed in touch with Sklarew and several fellows by e-mail and social media. “It was a lifetime experience and the learning will surely help me in the future,” said Jain, who is designing software to help small towns and villages design and secure funding for clean water projects.

Nélio Machado, a Brazilian high school teacher who was completing a master’s degree, said the workshop “was just fantastic.” Machado, who has published papers on sustainable development and aspires to get a PhD, noted that the workshop addressed not only environmental problems, but also the question of human rights and the conflicts waged over disputed waters.

George Mason’s own workshop fellow, Lindsey Denny, said, “I had no idea that issues of water insecurity throughout the globe are predominantly a woman’s burden.” She, too, is using social media to communicate with “my network of water-savvy friends all over the world.”  

A Work in Progress

Stearns gave a workshop session on the universal right to clean water. Several lectures were videotaped and made available for students and faculty at the consortium universities to watch, along with a dozen lectures by four George Mason professors. A full-fledged online course “is still being worked on,” said Stearns. “It’s a work in progress.” Madelyn Ross, director of GMU’s global consortium and China initiatives, said, “We want to find a way to turn the workshops into digital events as well. We hope to make them more than one-off events.” A second consortium workshop for students was held at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow in July 2014 on food security, and a third is scheduled for summer 2015 at Istanbul S‚ehir University on conflict resolution.

George Mason is accustomed to getting places in a hurry. Founded in 1972 in a Washington, D.C., suburb, it grew rapidly and has become Virginia’s largest public university. Five percent of the 33,000 students are international, and the university sends more than 1,300 students abroad each year. Its strategic plan captures the spirit behind the Global Problem Solving Consortium: “We will prepare our students to thrive in a global context by infusing global awareness, citizenship values, and learning opportunities across all fields, and we will partner with other organizations in solving global problems where our impact will be highest.”

A Modest Beginning, but ‘How Else Would You Start?’

George Mason recently got a $50,000 donation from Cisco Systems to strengthen the consortium’s ability to share information and develop more globally networked learning opportunities. The embryonic consortium has been operating on a shoestring with some outside and some internal funding. But “how else would you start?” asked President Angel Cabrera. “What we have here is the beginning of what could be a global learning platform” to allow more people to work together in quest of interdisciplinary solutions to “wicked” problems.

Mason professor Thomas Lovejoy, a globe-trotting ecologist who has worked in the Amazon since 1965 and coined the term “biological diversity,” helped bring the University of Brasília aboard and taught at the first workshop.

“What’s quite unusual about (the consortium) is the drawing together of a network of student representatives from universities in national capitals, which by their very nature are public service– oriented. This allows a lot of boundaries to be crossed,” said Lovejoy. Those personal ties could “lead to very important things down the line.”

“A lot of good things start without a lot of money,” said Lovejoy, a former environmental adviser for the United Nations Foundation and World Bank. “As long as there’s somebody with vision and drive behind it like Peter Stearns, it should do fine."

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George Mason University

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Hundreds of U.S. cities have sister places around the world, with their interchanges usually centering on trade, tourism, and education. The custom took hold after U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower convened a White House conference in 1956 to promote citizen diplomacy. The partnership between Albion, Michigan, a small town in the middle of Michigan, and Noisy-le-Roi, a similar sized community not far from Versailles, France, fit that mold. It began in the late 1990s and was built on the personal connection between an Albion businesswoman who had once lived in the Paris suburb and a Frenchman who’d been a high school exchange student in Michigan. The partnership, called a jumelage in French, flourished, with the customary visits by civic delegations, youths, and senior citizens, with home stays, concerts, and sports competitions. The mayor of Noisy-le-Roi became a regular at Albion’s annual Festival of the Forks, a community celebration alongside the Kalamazoo River. Faculty and staff from Albion College took part on their own, and French professor Dianne Guenin-Lelle began taking freshmen to the suburb on class trips to Paris.

When the college got new leadership in 2008, it set about turning the bilateral relationship into a tripartite one. Today Albion College has a joint program in sustainability studies with the Université de Versailles at Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ) and its students work with counterparts from two French business schools on projects that include reciprocal visits. Several UVSQ students attend classes and serve as teaching assistants at Albion, and Albion education majors practice teach in the middle school in Noisy-le-Roi.

Provost Susan Conner, whose field is eighteenth and nineteenth century French history, believes this is a model for internationalization that other small colleges might want to follow. “A lot of our success has been through personal relationships that came through the sister city partnership,” she said. That’s something that happens all the time “in a small community at a small college where people see each other, talk with each other, and build programs together.”

From the City of Lights to the American Heartland

Noisy-le-Roi (literally “the King’s Walnut Grove”) and neighboring Bailly (a later addition to the jumelage) are 15 miles from the Eiffel Tower and one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. Albion, out in the Michigan woods 95 miles from Detroit, holds its own attraction for the visitors from France. “For them this is very exotic. This is part of l’Amerique profonde, the heartland of America. It is absolutely a place of wonder, the green space, the natural beauty, the way people are very friendly,” said Guenin-Lelle.

Albion, after a sharp enrollment drop during the economic downturn, enrolls 1,300 students and sends 50 to 60 on education abroad programs each year. It has relationships with more than a dozen universities overseas, some through the Great Lakes College Association, but nothing before like the ambitious partnership with UVSQ, a two-decade-old public university with 19,000 students. It was Noisy Mayor Michel Colin, a retired international businessman, who opened that door.

“He and his wife were staying with us and we were talking in the kitchen about all sorts of things. He knew about our sustainability studies program and said, ‘When you come I’ll introduce you to the president of the University of Versailles because they have a sustainability program, too,’” recalled Conner.

Meeting on the Common Ground of Sustainability

Despite huge differences in size and mission, the two institutions found a congruity between Albion’s Center for Sustainability and the Environment and UVSQ’s master’s degree program and research on développement durable. The joint program includes team-taught international courses, video or online guest lectures, co-op and field research, and study abroad opportunities. Albion elevated sustainability studies in 2013 to a stand-alone major. Albion students now can receive a UVSQ certificate along with their college degree and, if they wish, cross the ocean to earn a UVSQ master’s degree in half the time.

Sara Sample was among the first two sustainability majors. She was a natural fit to study at USVQ since she is also double majoring in French. “I was kind of the guinea pig for the program,” said the 21-year-old junior from Sterling Heights, Michigan, who spent fall 2013 at UVSQ’s Rambouillet campus. Sample, who manages the Albion student farm, took a week of classes at the Bergerie Nationale, a historic sheepfold created in 1784 by King Louis XVI and now the university’s experimental farm. “It was really cool,” said Sample, who wants to return to France after college to teach or pursue research.

While the USVQ sustainability classes are supposed to be taught in English, some professors reverted to French since they knew how well Sample could handle the language. The only culture shock she experienced was when she returned home. “It was a bit difficult not to be able to say, ‘Oh, I can go to Paris right now. It will only take a half-hour by train,’” she allowed.

A Dearth of French Speakers

While Albion welcomes up to five exchange students from UVSQ each year, only two so far have spent a semester at UVSQ and Debra Peterson, director of the Center for International Education, said, “It will be challenging to find students who have the level of French to make it there.” The students from Albion’s Gerstacker Institute for Business and Management do their projects with students from the École Supérieure de Vente (SdV) in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in English. Caitlin McClorey, 21, a junior and captain of the volleyball team, skipped games against two rivals to make the trip to SdV for a week last fall. Her coach was understanding and McClorey called it “one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.” Seven SdV students paid a return visit in April and got to make a presentation on their project, marketing and designing a fitness device, at Albion’s annual undergraduate research symposium.

Albion sent students to practice teach in Costa Rica for the first time in 2013, and Conner said it was the success of students doing their practicum in Noisy that led to the start of that initiative. “We are seeing comparable aspects of a sister city relationship develop (in Costa Rica) as well,” said Conner, who recently retired.

Seeking More Structure, Less Serendipity

Conner’s hope for the future is that the college will become an even greater participant in the sister city partnership. “We’re the latecomer into this relationship. I’d like to see it become part of the fabric so that people plan things a year in advance, that things are absolutely on the college calendar, and that relationships have been so cemented that we don’t need to rely on serendipity to make things happen,” the retiring provost said.

Noisy and Bailly have taxpayer dollars to spend on the jumelage. “We have no budget,” said Guenin-Lelle, although it is not hard to convince Michiganders to go to Paris. All told, 600 people have journeyed across the Atlantic since the sister city partnership began.

“So many activities have grown out of this relationship” that pay dividends for Albion students even if they never “set foot off campus,” said Peterson. But the partnership “requires a lot of tending and a lot of involvement from all sides. It’s been very organic and grassroots, not top down. You never know quite where it’s going except that it’s developing and doing wonderful things for people on both sides.”

Guenin-Lelle, who has taught at Albion for 27 years, said, “This should not be happening by some measures. You look at the different places and ask, ‘What is going on? How can this be?’” What has made it work was that the college “simply said yes to opportunities and understood it’s really people-to-people, not place to place.”

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Albion College

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The Ohio State University (OSU) is imposing by any dimension. Its 64,000 students make it the third largest higher education institution in the United States. The research budget is closing in on $1 billion. Recently it generated nearly a half-billion dollars for its endowment by leasing to an Australian firm the concession to operate the campus parking garages for 50 years. When it piloted an undergraduate mentorship program that came with a $2,000 carrot that could be used for education abroad, it started with 1,000 students. “We don’t do anything small in Ohio State,” said Dolan Evanovich, vice president for strategic enrollment planning.

But five years ago its president, provost, and faculty decided that Ohio State was not sufficiently international. They set out to remedy that in a hurry. Today Ohio State has what it calls Global Gateway offices in Shanghai, China, Mumbai, India, and São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, and it’s eyeing which continent will be next. International enrollments have rocketed from 4,000 to 6,000, mostly due to a large influx of Chinese undergraduates, who now comprise two-thirds of all 3,600 students the world’s largest country sends off to Columbus. Education abroad enrollments have spiked from 1,716 to 2,255, thanks to a switch from quarters to semesters and the introduction of May session courses. Deans of the 14 colleges have embraced the strategy, recognizing internationalization is vital to their mission, not to mention their job evaluation.

Even colleges deeply engaged for years in overseas research and partnerships now see new doors opening. Bruce McPheron, dean of the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, said, “This gateway strategy provides an opportunity not only to build lasting partnerships with other scholars, but with the private and public sectors, just like we do here as a land-grant university.”

What’s taking place, said Vice Provost for Global Strategies and International Affairs William Brustein, is that internationalization has become rooted in “the campus community’s DNA.”

Sherri Geldin, director of Ohio State’s showcase Wexner Center for the Arts, which just mounted an exhibition on the work of contemporary Brazilian artists and filmmakers, observed, “It’s nothing we even have to think about very consciously. It just happens.”

New Leadership and Status for International Affairs

Ohio State wooed Brustein from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009 by elevating the position of senior international officer to the rank of vice provost and including him in the Council of Deans. Brustein also was promised “that he would have the attention of not only the provost, but also the president. Symbolically that’s critical,” said Joseph Alutto, provost at the time and later interim president after E. Gordon Gee stepped down in 2013 (it was the globally minded Gee who set a goal of making Ohio State “the landgrant university to the world).”

“This university was punching under its weight when it came to comprehensive internationalization,” said Brustein, who also was given an office in Bricker Hall on the Oval amidst the rest of the university’s leadership. “A lot was going on in the colleges, but in terms of having signature university programs and an institutional strategy, those didn’t exist.” Kelechi Kalu, a professor of African American and African Studies, was tapped in 2012 for associate provost, overseeing day-to-day operations of the Office of International Affairs (OIA) in century-old Oxley Hall.

A President’s and Provost’s Council on Strategic Internationalization prepared a detailed blueprint for engaging more faculty and students in global learning, teaching, and research. Undergirding the strategy were what the council called its six “pillars”: recruiting more international faculty and students, promoting scholarship on global issues, creating dual-degree programs, developing an international physical presence, increasing international experiences for students, and collaborating with alumni and Ohio business ventures.

Ohio State has embarked on a 10-year, $400 million initiative to hire 500 new, interdisciplinary faculty to pursue breakthroughs on the “grand challenges of the twenty-first century” in three realms: energy and environment, food production and safety, and health and wellness. These Discovery Themes, as Ohio State calls them, all have deep international dimensions.

Understanding the Worth of Global Gateways

Ohio State leaders originally thought the gateway offices could largely cover their $250,000-a-year costs by generating revenues from executive training, which would subsidize recruiting and academic activities. Professors would fly in from Columbus to provide executive training in short bursts. But “the price points for delivering executive-type education in China and India are not what they are here in the U.S.,” said Christopher Carey, a West Point graduate who is Global Gateways director.

The original business model, Brustein said, “was overly ambitious” and undervalued the academic benefits accruing from these overseas outposts.

“We said, ‘Let’s look at what the gateways are doing in terms of assisting the quantity and quality of the students who are coming here, particularly from China, and let’s monetize that. Let’s look at (how) they’re facilitating faculty teaching and research collaborations. Let’s look at the monetary value of the new internships and study abroad programs that we’ve created,’” he recalled. That reasoning carried the day.

New dual-degree programs have sprouted with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and other institutions. The gateways energized local Buckeye alumni, one of whom donated prime office space in Mumbai. With a half-million living alumni, Buckeyes are everywhere. “We just started our own alumni club in Shanghai,” boasted David Williams, dean of the College of Engineering. “We’re building the same kind of network for engineers we have here in this country.” The gateway also gives Ohio State an edge in recruiting “fabulous” Shanghai Jiao Tong students for graduate school, he added.

“None of this is cheap, but if you’re going to do it, you have to do it well,” said Alutto, the former longtime dean of the Fisher College of Business, who returned to the faculty after Ohio State’s new president, Michael Drake, took office this summer.

Ramping Up Student Services and Friendship

As recently as a quarter century ago, Ohio State had open admissions and nearly nine in 10 students were from Ohio. As it raised standards, it attracted more out-of-staters and international students, who together now make up nearly a third of the student body. Engineering and business are the biggest draws for the 6,000 international students.

The emphasis now is not on driving that number higher, but diversifying the pool and improving the experience when they reach Columbus. “We’re concentrating on making sure that our students are well taken care of, feel welcome, and integrate well into the fabric of Ohio State,” said Gifty Ako-Adounvo, international student and scholar services director.

Improved services come at a price. Ohio State in 2012 added a $500 per-term fee to tuition for new international undergraduates to expand academic support and extracurricular programs, provide more English proficiency instruction, and offer more housing options. It also underwrote the $175,000 cost of flying a 10-person team from admissions, international affairs, and student life to China to hold full-blown preorientation sessions for hundreds of incoming students and their parents.

The raft of extracurricular programming includes weekly “Global Engagement Nights” that bring dozens of U.S. and international students together. Xin Ni Au, 21, a nutrition major from Johor, Malaysia, attended nearly every one, became a volunteer Global Ambassador, and exuberantly greeted new arrivals at an OIA booth at the Columbus airport.

Au, a junior, transferred to Ohio State just nine months earlier, but with help from two Malaysian students she found on Facebook, she threw herself into campus life. She’s still surprised “how friendly people are. People smile and say, ‘Hi. How are you?’ and everything. Frankly, you don’t get that in Malaysia.”

Tianxia “Mark” Gu, 22, a senior from Shanghai, also became a Global Ambassador. The gregarious Gu said he was “pretty shy” before coming to Columbus, but now counts more than 50 students as close friends. A self-described “super sports fan,” he “learned the Buckeye pride before I came here.” He credits his American accent to watching reruns of the sitcom Friends back in Shanghai and considers Monica, the perfectionist, a role model. The finance and math major wants to return to China and develop job search software to help people “build their dream.”

Tackling Rabies and Cervical Cancer in Ethiopia

Wide-ranging partnerships in Ethiopia with universities, government agencies, and NGOs testify to the breadth of resources Ohio State can summon to address endemic health problems. Its “One Health” initiative musters administrators, faculty, and students from all seven OSU health science colleges, as well as the business college and others. Already the collaboration has laid the groundwork for a mass campaign to vaccinate dogs against rabies and introduce cervical cancer screening in places where that has never been done.

Spearheading the One Health work in Ethiopia is Wondwossen Gebreyes, a veterinary molecular epidemiologist. “We’ve been teaching courses there every summer since 2009,” said Gebreyes. “For the past two years we’ve adopted the One Health model and expanded the disciplines.” For him, One Health is a way to pay back the poor farmers whose cattle Gebreyes once treated after earning a veterinary degree at Addis Ababa University (he also has a PhD from North Carolina State). “I got all my education in Ethiopia for free on their shoulders,” he said.

Usha Menon, vice dean of the College of Nursing, has journeyed to Addis Ababa four times to teach and prepare a pilot cervical cancer screening program in the Amhara region. A half-dozen nursing students accompanied her on the last trip. Nearly 90 percent of cervical cancer occurs in the developing world, where four of five women have never been screened, said Menon, who came to Ohio State in 2012. “I’ve never seen this level of collaboration at other schools among the health sciences.” Menon encountered fewer bureaucratic hurdles for her screening since Gebreyes already had secured permission from the Ethiopian government for the larger One Health project. “That’s the joy of Ohio State for me. Cross-collaboration makes these things much easier to do. I don’t have to start from scratch,” she said.

“I’ve never seen this level of collaboration at other schools among the health sciences....That’s the joy of Ohio State for me.”

Tom Gregoire, dean of the College of Social Work, made his first visit to Ethiopia with the One Health team and will return to teach a graduate course. Did the College of Social Work need a kick to internationalize? No, Gregoire said, but the strategic plan “sent a signal from the top and created more enthusiasm around it. It’s more sanctioned. There’s a zillion things one can do around here and a good plan helps you choose.”

Teaching Critical Languages

Ohio State has six Title VI national resource centers, including the National East Asian Languages Resource Center. The Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures offers more than 160 language courses and in 2012 received a threeyear, nearly $10 million grant to administer the U.S. State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program to establish intensive summer language institutes at partner universities in China, Japan, and Korea.

Professor Galal Walker underscored the difficulty the United States faces in producing enough graduates fluent in these languages. “There are 200,000 Chinese studying in the United States and about 15,000 Americans studying in China, most in very low-level, short-term classes, sometimes with no language at all,” he said. While Mandarin course enrollments have grown to 60,000 at U.S. campuses, 50,000 are at beginner levels, said Walker.

Walker is doing his part. He runs a two-year master’s program that prepares Americans to work in China-related careers. They do internships in China and spend the second year taking regular classes at a Chinese university. “The idea is to provide our students a basis for having sophisticated interactions with Chinese counterparts, the kind of educated people you meet in large companies and corporations,” said Walker.

Briun Greene, one of those graduate students, first learned Mandarin as a linguist for the Army. Recently he was tapped to serve as the interpreter for a visiting Chinese business delegation at a big trade show in Las Vegas. (The company flew in several of Walker’s students as its guests.)

“You have to be really fast on your feet to do that. He did a great job,” said the professor. The problem is that “very few get up to Briun’s level, which takes 2,500 hours of instruction—more than it takes to earn a law degree.” Greene sees his future as an entrepreneur in China. “I love living in Asia. I felt the most alive there,” he said.

Preparing Stem Faculty for India

When the U.S. Department of State announced in June 2013 that Ohio State had won a prestigious Obama-Singh 21st Century Knowledge Initiative award to expand India’s pipeline for producing science and engineering faculty, astrophysicist Anil Pradhan received accolades as the driving force behind the effort. Two OSU colleagues and a professor at partner Aligarh Muslim University are codirectors.

But Pradhan said “20 to 30 busy people” at OSU and an equal number at the Uttar Pradesh, India, university helped prepare the complex proposal. Ohio State also matched his $150,000 grant and will provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in fellowships to allow future Indian faculty to conduct PhD research, receive mentoring, and earn a master’s degree in teaching in Columbus.

“The idea is to train STEM faculty at the worldclass level,” said Pradhan. “Thousands upon thousands of universities and colleges have opened up in India with practically no (such) faculty.” He hopes to speed up the 10 years of training customarily required.

“Other universities in India are watching this project. It has huge potential,” said Pradhan, who taught radiation physics in India last spring as a Fulbright scholar, one of 14 Ohio State faculty so honored in 2013–2014. Pradhan, who emigrated from India as a teen, had never before ventured outside his laboratory on a project like this, but felt emboldened by OSU’s internationalization efforts. The big U.S. land-grant universities “have the most experience in providing higher education to masses of people,” said Pradhan, and Ohio State can “lead the pack.”

Pradhan is not alone in that belief. “There’s a certain hunger for helping this university realize its goal of global eminence. It’s become everybody’s narrative,” said Kalu.