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The project will assist institutions working on increasing participation in study abroad, encouraging diversity of participants, promoting health and safety, and enhancing the value of study abroad programs for its students.
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The University of Pennsylvania is like most colleges and universities in wanting to increase the number of its students with international experiences. But while many institutions have focused on increasing their study abroad numbers -- and a select few colleges and schools have even implemented requirements that students study overseas -- Penn has made a particularly big push on promoting noncredit international internships and post-graduation work opportunities as alternative ways for students to gain meaningful experiences abroad.
"Were not trying to undercut semesters abroad or years abroad; we are, however, recognizing the reality that theyre not growing," said Ezekiel J. Emanuel, the universitys vice provost for global initiatives, who speculates this is the case because students today have so many competing opportunities on campus. Semesterlong study abroad at Penn has been fairly flat, with the undergraduate participation rate hovering between 23 and 25 percent, while the total number of undergraduates studying abroad for a full year has decreased from 83 in 2005-6 to just 11 in 2011-12.
Summer and short-term study abroad has been growing, however, and the university is making a push to increase non-credit-bearing international internships and volunteer opportunities.
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A couple of years ago, the WorldWise contributor Francisco Marmolejo pondered whether the United States was moving backward in its connections with Brazil. He was concerned that the U.S.-Brazil Higher Education Consortia Program run by the U.S. Education Department was being hurt by budget cuts. He argued that in a time when higher education was growing in Latin America, there needed to be more, not fewer, programs focused on developing relationships between the United States and Brazil.
He was right about the importance of such links. But things are not so dire as our colleague predicted.
Just a few days ago, President Obama announced a new United States-Mexico Bilateral Forum on Higher Education, Innovation, and Research. "This forum will build upon the many positive educational and research linkages that already exist through federal, state, and local governments, public and private academic institutions, civil society, and the private sector," a press release notes. "It will bring together government agency counterparts to deepen cooperation on higher education, innovation, and research. It will also draw on the expertise of the higher-education community in both countries."
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Since the Boston Marathon bombings three weeks ago, the U.S. government has enacted just one significant security change: It has ordered increased scrutiny of international students coming into the country.
The policy directive, by the Department of Homeland Security, was prompted by news that a Kazakh student who is accused of hiding evidence for one of the bombing suspects had been permitted to enter the United States on a student visa that was no longer valid. The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth had apparently terminated Azamat Tazhayakov's status as an international student weeks earlier, but a border agent at the airport did not have access to that information, even though it had been filed in a federal-government database.
While colleges applaud the steps to improve the sharing of informationand say they should have been made years agosome educators wonder if subjecting every foreign student to additional border screening, which can take up to several hours, is an overreaction. But more than that, they worry that the student-visa system could be scapegoated, as government officials seek to ensure a rattled public that they're taking national security seriously.
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It's decision time for Chinese students planning to study in the United States this fall, and Stacy Palestrant, an independent college counselor in Beijing, has been meeting these past few weeks with families weighing admissions offers.
One issue raised again and again, says Ms. Palestrant, who advises students applying to top-flight American colleges, is, How safe will my child be studying in America?
The death of a Chinese graduate student, Lingzi Lu, in last week's Boston Marathon bombings has received extensive coverage in China. Social media there have erupted both with memorials to Ms. Lu and handwringing over whether families in China's burgeoning middle class should feel secure in continuing to send their children to be educated in the United States, as they have done in increasing numbers in recent years.
Few experts believe that the Boston attacks will cause the 194,000 Chinese -or 764,500 international- students now studying on American campuses to pack their bags. Nor do they anticipate the bombings will lead future foreign enrollments to plummet.
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Professionals in international education have long had to counter stereotypical depictions of the U.S. as a crime-ridden, pistol-packing kind of place, but this week issues surrounding perceptions of international student safety have been especially prominent: not only was Secretary of State John Kerry quoted as saying that prospective Japanese students are deterred by fears of gun violence, but one international student died, and at least three others were injured, as a result of the Boston Marathon bombings.
Boston University has been left mourning Lu Lingzi, a graduate student in mathematics and statistics who was described by The New York Times as "a woman whose aspirations took her from a rust-belt hometown, Shenyang, to Beijing and then the United States." One other Chinese student was reported injured, as were two Saudi Arabian students, one of whom was initially misidentified by some media outlets as a suspect, leading a Saudi embassy official to tell The Boston Globe, "Were concerned about the backlash against students based on a false story." (Officials at the Saudi Embassy did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.)
The numbers of Chinese and Saudi students in the U.S. have grown dramatically in recent years, fueled by a hunger for U.S. education on the part of Chinas growing middle class, on the one hand, and a generous Saudi government scholarship program, on the other. But while the overall number of international students in the U.S. is growing, this may be in some cases despite concerns about safety. An October 2012 report from the British Council shows something of a mixed picture in regard to international students' perceptions of safety in the U.S.: students rated the U.S. in the top five in terms of both the safest and the least-safe countries in which to study abroad. This divided opinion "is no doubt a product of [the country's] size, diverse urban and rural nature, and the national celebrity status generated by its media, television, and sports industries and afforded to it by countries around the world," the report states.
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On 5 April, a large group of colleagues, students and friends gathered in Boston to honour the career of Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education and J Donald Monan SJ professor of higher education in the school of education at Boston College, US. He will retire from his professorship, but continue as director of the centre.
The global gathering was organised to pay tribute to Altbach for his enormous contributions over almost 50 years as a teacher, scholar and advisor, and author of many books and articles on international higher education.
During a one-day seminar, key topics in international higher education were addressed by scholars and higher education policy leaders from around the world - including China, India, Africa, Russia, Europe, Latin America and North America: national and regional challenges for higher education; the international pursuit of excellence; and international imperatives, initiatives and risks.
Altbach, who does not like to put himself on a pedestal, set one condition for accepting this surprise honour: the seminar had to be substantive and its results will be published by the centre.
Look out for its future publication, as together the presentations provided a comprehensive overview of developments in international higher education over the past 20 years.
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The worlds university system is in "chaos" because of the globalisation and enormous expansion of higher education, a leading scholar has argued.
Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, warned that there was "a lot to worry about" in the global sector and that the downsides of these two trends were being ignored.
"Global mobility of students and faculty is higher then at least since the period of the medieval European universities," he told a symposium in his honour held at the institution on 5 April.
But this movement had created a brain drain from the "peripheries" of higher education to the "centres" - North America, Europe and parts of the English-speaking world such as Australia - he said.
"The developing and emerging economies are subsidising the rich countries by educating many through the bachelors degree and then losing them," Professor Altbach argued.
The internet had made the world "smaller" but had not diminished the dominance of the Wests established university systems, he added.
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High school and college graduates are still being hobbled by years of weak economic growth and an extremely tight job market, and that difficult start in the job market could impact the Class of 2013 for years to come, a new analysis finds.
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CHICAGO -- At last weeks Forum on Education Abroad conference, a prevailing theme was the need for universities to be more intentional - and ambitious - in crafting learning outcomes for their overseas programs.
"Our aspirations are weighed down by deeply rooted consumer values, tacit agreements, lets call them, which are abundantly visible throughout the wider American educational system, but which arguably do not serve desirable learning outcomes in study abroad," Lilli Engle, the director of the American University Center of Provence, said in her keynote speech.
Engle criticized the fields emphases on student satisfaction as opposed to measurable learning and growth, on inclusive access versus selectivity and merit, and on the provision of familiar comforts rather than exposure to difference. She bemoaned the focus on increasing the numbers of students going abroad to the exclusion of an emphasis on outcomes, noting in particular data from the Forum that show that only 22 percent of institutions and program providers assess students foreign language acquisition.
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