Exchanges in the media
The New York Times reported on the new Interim Final Rule (IFR) for the Summer Work Travel (SWT) program, released this past Friday by the Department of State. The IFR (currently available on the ECA website) will be published in the Federal Register this week.
NAFSA: Association of International Educators posted two items on its blog this week: one tackling the issue of “Higher Education’s Stake in the Immigration Reform Debate,” and the second focusing on new Pew data on Mexican migration (“there may now be more Mexicans going back to Mexico from the United States than there are coming in”).
While it is still the third-most studied language in the U.S., American students’ interest in German as a foreign language has declined significantly, the New York Times recently reported.
The number of international graduate applications for education programs in the U.S. grew at almost double the rate as that of applications to other master’s and doctoral programs this year, Inside Higher Ed recently reported.
The South Korean higher-education system is increasingly internationalizing, according to a recent Chronicle of Higher Education blog post.
“South Korean universities are pushing hard to make an even bigger impact in the world and, at least to judge by rankings, confidence levels and the state of their campuses, they are clearly succeeding.”
U.S. university faculty are increasingly realizing that their students’ education “‘about’ the world must be supplemented with an effort to learn ‘with’ it,” iEARN-USA’s Director Emeritus Ed Gragert writes in a recent Huffington Post blog post.
International graduate student applications to U.S. institutions for this coming fall have increased by 9 per cent compared to 2011, according to the recently released annual report of the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS).
An increasing number of South Korean parents are sending their children to study in the U.S. at young ages, leading to a large number of “split families,” according to a recent AP article.
An increasing number of public schools in rural areas throughout the U.S. are recruiting international students to fill empty classroom seats and boost revenue, Reuters recently reported.
Back in January, writing in the New York Times, former Harvard President and Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers asserted that “English’s emergence as the global language…make it less clear that the substantial investment necessary to speak a foreign tongue is universally worthwhile.” A variety of voices wholeheartedly disagreed, arguing that learning a foreign language makes an English speaker more globally competent and thus more attractive to employers; improves cognitive ability; and generally makes life a lot more interesting.
