Study Abroad
Campus-based English language programs may be required to apply for separate, specialized accreditation to maintain their ability to enroll international students, the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed report. A bulletin recently issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) requires separate accreditation for both freestanding ESL programs and those affiliated with colleges and universities that already have their own accreditation.
In a recent interview on WGN Radio, Rajika Bhandari, the Institute of International Education’s (IIE) Deputy Vice President of Research and Evaluation, and radio host Mike McConnell discussed the value study abroad adds to students’ resumes and agreed that overseas experience makes them more attractive to future employers.
McConnell recalled his own daughter’s personal experience:
A growing number of students from the U.K. are considering pursuing a degree abroad, driven by a combination of the increasingly globalized graduate employment market and rising tuition fees in the UK, the Guardian recently reported.
Last Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Chinese State Councilor Liu Yandong “hailed the importance of people-to-people engagement during the third annual U.S.-China Consultation on People-to-People Exchange (CPE),” according to a media note released by the Department of State.
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”).
In her recent remarks to the U.S.-Brazil partnership for the 21st century, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stressed the importance of exchange programs between the two countries as well as President Obama’s 100,000 Strong in the Americas initiative. This initiative aims to increase the number of students from Latin America and the Caribbean studying in the U.S. to 100,000 each year while at the same time sending 100,000 American students to the region over the next ten years, Clinton explained.
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).
