Point: Counterpoint

The Global Job Market

Why Today's Study Abroad Programs Are Often Inadequate

By Bill Hoffa

Almost axiomatic for many years has been the notion that any study abroad experience will not only enrich the studies of American students, but will also internationalize them and increase their qualifications for employment in the global job market. Indeed, this pragmatic argument for study abroad is often prominently advanced in campus debates with faculty and the administration, in appeals to doubting parents, and in study abroad promotional literature. Since little evidence beyond the anecdotal actually exists to prove this widely-held truism, it has tended to carry the wishful campus day.

When an overseas study program is supplemented with some sort of practical training, such an internship or actual paid work, te pitch for the practicality of study abroad seems almost irrefutable.

But according to a recent Rand Corporation/College Placement Council Foundation study, simply living and learning for a period of time in another country will not automatically make students more qualified for international employment. See Corporate Hiring in the '90s in NAFSA's magazine International Educator, Winter 1995. The average study abroad experience, it is asserted, is too short and too insulated from the life and values of the local foreign culture in which it takes place.

An Americanized experience, while occurring on foreign soil, does not provide the strong language training coupled with intensive exposure to another culture which global employers say they are seeking. Those in the worldwide job market and those who hire for it stress that the supply of cross-culturally competent U.S. job candidates is scarce.

There seems to be a contradiction between what most students do when they study abroad and the practical career benefits they and their institutions think may accrue from this experience and what employers are actually seeking.

Short-Term Programs Prevail

So, why are so few of the 75,000 or more U.S. students who study and work abroad each year qualified for positions in the global job market?

The answer to this question has to do, in part, with the fact that as the absolute number of students studying abroad has increased slowly and steadily over the past 25 years, the average duration of their overseas stay has shrunk dramatically. According to the most recent IIE figures, Junior Year Abroad enrolls only about 16 percent of all students studying abroad. Semester programs enroll about 38 percent, also a declining percentage. Short-term programs, on the other hand, enroll 45 percent. (If anything, this figure might be even higher, since it is widely felt that the largest number of undercounted students in the IIE survey are those who take winter-term courses abroad or participate in summer study tours or language study.)

Further, student motives for going abroad, and the nature of the programs in which they participate, emphasize the earning of U.S. academic credit, often in highly specialized areas. This emphasis is understandable: it qualifies students for financial assistance and articulates their overseas coursework with the home campus curriculum. But such practical and academic accommodations have often come at the expense of full language and cultural immersion. Surrounded by each other and by an Americanized classroom and social environment, and not being abroad long enough to enter the indigenous local environment or get to know its people on their own terms, too many students return with credits in place, having usually had the proverbial good time, but not cross-culturally educated.

Us Versus Them

If we compare the number of students from other countries who are studying in this country with the number of U.S. students studying elsewhere over a single year the current export/import imbalance is approximately 450,000 foreign students here to approximately 75,000 Americans abroad, a ratio of about 6-1. But, taking into account that all but 2.1 percent of the international students on U.S. campuses stay for two to four years, the durational imbalance and its inevitable cross-cultural impact mushrooms to about 35-1.

Obviously, this imbalance is testimony to the quality of U.S. higher education. It is also an economic boon, fills college classrooms, and satisfies instructional and research needs in our universities. But is there any question why corporations active in the global economy are turning to non-U.S. students? Can we really learn what we, as the self-proclaimed leader in world economic, military, and diplomatic affairs, need to know about life beyond our national borders with such a minimal (and shrinking) commitment?

Diversity of Options

The trend in U.S. study abroad toward more programs of shorter duration has developed in response to a number of laudable principles, as well as hard necessities. Such study (and work) abroad programs have made it possible for a huge body of previously disenfranchised students to be able to afford the time and money to participate. Within these numbers are many students with a minority racial and/or ethnic heritage, those who attend two-year colleges, are older, or otherwise have been shut out of more expensive and demanding semester and year programs.

Further, short-term programs have successfully addressed the need to spread study abroad across the academic curriculum. Students majoring in technology, science, business, education, architecture, communications, and other disciplines requiring specialized and usually sequenced studies can enroll in credit-bearing programs that do not interrupt progress to their degree. Such programs also frequently involve faculty members and contribute to internationalizing the home campus curriculum. When such programs are set up as exchanges, they bring to the campus students from other countries. Moreover, a program that maximizes opportunities for cross-cultural stimulation can result in follow-up participation in longer overseas ventures.

The Value of Immersion

However, when short-term or even semester programs represent the only option an institution allows, it often deprives students of the fullest benefits which can come from education abroad, the opportunity to get in under the skin of a foreign culture and, conversely, to see themselves and their own culture as others do. This essential immersion is not, of course, merely a byproduct of more time spent abroad, since other personal and program factors can inspire or retard its achievement. But the chances of the high-level language and cultural understanding that employers in the global job market are demanding clearly increase exponentially with time spent learning and living overseas.

Shorter programs are more focused. Earning U.S. academic credit must be of primary consideration and this usually means time spent in Americanized learning environments. Further, the proportion of time needed to deal with the logistics of entering, settling in, and leaving, as with the unavoidable sightseeing, can easily dominate other program objectives. These practical necessities may exist in longer programs, too, but proportionally matter less. The longer duration gives students the chance to learn, see, and ponder local values and history; to balance the imperatives of earning U.S. credit with the intensities, vagaries, and dynamics of experiential education.

We have learned how great the personal and intellectual impact the right short-term program can be for the right student. But one of the unintended consequences of this lesson has been a subtle undermining of the broad educational value of the full-year, full-immersion academic program. Even when JYA dominated study abroad, its benefit was seldom defended as something of practical career value except perhaps than for those going into language teaching. Now, given what employers hiring for the global marketplace say they are seeking, the pragmatic value of a longer commitment which allows and inspires deeper cross-cultural learning is evident. While any and all serious overseas educational ventures by U.S. students are likely to contribute something to their education and world view, we owe it to them to encourage them, where and when possible, to seek the greatest challenges and concomitant rewards.

BILL HOFFA is an independent consultant in international education.