Point: Counterpoint

Crediting Study Abroad

Recognizing "Extracurricular" International Experience

By William Hoffa

At least four distinct arguments are made for education abroad as being essential to the higher, broader, deeper, education of U.S. undergraduates:

• The Curricular Argument: Education abroad enriches and diversifies U.S. degree studies by offering courses, programs, and academic learning of a sort often not possible on the home campus yet of a standard which earns home campus academic credit.
• The Cross-Cultural Argument: Education abroad provides American students with an opportunity they cannot experience at home--to learn about their own Americanness, to immerse themselves in a foreign culture (and its subcultures), and to experience first-hand the emerging global culture.
• The Career Enhancement Argument: Education abroad sharpens and deepens career preparation by building future workplace skills of value to employers in the global marketplace, often through internships and other hands-on learning.
• The Development Argument: Education abroad deepens personal and intellectual growth and social maturity, fosters independent thinking, builds self-confidence.

Most U.S. colleges and universities active in study abroad understandably stress the curricular argument as the sine qua non. Educators usually justify study abroad as an academic activity; the other arguments for study abroad receive considerably less institutional acknowledgement, endorsement, or measurement. In marked contrast, when returnees rank the relative importance of these four areas of the educational value of the overseas experience, only a few place what they learned in their courses anywhere close to the top.

Indeed, most students who have studied abroad report that taking courses overseas (which satisfy various degree requirements at home and qualify them for financial aid) was largely a means to the other educational ends they either sensed in advance or discovered overseas. The old undergraduate adage, "Don't let your studies get in the way of your education," has found new life in their current convictions about the value of study abroad.

This apparent rejection of the importance of formal course work does not necessarily mean--as faculty and others often conclude--that the courses taken abroad are not worthy of credit. Rather, it suggests only that students honestly feel they learned much more of equal or more significant and life-changing value outside of classroom demands. While, out of legitimate concern over the meaning and integrity of the institutions' degree, faculty members and administrators focus on curricular considerations, student motivations, interests, and needs go far beyond their formal studies. They center instead on learning as much as they can about themselves, about life as it has been and is now being lived in the broader world beyond American campus borders, and about what they need to know in order to prepare themselves to succeed in "the great penultimate thereafter" in the very globalized world they will enter after graduation.

Crediting Study Abroad

The main reason institutions emphasize the curricular dimensions of overseas study is that creditability is something they assume they can assess via academic policies and standards already in place. Crediting study abroad is almost a self-fulfilling prophesy: by preapproving programs and course work to be taken overseas (and assuming that student performance will be meritorious) the credit-worthiness of study abroad becomes almost a given. This ready solution may not address the question of whether study abroad represents an extension and diversification of the home campus curriculum or a duplication of it which simply happens elsewhere. But it does suggest that as long as the curricular fruit of study abroad is viewed as nothing more exotic than an orange, it can be readily linked with the apple of home campus study. Students, on the other hand, seem to be saying that this is not the main course of their overseas nourishment, merely a palatable dessert.

Admittedly, study abroad becomes a practical reality for students only when course work taken overseas can be articulated with home campus studies. About 80 to 85 percent of students who study abroad do so sometime during their junior or senior years, when they must become serious about fulfilling course requirements in their academic concentrations. The curricular relevance of study abroad is therefore paramount. Depending on the campus, student, and program, residential or transfer credit can be earned variously: to satisfy general education or broad degree requirements, or to fulfill academic major, minor, or elective requirements. There are very few academic fields for which at least some overseas course work is not now available, as demonstrated in the subject indices to IIEs Academic Year Abroad and Vacation Study Abroad and Peterson's Study Abroad.

Most campuses which support study abroad thus have policies allowing students to receive as much credit for study abroad as they would for the same time spent at home. With the promise of credit, moreover, federal and often institutional aid becomes available.

Since the institutional aim is to insure timely student progress toward that institution's degree, it is usually possible for the registrars to determine how many students got what kind of credit for study abroad. Therefore, campus advisers and administrators, in conjunction with the faculty, usually have ample evidence and known criteria for analyzing and assessing the relationship between campus courses and courses taken abroad.

Discrediting Extracurricular Learning

But U.S. colleges and universities have yet to learn how to assess the educational value of the other kinds of learning which students know are not only inherent in the overseas experience but are central to its meaning and set it apart from domestic study.

Such learning is usually lumped under the loaded term, "experiential" and dismissed as something with which campuses need not concern themselves. The logic seems to be that since such learning is given little account at home, why should it be counted when it occurs far from home.

Some study abroad advisers and administrators even deem this part of overseas learning to be something incidental, not central, to the experience and something which cannot and should not be confused with "rigorous academic study" (see Ken Lewandowski's Point: Counterpoint piece, "Experiential Learning Must Be Its Own Reward," Transitions Abroad, July/August 1997). On the other hand, Margaret Pusch ("Where Credit is Due: Recognizing the Benefits of Intercultural Experience," Transitions Abroad, March/April 1997) and John Sommer ("Crediting Study Abroad," Transitions Abroad, November/December 1997) both urge that academic institutions do a disservice to students by not understanding how experiential learning abroad can be raised to a conscious, formal level of comprehension and intellectual analysis.

The challenge before international educators during the formative decades when study abroad was a new phenomenon in American higher education was to demonstrate to campus faculty and administrators that course work taken overseas could be as worthy of the award of credit as courses taken domestically. This battle, as we know, has largely been won. The challenges which remain concern what most international educators and almost all students know in their minds and hearts, namely that taking and passing courses represents only a small portion of the total educational impact of living and learning in another country.

Thus, apart from the debate over how much extracurricular learning is creditable, it is neither healthy nor honest for colleges and universities to pretend that the rest somehow doesn't matter and has little to do with what they stand for as educational institutions. Students know that it matters tremendously.

This pretense of academic mean- inglessness forces students to think of this part of their education as accidental and surreptitious; it makes colleges and universities seem intellectually lazy and parochial. Not to acknowledge the importance of cross-cultural understanding in a world ever more culturally diverse, of the need to prepare students for careers in the global job market they will enter, or of acquisition of the personal maturation essential for any further intellectual and social growth, is surely to sleep before dawn.

BILL HOFFA is an independent consultant in international education.