http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/livi ... 155953.htm

Posted on Sun, Nov. 13, 2005

Global Learning

Higher education's worldwide quest for minds and money.

Colleges are cramming for foreign enrollment

Penn and other schools - seeking diversity, a way to grow, and new sources of funding - are determined to lure international students.

By Steve Goldstein

Inquirer Washington Bureau


First of three parts

It was just before 5 p.m. as students - many with families and younger siblings in tow - began trickling into the lobby of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center on Walnut Street. Waiting to greet them were student volunteers wearing badges that read "International Student Orientation."

A cappella chorus music - the tasteful soundtrack of the Ivy League - was playing in the background, and finger food was arrayed on three tables decorated with Penn's red and blue.

Surveying the scene as they clutched drinks were Robert and Dorothy Lai. The head of an investment firm in Singapore, Robert Lai said his daughter Michelle had badly wanted to go to school in the United States.

"I told her if she got into an Ivy League school, she could go," he said, smiling. "So here we are."

The reception last year opened three days of events for 320 foreign-born freshmen, from "getting to know" Philadelphia primers to a public-safety briefing. The schedule seemed designed for parents discomfited by long-distance separation - a feeling somewhat assuaged by knowing that Penn's prestige inspired envy at home.

Shalini Bhutani, director of student services in Penn's Office of International Programs, arrived after registering the immigration documents of freshmen from more than 80 countries.

"Today," Bhutani told them, "you start the process of becoming Penn's representatives to the world."

Elisabeth O'Connell, the director of international admissions, said she was "grateful to see many faces I've seen traveling the world for Penn."

"Penn is going to be a better place for having you here," she declared.

The scene at Penn was repeated this fall at many of America's 2,466 four-year colleges and universities. Internationalizing the campus has become a "core mission," in college-speak, as higher education institutions go beyond U.S. borders to seek foreign students. In this 21st-century age of expansionism, the "new world" for educators is not just Europe, but Asia, Latin America and Africa.

As higher education has become more competitive, schools find themselves in a race to keep up, push ahead, grow, or fall behind. Recently, representatives of five Philadelphia-area colleges and universities, along with David Thornburgh of the Pennsylvania Economy League, traveled to Asia to sell the region as an educational destination.

Globalization in higher education is a natural evolution of the competitive process.

Though 2003-04 saw the first decline in foreign enrollment in 30 years - a dip tied mainly to post-9/11 visa strictures - determination is fierce among colleges and universities racing to attract more international students.

A half-century ago, the Fulbright scholarships became an instrument of U.S. foreign policy, drawing the best and brightest graduate students from overseas and sending them home to become leaders in their own countries, imbued with the heady spirit of American-style democracy.

In recent years, the emphasis has shifted to undergraduates, so that now, with nearly 600,000 foreign students in the United States, there is virtually an even split between undergraduate and graduate students. Private colleges tend to have more foreign-born undergrads, while public universities enroll more grad students.

Selective colleges know that foreigners are immoderately influenced by rankings that appear in U.S. News & World Report and the Princeton Review.

"Typically, prestige matters more to international students and parents than [to] American parents," said James L. Bock, admissions director at Swarthmore College, which also has been increasing its foreign student representation. "Foreign families want to show it to their friends."

British-born David Ward, a 1960 Fulbright scholar, stayed in the United States and eventually became chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the leading public institutions in international enrollment.

"Elites in many developing countries saw the advantage of an English-language education," said Ward, now the president of the American Council on Education, an advocacy organization for colleges and universities.

The United States has benefited - and in unforeseen ways. Philadelphia has a more internationally diverse community as a result, and local high-tech companies don't have to look far for graduates who have the requisite skill set.

This "diaspora of American influence" in the world doesn't mean that foreign students buy into all things American, Ward said, but "they have a sense of having got something of value out of the United States."

The spread of American ideals is one by-product of globalization, but there's a huge financial payoff, as well. Educating foreign students is a $13 billion-a-year industry, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Harvard University government professor Joseph S. Nye, a former State Department and Pentagon official, noted that international students make up the shortfall of homegrown doctoral students in science and engineering.

Ward said: "We tend to underproduce kids with an interest in science and technology, and I don't believe the U.S. would have its digital revolution had there not been a significant East Asian migration of young people to populate those industries. There were certainly many Americans involved, but its depth and dynamism was affected by these foreign students at universities."

Nowhere is the international trend more apparent than at Penn, which leads the Ivies in percentage of foreign-born undergraduates and is among the top 15 universities in the nation in foreign enrollment.

Moreover, each year, more than 600 Penn students spend a semester or a year abroad. U.S. study abroad overall increased by 9.6 percent in 2003-04 to a record 191,321 students.

What is the effect of having foreign students here? Exposure to different cultures. A richer curriculum. An influx of families - read: potential donors - from the wealthier classes of their nations. A diverse campus, which, as long as it doesn't bite deeply into domestic enrollment, many students want.

Eduardo Hernandez, a 19-year-old sophomore from the Dominican Republic, said a family friend told him about Penn, though many of his countrymen attended college recruitment conferences at home where Penn was represented.

"In a world that's increasingly globalized, if you can have that global perspective, then you'll have an edge," he said.

Victoria Sakr, from Bahrain, now lives in the nation of Lebanon. She's a senior at the Wharton School.

"My entire university career is a study abroad," she said. "Being here, I think, really forces you to figure out who you are in the world, how you define yourself. I've also learned more about what America's like from the inside... the politics, the 'bubble' we're in here, the nuances in the culture... . And any time when you get a glimpse into how other people think, it's helpful and teaches you how to get along with people of different backgrounds."

Educators say having a significant number of international students on campus enriches the conversation and therefore the learning for all students.

Globalization at Penn also extends to faculty recruitment. Nearly one-third of assistant professors in the School of Arts and Sciences hold visas. Four of the university's 12 college deans are foreign-born. One of them, engineering dean Eduardo Glandt (Argentina), spends significant time scouting faculty hires. Penn, which teaches 60 languages, can offer many taught by native speakers.

Most surprising of all, perhaps, is the global reach of Penn's fund-raising. As one of the leaders in attracting money from overseas, the school sends dozens of representatives abroad to court international donors.

Robert Lai of Singapore, for instance, is already on their list.

More than 18,000 Penn alumni live outside the United States. International development director Edward M. Resovsky is a fixture on flights to Europe and Asia, spending 12 weeks a year hitting international targets.

"I'm the heat-seeking missile," Resovsky said.

American universities needed to expand their sphere of affluence. One university president likened the rivalry for foreign students, faculty and money to a "world series."

Penn's playing field - and that of many private colleges and large state schools - is no longer the East and West Coasts and everything in between, but Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Events have altered that playing field. In 2003-04, international student enrollment in undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral programs fell 2.4 percent for the first time since 1971, according to the Institute of International Education.

Tightened visa requirements, a perception by some foreign students that the United States is not as hospitable to foreigners as it once was, and aggressive recruiting by schools in other English-speaking countries, particularly the United Kingdom and Australia, have depressed U.S. applications.

In recent years, Australia has opened 17 college recruitment offices around the world. American learning centers do not get federal assistance in recruiting, although some state university systems provide funding for marketing.

Visa problems can be overcome, U.S. education officials say, but international competition is growing.

"We were pretty concerned when the visa issue began to diminish the flow of foreign students," Ward said. "I think we've kind of overcome that. There are still some problems, but, overall, the State Department and Homeland Security have done a pretty good job of handling security while welcoming students.

"There are still some areas where there are problems - the Arab world and China," he went on. "But the difficulties we've had have been mitigated."

Recent statistics seem to support that view. The decline in foreign enrollment for 2004-05 slowed to 1.3 percent from the previous year, or a total of 565,039 - accompanied by actual increases in the number of students coming from top sending countries such as India, according to the Open Doors report by the Institute of International Education.

As competition for Asian students heats up, an increasing number of larger U.S. schools are opening graduate programs abroad. Cornell University, the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and Johns Hopkins University have opened programs in Singapore. Most offer specific degrees rather than an entire curriculum.

At Penn, the idea of globalization has been institutionalized. The school's 2003 strategic plan recommends that Penn "encourage the presence of international students and American students with international interests on the Penn campus."

One tangible result of this commitment is Penn's Center for the Advanced Study of India, the only research institution in the United States focused on contemporary India. As part of the School of Arts and Sciences, the center's mission is to seed a new generation of policy-oriented scholars focused on India and trained in interdisciplinary perspectives.

Said Penn English professor Peter Conn, who served as provost until September, "Globalization is on everyone's quite conscious mind."

Penn president Amy Gutmann has continued the strategy begun by predecessor Judith Rodin of remaking West Philadelphia as an international hub.

"We take pride at Penn in being an American university with a global perspective," Gutmann said. "If you walk across campus, you'll hear languages from around the globe, and our students leave this university with a truly international perspective. We need to continue to attract the best and the brightest students and faculty from all over the world to enrich our places of learning and to remain competitive globally."

According to university-wide figures, the school had a total enrollment of 4,192 students from nearly 120 countries in 2004. There were 320 foreign students in the class of 2008 - tops in the Ivy League. The Class of 2009 has 281 international undergraduates, but dean of admissions Willis "Lee" Stetson said the fluctuation was unintentional.

"Our plan is to keep the international student ratio at about 12 percent," Stetson said. The freshman class was slightly larger this year, so the proportion of foreigners decreased.

"We feel that's a significant number to allow international students to have an impact on campus and to have a diverse population," Stetson said.

When Stetson arrived at Penn in the 1970s, he found a heavily native institution - only about 1 percent of undergraduates were from foreign countries. A strategy was initiated to change that. In the early 1980s, Stetson began traveling in Asia - "They like to see the dean" - and visited the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand.

In the mid-1980s, Elisabeth O'Connell, Swedish-born and raised in Sudan, began managing international admissions, traveling to Europe, Central and South America, and eventually Africa.

"The feeling was we didn't have an appropriate international presence compared to what we could have," O'Connell said. "Plus, it had long-term implications for Penn's development efforts, national reputation, and the school's stature in the world."

Though the Ivy League's image of competitiveness, quality and selectiveness is well-known, Penn's brand is still a work in progress. Foreigners already knew of the Wharton Business School or Penn's medical school. Now the engineering and arts colleges have a good reputation.

"We have what they respect," O'Connell said. "High-quality education at a private Ivy League university, plus the selectivity and prestige they want."

Eventually, the international presence at Penn reached a kind of critical mass.

"We benefited from having an international presence with exchange and grad students," O'Connell said. "This helped attract more foreign undergraduates."

The school avoids the idea of a quota, but its foreign admission target can be considered desirable without being a disadvantage to American students.

"We want a mix," O'Connell said. "We're never going to take a huge number of students from one country."

One interested observer is Penn benefactor Raymond K.F. Ch'ien, a 1970s-era Penn grad student who met his wife at the school and now is the chairman of CDC Corp., a software and Internet services company based in Hong Kong.

During a college visit to Penn with his son, Ch'ien was asked what he would do to enhance the Penn brand overseas.

"You can be seen to be bringing observable benefits to communities," he said. "An example would be to use the Penn medical school to deal with public-health concerns like avian flu or SARS. If you can be seen helping communities, that would really enhance your reputation."

Ward, the former Wisconsin chancellor now heading the American Council on Education, said he learned as a college president how accepting international students quickly fed on itself - producing what he called "chain migration."

"At Wisconsin, we discovered that we had three generations of Thai students," he said. "Once you establish that link, it becomes like their local university.

"When I visited Thailand," Ward said, "I found students whose middle name was Madison."