In My View
There Are More U.S. Students Studying Abroad Than You May Know: Worldwide, For Longer Stays Abroad, and in North America
Gary Rhodes
Associate Dean, International Education & Senior International Officer,
College of Extended & International Education
Director, Center for Global Education
California State University at Dominguez Hills
As the 2013 year winds down, I’d like to point readers of the Terra Dotta Newsletter to reconsider the number they use when reporting U.S. study abroad participation. The week of November 11th was International Education Week in the U.S. this year. International Education Week celebrates cooperation between the U.S. and the rest of the world and highlights international learning through student mobility between the U.S. and other countries.
1. Total Number of U.S. Students Studying Abroad
Open Doors only reported 283,332 U.S. study abroad students during 2011/12. That number only included U.S. degree students. If you added the 46,571 U.S. students that IIE reported doing full degrees outside the U.S., the number would be 329,903 U.S. students studying abroad for academic credit during the 2011/2012 academic year. Where does that 46,571 number come from? According to the Institute of International Education report: New Frontiers: U.S. Students Pursuing Degrees Abroad (Belyavina, Li, and Bhandari, May 2013 – (https://www.iie.org/Research-and-Publications/Project-Atlas), there were another 46,571 U.S. students pursuing degrees abroad in just 14 countries (UK, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, China, Netherlands, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, Japan, Denmark, and Malaysia). I was in the Dominican Republic this summer and visited a Medical School where 40% of the students were from the U.S. If data were collected from the Dominican Republic and additional countries outside the U.S., we might find how many more U.S. students are studying outside the U.S.
2. Duration of Study Abroad
In the Open Doors November 2013 report, it appears that only 3.6% (or about 10,200) of U.S. students study abroad for more than a semester; however, when you add the 46,571 obtaining degrees abroad, that total number changes to about 56,771 or over 17%.
3. Number of U.S. Students Studying in North America
The total number of students who earned credit for study abroad in North America in 2011/12 was reported as only 1,639 in the November 2013 Open Doors data. Problem 1: Where’s Mexico? In the Open Doors data, there is only one other country besides the U.S. in North America – Canada. I think that most geographers would agree that the three countries in North America are Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. Adding the 2011/12 data for study abroad in Mexico would increase study abroad numbers another 3,815 to 5,454 and including the full degree students at Canadian universities would add another 9,280 to make the total 14,734. However, the number would be even larger as IIE did not include the number of U.S. students doing full degrees at Mexican universities.
4. Underreporting and the Crystal Ball Effect
Another challenge for the IIE Open Doors Data is that far fewer than the number of total U.S. colleges and universities report data. I think that one of the areas that Terra Dotta Software makes a positive effect on the professionalization of the study abroad field is making more easy access to data. As a Terra Dotta user, you have much easier access to data used in the Open Doors report. Many institutions don’t report and other institutions don’t report each year. I think that there needs to be a bigger push to get regular reports from all U.S. colleges and universities. Many institutions who have not reported in the past don’t get requests from IIE to report. When an institution that reported in the past year doesn’t report, IIE staff creates a new number based on their reading of what that institution might be sending (the Crystal Ball effect).
As I think that we should be including the full degree study abroad, we should also be collecting that data from many more than the 14 countries that IIE collected in their 2013 Project Atlas data.
In the press release for the Open Doors data, a quote is provided by the Assistant Secretary of State for Education and Cultural Affairs (https://www.iie.org/Who-We-Are/News-and-Events/Press-Center/Press-Releases/2013/2013-11-11-Open-Doors-Data):
“International education promotes the relationship building and knowledge exchange between people and communities in the United States and around the world that are necessary to solve global challenges,” said Evan M. Ryan, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs. “The connections made during international education experiences last a lifetime. International students enrich classrooms, campuses and communities in ways that endure long after students return to their home countries. We encourage U.S. schools to continue to welcome more international students to their campuses and to do more to make study abroad a reality for all of their students.
I think Assistant Secretary of State Ryan and most professionals in the international education field would agree that counting all international students who study in the U.S. and all U.S. students who study abroad (degree and non-degree) would be the correct method to use.