The-Ave.US

Ed.  In a global world, shouldn’t we take the market value of our reputation seriously by recruiting the best students we can to Seattle?  From a tuition POV, foreign students are a blessing .. they pay full boat,  This is a lot better deal than following the pattern of Ashworth University , probably the most profitable accredited school in the US, and turning our attention to creating a surfeit of less than world class competitive students.

The US easily has the best universities in the world … something one could once have said of our cars, televisions, and woolens.  Is the American university next?

McDonalds University anyone?  Attendees at Asian meetings of higher ed expect to see fierce competition for the best students.  The US, however, is notable for its absence.

from the Chronicle of Higher Education

By David L. Wheeler

Taipei, Taiwan

In the exhibition halls and corridors of many international higher-education meetings these days, the same question keeps coming up: Where are the Americans?

That question arose again at the Asia-Pacific Association for International Education’s annual conference here this week. The United States, observed some delegates, acts as if it is the middle of the higher-education universe, waiting for visitors and all too rarely going to visit.

“There’s lots of rhetoric in the U.S. about how important Asia is,” said Edgar A. Porter, a board member of the association and a pro vice president of international affairs at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, in Japan. “But rhetoric and reality have not connected.”

The growth of international higher-education associations, many of them with vowel-heavy acronyms, has been rapid in recent years, as universities in many countries seek students from outside their borders and make internationalization a watchword—some would say a buzzword—of their strategic plans. Attendance at the annual meeting of the European Association for International Education has doubled in the last five years, according to its president, Gudrun Paulsdottir. The number of international higher-education meetings has also proliferated: The Asia-Pacific meeting overlapped with another meeting sponsored by the British Council in Hong Kong, and a conference in India called Emerging Directions in Global Education.

At the meeting here, about 30 of the nearly 900 attendees were from the United States, an official with the Asia-Pacific Association estimated. American universities rented four out of 67 booths on the exhibition floor.

American attendance at many other Asian higher-education meetings is similarly light, and the recent recession can’t bear all the blame, attendees said.

“An interesting question is, Why do the Europeans get it when the Americans don’t,” said Christopher Madden, pro vice chancellor for international at Griffith University, in Australia, and vice president for administration at the Asia-Pacific Association. “The biggest stand in the exhibition hall is the Germans.”

Arnim Heinemann, head of the international office at the University of Bayreuth, is one of about 50 Germans at the meeting. He is spending some of his time at the German booth, which is organized by the DAAD, or German Academic Exchange Service, and has a specialized list of interests as he shops for partners at the conference. Part of his mission, he said, is to help companies in Bavaria, such as BMW, Audi, Puma, and Siemens. They turn to the University of Bayreuth, which has a department of intercultural linguistics that studies the cultural nuances and cues that weave in and around language.

Mr. Heinemann is looking for Asian universities with similar programs, to build on his university’s scholarly strength. Using such a strategy, Mr. Heinemann said, the University of Bayreuth has become popular with the German companies working in Asia. Those companies send staff members to the university for training and want to hire the universities’ students, believing they will be good at working in Asia or negotiating with Asians.

Ole Miss Is Among the Few

Among the few American universities at the Asia-Pacific meeting is the University of Mississippi, which has had a booth at the meeting for three years. “We definitely saw lots of rapid growth after we started coming to these kinds of events,” said Vanessa Cook, a study-abroad adviser with the Ole Miss international-outreach office.

She said the university brings in about 300 international students for short-term stays, including summer programs, English-language courses, and internships. At international conferences, she said, Mississippi finds partners that become a conduit for student exchange and ideas that it adapts in its own programs. Mississippi has noticed, for example, that universities in Britain have summer schools in specialized disciplines and South Korea uses summer programs to introduce students to Korean culture. Mississippi combines those approaches—summer students may take two business classes and also enjoy university-sponsored visits to juke joints, Graceland, and diners where they can get catfish dinners.

Some organizers of international higher-education meetings are satisfied with their American attendance. Ms. Paulsdottir of the European association said that close to 100 of the roughly 3,600 attendees at her group’s annual meeting, in September, were from the United States. “We’re very happy with the American contingent,” she said.

And of course, the largest of the international higher-education meetings, Nafsa: Association of International Educators, usually has its annual conference in the United States. (This May, it is in Vancouver, British Columbia.) But by going only to the Nafsa meeting, international educators say, American universities miss out on building the trust that comes with personal visits and on learning the wider cultural context for potential partners.

Just as at other academic meetings, there is plenty of complaining at international higher-education conferences about whether they are worth attending at all. Depending on the conference, attendees may grumble about booth traffic, conference organization, the level of the attendees, and session content, or the lack thereof. Unlike scholarly meetings, presentations at international higher-education events do not usually wind up in peer-reviewed journals, and are not always vetted for quality. One consultant who has analyzed the official attendance numbers touted by the higher-education conferences found that, at least at some meetings, those numbers don’t always match the tally of people who actually show up.

Clay Hensley, director for strategy and relationships for the international-services division of the College Board, a membership organization with a predominantly American base, noted that the United States has no strong national organization, such as DAAD or the British Council, to pull universities together and help them have an overseas presence. “There’s a lack of central coordination,” he said.

If that situation ever changed, many countries that are competitors with the United States for international students and scholars’ attention would take note. “If the U.S. got its act together,” said Jean-Philippe Tachdjian, deputy director and trade commissioner for Edu-Canada, which promotes Canadian higher education, “it would cream everybody.”