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Studying up on study abroad
In the wake of last winter's student loan scandal, the public is newly aware of the need for transparency in higher education--and now comes the latest revelation. Monday's New York Times broke a corker of a story about how study abroad programs engage in conduct that is at once ethically questionable and costly for students--and in response, academic officials are scrambling to explain themselves.
The Times reported that at many schools, study abroad programs are run through for-profit companies and non-profit institutes that give perks to schools in exchange for sending students their way. These include "free and subsidized travel overseas for officials, back-office services to defray operating expenses, stipends to market the programs to students, unpaid membership on advisory councils and boards, and even cash bonuses and commissions on student-paid fees."
Are the students the first concern? By no means. Students typically pay full tuition to their home institution while studying abroad; the school then pays the students' abroad tuition and pockets the often considerable difference. Worse, students who wish to strike out on their own to save money run into trouble--the Times tells the story of a Columbia student who spent his junior year at Oxford's Magdalen College, only to find that Columbia refused to transfer credit for the courses he took there. He wound up staying where he was, and graduated from Oxford rather than repeat his junior year at Columbia.
The Times article caused quite a stir--and prompted an immediate response from higher education officials and external providers. In the story, Brian Whalen of the Forum for Education Abroad noted the need for greater transparency so that students know whether their costs or choices are affected by their schools' arrangement with external providers.
"We're all wringing our hands about how to make it possible for lower income kids to participate in study abroad," Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, told the Times. "But one of the reasons it costs so much is all this institutional mediation."
And, in follow-up articles published at Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education, college administrators and study abroad companies acknowledge the need for greater accountability when it comes to how individual colleges and universities run their study abroad programs.
As Eric Lund, who directs international and off-campus study at St. Olaf College, told Inside Higher Ed, "If individual schools are making deals on the basis of special offers like that, and if the assumption is that the provider is going to be able to monopolize a market, or expect something in return, there are reasons to be concerned about relations like that. ... It raises questions about ethical standards ... in our field if some arrangements like this are going on."
Peggy Blumenthal of the Institute of International Education agrees: "Disclosure is really the key issue," she told Inside Higher Ed. "It's really the realization--and maybe schools are not always as quick to come to this as they need to be--that today we just need to disclose all of our ties that we have with business providers. And that's true, ever since the new accounting rules for for-profit companies and now, increasingly, for not-for-profit companies. You're expected to disclose."
Although a number of study abroad officials have criticized the Times for overstating the problem, no one is arguing that change is not needed. Currently, about 200,000 students study abroad each year, and about 20 percent of those go through independent providers. But as more and more schools are requiring study abroad for graduation--higher education's goal is to send a million college students abroad each year by 2017--the cozy business practices associated with study abroad programs are coming under growing scrutiny.
Today's New York Times reports that New York attorney general Andrew M. Cuomo has begun an inquiry into universities' relationships with study abroad providers. On Wednesday, his office delivered subpoenas to five such providers--with a promise of more to come. The inquiry grows out of that office's work on the student loan system. "As our investigation continues to expand," said Benjamin Lawsky, Cuomo's deputy counselor, "we are finding that more and more vendors who do business on campus are there because of the cozy relationships they have developed with the schools. The question is whether those relationships help the schools at the expense of students."
Posted by acta online on August 16, 2007 at August 16, 2007 04:03 PM
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Comments
INVESTIGATE TEXTBOOK PUBLISHERS
Look at the academic book publishing giants. Check the textbooks that have large numbers of “contributing” editors. See if those “editors’” colleges bought the textbook in question.
Then ask non-involved experts how those textbooks compare with others in the field.
Post the results. Prepare for whining.
Posted by: B.D. at August 16, 2007 06:53 PM
We have to be careful about how broad a brush we use to paint study abroad programs. Some study abroad programs, very often the ones with the glossiest catalogs, are little more than over-priced guided tours of world capitals. Others are solid academic and cultural exchanges.
My own university, for example, is working very hard to send more of our students abroad through direct exchanges with other schools, rather than backroom deals with travel agencies. We, however, have a good deal more in the way of global resources than most comparable schools would.
Good reform of study abroad programs would not just eliminate abuse, but would also suggest alternatives for students who are at schools without the international resources of schools like Troy University.
Posted by: Richard Scott Nokes at August 16, 2007 08:38 PM