Within the next 10 years, we can expect that international students will see some further redistribution throughout the world. Already, countries such as Singapore, China, Malaysia, South Korea, and India are working to transform their knowledge economy and to develop national strategies to position their higher education institutions in an increasingly competitive world. As they make their programs more attractive to their own students, we might expect fewer to travel to other countries to earn their first degrees.

The latest NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates shows that in 2006, two Chinese universities (Tsinghau University and Beijing University) contributed the most undergraduates to U.S. Ph.D. programs. Fifteen of the top 50 universities on the list are outside the U.S; 9 are in China, 3 in South Korea, and India, Taiwan, and Turkey each have one.

This global expansion of educational excellence has enormous potential to benefit the world by yielding transcontinental opportunities for research into urgent global problems, such as climate change, energy, and infectious diseases.

Kofi Annan may have said it best with this quote. “Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family…On its foundation rest the cornerstones of freedom, democracy and sustainable human development.”

            But how do we advance the concept of a global education today? 

            Universities traditionally have taken a two-fold approach to internationalism: foreign student recruitment and study-abroad programs. These efforts have yielded some success.

            Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that “America’s mission in this new century must be to welcome more foreign students to our nation.”

Certainly, international students bring cultural diversity to university campuses. They also have a major economic impact. In 2006-07, international students contributed about $14.5 billion to the U.S. economy through their expenditure on tuition and living costs.

Notably, most international students in the U.S. are graduate students; at Penn State they comprise two-thirds of our international student population. Grad students tend to be attracted to an institution to pursue specific research or professional interests. They are a productive but often insular group that usually lives off campus and socializes with smaller, more homogeneous groups.

Conversely, undergraduate students often live in residence halls and may have more opportunities to interact with a broader population in clubs, organizations, and classrooms. The relations formed can go a long way toward building goodwill and lasting respect among young adults. It would serve us all to recruit more international undergraduate students.

Another way to make our universities more international is to integrate global perspectives into the curriculum. This shouldn’t be confined to one “International Perspectives” course within a major. It is crucial that humanities, social sciences, arts, and business course content reflect variations across countries, cultures, and time periods.

Yet, the American Council on Education’s publication Mapping Internationalization on U.S. Campuses: 2008 Edition found that many institutions do not see internationalization as integral to their identity or strategy. Less than 40 percent of institutions made specific reference to international or global education in their mission statements, although that is an increase from 28 percent in 2001.[1]

In addition, the percentage of colleges and universities that require a course with an international or global focus as part of the general education curriculum dipped from 41 percent in 2001 to 37 percent in 2006.  Less than one in five had a foreign-language requirement for all undergraduates.

 This is of some concern. Fluency in a foreign language is a key component of an international education.

 It’s said that if you speak three languages, you’re trilingual; if you speak two, you’re bilingual; and if you only speak one language, you’re American.

 The fact that English has become the second most spoken language and is the language of international commerce doesn’t lessen the importance of encouraging competency in a second or third language. Over one billion people speak a form of Chinese, while Hindi and Spanish are a close third and fourth to English.

There has been some good news in the area of study-aboard. The proportion of institutions offering education abroad opportunities has grown sharply to 91 percent in 2006 compared with 65 percent in 2001.

 The model of a semester or year abroad is still effective, although it is important to offer additional experiential options in the summer and over holiday breaks so more students can participate. A 2007 survey by the Institute of International Education found that 56 percent of those studying overseas are enrolled in programs that are shorter than a semester.

 I’ll end my comments with a quote from the late United States Senator J. William Fulbright who said, “We must try, through education, to realize something new in the world -- " by persuasion rather than by force, cooperatively rather than competitively, not for the purpose of gaining dominance for a nation or an ideology but for the purpose of helping every society develop its own concept of public decency and individual fulfillment.”

Thank you.