EDUInsight.com
"Covering Innovation and Best Practice in Online Student Communication"
Journal of College Student Retention and Recruiting for both On-Campus and Online Universities
"Students want to search for schools online, look at school web sites and apply online"
Mark Shay
Chief Academic Liasion
EducationDynamics
Has e-mail peaked?
- The Chronicle of Higher Education asksis email for old people?
- According to a 2005 Pew Internet and American Life study, almost half of Web-using teenagers prefer to chat with friends via instant messaging rather than e-mail.
- Business 2.0 describes a comScore report that statesteen e-mail use was down 8 percent, compared with a 6 percent increase in e-mailing for users of all ages.
Archived Articles
Empowering the Senior International Officers
Globalization is impacting all of our lives. We see its impact everywhere we turn. Business news is filled with articles on global markets, global demand for commodities, global shifts in manufacturing and investment volatility. Global social and political events impact our lives as well, and in education, global interests are now impacting the direction of the industry.
For many, the measure of globalization on American campuses comes from the http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/Open Doors Report from the Institute of International Education. Annually, the Open Doors Report provides a view of higher education’s global mobility by listing the number of foreign students enrolled in American universities, similarly, the number of U.S. students studying abroad. Further estimates are provided to academic sojourns, which are defined to be significant research activity overseas. Open Doors’ data comes from a variety of campus sources, including registrars, international student offices, and study abroad departments, and the information unveils the lack of central coordination of international activity on campus. Open Doors is a noble effort to overcome the basic fact that higher education industry does a poor job of measuring its impact and activity.
1) Study abroad advocates are pushing for greater student participation and are encouraging faculty and program developers to expose American students to the world first-hand. According to Open Doors, study abroad enrollments are continuing to grow; 210,000 American students are reported to have studied abroad last year. Seventy-five percent of these students did so through faculty-led programs, the other 25% through programs offered by third party providers. This number does not include students who may have traveled as part of a domestically-based course or who completed study abroad between a college transfer.
2) Institutional research is increasingly feeling the impacts of globalization. As foreign universities try to model the success of the American research university, they are building their own research capacity and competing for research dollars. As immigration barriers keep many leading researchers from freely moving about the world, American universities increasingly need to collaborate with foreign universities.
3) Partnerships and economic development wherein state legislatures are wanting universities to support local economic development and directing university leaders to foreign markets that align well with their local district's economy. These partnerships are especially noticeable at public institutions where governments are looking to use their state-funded universities to help their local economies prosper. An example of this was demonstrated by South Carolina's focus on German automotive manufacturing through the ICAR project
What each of these areas of activity has in common is a huge administrative burden to document and process international passage and support the logistics of the ever-changing requirements of international short-term residency. Some schools have coordinated administrative functions across their institutions, but only a few have done so at the top of their administrations.
After attending the recent Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA) conference, it became evident that the move to globalize is still a struggle on America's college campuses. AIEA was created to serve people with title’s equivalent to "Chief International Officer," or the people that oversee the internationalization efforts on campuses. Due to the varied management structures at institutions, this title nor any other single overarching title has emerged for this administrative position; therefore, AIEA now supports the designation of "Senior international officers." With this designation, the hope is that these people will report directly to the institution’s chief academic or chief executive to approach the globalization of campuses in more collaborative fashion.
Global mobility is key to the future of higher education. Students need exposure to it and are generally receptive to the idea, along with many of the nation’s top faculty. As universities continue to emerge as the catalyst for our local economies, their international reach impacts those outside the normal university constituency. More and more universities are incorporating "global" into their mission statements and institutional vision, but is it just lip service? Universities of all sizes need a Senior International Officer with authority—someone that is only one step from the top in the university hierarchy to truly make globalization a reality in higher education.
Peter McPherson, a university president and featured speaker at the AIEA conference NASULGC spoke passionately about the future of internationalization and provided an interesting perspective. He proposed that study abroad programs might better serve universities’ overall ambitions by "pulling the cart of internationalization." This approach suggests that, rather than merely placing students in programs abroad, schools should use study abroad to establish true centers of international activity and collaborative efforts. This might entail both bringing U.S.-based campus faculty and research projects and local foreign faculty from the international community. To make McPherson’s vision a reality, however, universities will need someone at the top that can cross institutional boundaries more quickly than international ones—ideally, a Chief International Officer.
EDUInsight.com is a new online interactive journal that brings academic administrators together to understand and debate the issues of the day, analyze and review the latest trends, exchange ideas, and evolve common sense approaches to
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Additional sections of this journal address student recruiting and student retention. We have also placed all articles with a common theme of online education and distance education programs in a separate portal. New articles will be posted each Monday, please check back by bookmarking this site or placing a link to this Innovative Practices in Communicating with Students portal.
Mark Shay is the founder of EDU - a leading academic advertising provider, - part of Halyard Education Partners, a leader in student lead generation and enrollment management services.
