Point: Counterpoint

Know Your Enemy

Confronting the Case Against Study Abroad

By Bill Hoffa

Back in the 1960s, when the world was rife with politics and revolution and mistrust of authority, the counsel to “know your enemy” was passed back and forth in the trenches of oppositional life. By this we meant that we shouldn’t assume that everyone thought the way we did, even though they should.

These cautionary words came back to me recently when I was visiting a campus and having what I thought was a friendly conversation with a faculty member about studying abroad. Suddenly, he caught me up short with a remark which revealed how different our opinions were on the subject. I realized that we international educators spend so much time with people who agree with us about the value of the overseas experience that we can lose touch with what we are up against when we meet people who think differently. When they not only think differently but, as in this case, say what they think, it can be a bit of a shock.

What follows are some of the arguments we might hear if we listen carefully to the case still being made on U.S. campuses against study abroad. I have heard every one of them, at one point or another, as have most of us. Faculty or administrators who hold such beliefs are not of course “the enemy.” Indeed, they are our erstwhile colleagues, our friends, and even our bosses. And if we want to win them over to the cause of international education it will not do to underestimate or misunderstand what they are saying and why they are saying it.

Do you have your arguments ready to answer these?

Study abroad ought to be a privilege, not a right. Only the very best students should be allowed to go abroad, and only after they have demonstrated intellectual, emotional, linguistic, and social maturity. Average students will waste their time simply coping with the foreign environment and will not be able to learn anything which could not be better learned at home.

Study abroad competes with on-campus programs and takes good students out of classrooms, especially during the junior year when they should be getting serious about their academic major. Not only are the courses taken elsewhere are not as rigorous as they would find at home, the students will pick up poor study habits, read and write less, and often mix with U.S. or foreign students who have inferior backgrounds and motivations.

Students abroad are marginalized by foreign universities and programs, even in English-speaking countries, because they do not have the same training and background as native students. In non-English-speaking countries they are marginalized even further, because they do not have the language skills or cross-cultural understanding to be integrated fully into foreign institutions or social life. They spend too few hours in the classroom and library; instead of studying, they travel too much and have too much fun.

Students return ill-prepared for the demands we make on them during their senior year, having earned “easy” credits while their counterparts who remained on campus worked harder and learned more.

(Those faculty members who are generally supportive of study abroad—for “selected” and “qualified” students—are not usually connected to the advising process which decides which students are “allowed” to study abroad and which programs and courses best meet their academic needs. Indeed, the direction students receive is too often influenced by nonacademic counsel, by program hype, by the exotic allure of “getting away,” by trendiness, and by friends rather than by scholars.)

Study abroad, if it cannot be resisted, should be carefully articulated with “our” curriculum, where the program design represents an expansion and diversification of what is available on campus. If students do other programs, these can be justified only if serious course work is done in the major. Or, alternatively, no course work in the major ought to be done off campus and only general or elective credit should be granted.

Study abroad is unfair to the students who do not study abroad and undermines the meaning and standards of our degree if credit is offered equally to these quite different types of learning. So, let those who wish to live abroad do so, and, if they wish to, enroll in programs or universities. But let us not use institutional resources, especially financial aid, in support of something whose academic quality is something we suspect is inferior to our own. Or at least is of a different order which we can neither measure nor control.

Students say positive things about their study abroad experience when they get back to campus because, understandably, they want credit for time they spent away. If they were completely honest about what they did and learned, if they knocked the programs they were in, this would undermine their shaky case for credit. So they say what they know people want to hear, and we (especially advisers) are too-willing believers who suppress our skepticism. We too have bought into this mythology, and it is in our interests to keep mum.

Students returning to campus do little to help internationalize the campus or bring what they learned into the classroom or their courses. Mainly, they hang out together, smugly showing off their new clothes and manners and talking wistfully about how to return to the easier, richer, and more exotic life they had abroad, marveling at how lucky and how smart they were to be able to escape for that fun semester or year someplace else.

Transitions Abroad welcomes your thoughts on the above. What are the best ways to confront the nay-sayers with arguments they might find convincing? Please write us.

BILL HOFFA is an independent consultant in education abroad.