Should Minnesota business leaders care about internationalized curriculums and student exchange within higher education?

At issue is global competition: Job seekers are now competing with the rest of the world, and it’s not only due to outsourcing. Now, countries beyond the United States churn out more graduates every year in technical fields such as science and engineering, and many of these students have international education or work experience.

NAFSA: Association of International Educators, based in Washington, D.C., is tackling a problem that affects more and more businesses: the lack of employees with international work experience or an understanding of business needs in a global setting. By holding roundtable discussions, one of which took place at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management in February, NAFSA hopes to highlight the need for a global-ready work force in Minnesota and around the world. (The organization was originally called National Association of Foreign Student Advisers, but changed its name as its mission expanded.) The half-day gathering set the stage for NAFSA’s annual conference, a six-day event that will come to Minneapolis in late May. At the February event, Larry Goodwin, president of the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, moderated a roundtable discussion on “International Education and Exchange: the Centerpiece for Global Work Force Development.” At that discussion, a couple of remarkable figures were cited:

››› In 2004, the United States graduated 70,000 engineers. That same year, China graduated 600,000.

››› If every U.S. job were outsourced to China, China would still not have enough jobs to employ its people.

These numbers underscore NAFSA’s work between the public and private sectors, and a key need: improving or creating study-abroad programs where they didn’t previously exist, especially for students pursuing curriculums that don’t traditionally promote overseas study, such as science and technology tracks.

“This is an issue that our board added to our organizational mission a few years ago,” says Marlene Johnson, president and CEO of NAFSA. Johnson served as Minnesota’s lieutenant governor from 1983 to 1991, worked in the General Services Administration for President Bill Clinton, and has been with NAFSA for the past nine years.

“While it’s true that business may not have defined that they want employees who have studied abroad, they do define their needs as wanting people who have cross-cultural capabilities, who have foreign-language capabilities, who are comfortable functioning outside what might be seen as their traditional comfort zone,” Johnson says. “[Businesses want] employees who understand cultural differences and have a good grasp of how the United States fits in the world. What is our leadership role in the world? What are our obligations?”

 

Creative Thinking

Businesses are reaching out to prospective employees in other countries in order to bring in new perspectives and languages, and to open new revenue and expansion possibilities. That puts considerable pressure on universities to react; the problem is, curriculums are often slow to change. Providing more competitive graduates requires input from the business community.

As an example, Johnson cites students in engineering, biological sciences, and professional-services fields. These curriculums typically have very little flexibility: students have almost no opportunity to study abroad for even a short program, let alone a full semester. Internationalized curriculums and study-abroad options are almost exclusively provided to students of the humanities.

While many colleges and universities offer studies in foreign language and international trade, it is only recently that other disciplines have incorporated more of a worldview. The University of Rhode Island, for example, offers a five-year international engineering program that includes foreign-language study and guarantees foreign internships. The university’s business partners orchestrate the internships, make executives available for sharing their experience, and have provided seed money to launch a more internationalized program.

For companies interested in talking to international educators about internship or partnership opportunities, the NAFSA Annual Conference and Exposition will be held May 27 through June 1 at the Minneapolis Convention Center.