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Institute of
International Education
809 United Nations Plaza
7th Floor
New York, NY 10017
USA
Tel: +1 (212) 984 5367
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In-Country Consortia: Rethinking Collaboration in Education Abroad |
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By Joseph L. Brockington
The Lincoln Commission’s goal of one million U.S. students studying abroad within a decade is ambitious. It will require an almost five-fold increase in the 205,893 study abroad students reported by IIE in the 2006 Open Doors. In addition to the massive amount of funding, reaching this goal will require unprecedented collaboration among colleges, universities, programs, and providers in the U.S. and abroad, as well as new models for such collaboration.
Fortunately U.S. colleges and universities have learned to work together in any number of different arenas and that collaborative spirit is particularly evident within education abroad. We are familiar with the three basic types of consortia in Education Abroad as described in NAFSA’s Guide to Education Abroad for Advisers and Administrators (2005). In a “Partnership Consortium”, collaborating institutions share “equally in the obligations (both financial and administrative) and benefits of the program” (361-2). With an “Agency Consortium,” the responsibility for the logistical and academic details of operating the programs abroad is transferred to an independent agency, often a not-for-profit or NGO (364). Finally, many “Providers” operate on a quasi-consortial model. They differ from agency consortia in that the provider retains autonomy and final authority for all decision-making, although there is often a path for advisory input from participating colleges. In each of these consortial models, programs are typically known by the name of the consortium, agency, or provider, not by the name of the sending institution(s).
Working against the collaborative spirit of international educators at home, particularly in the area of education abroad, is often the very goal that should bring us together. As “Internationalization” has gained credence as an institutional and curricular goal, it has also found its way into university brochures, admissions websites, grant applications, and the general marketing strategy of the institution. Thus, while it seems readily apparent that, at least with regard to education abroad, institutions would want to collaborate in order to ensure that more students can study abroad at financially sustainable rate; it is equally understandable that institutions may choose to go it alone, in order to be able to use the results of their efforts in a marketing campaign and for “branding.”
The desire of colleges and universities to choose a more autonomous path with regard to their education abroad programs can be seen in the results of an unpublished study by Gregory Wegner and Derek Vaughan (2004-05). As part of the Global Partners Project, a consortium comprising the 42 liberal arts colleges of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM), the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) and the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA), Wegner and Vaughan polled international offices as to which study abroad programs their students were participating in. Although the results do not reflect a 100% response rate, they are nonetheless revealing.
• 6 colleges sent a combined total of 838 students on 58 of their own programs.
• 10 colleges sent a combined total of 76 students on 13 direct enrollment programs.
• 10 colleges sent a combined total of 15 students on 5 consortially sponsored programs
The remaining more than 900 students participate in 218 programs sponsored by other institutions or providers.
This is significant for several reasons:
• There is a great deal of duplication of programs and effort (even within individual colleges).
• There is an enormous export of tuition dollars, and
• There is a corresponding enormous export of institutional financial aid dollars (in the neighborhood of 5 million dollars using the average discount rate from the College Board National Association of College and University Business Offices’ (NABUCO) latest survey data for private 4-year colleges (2006).)
Despite these realities, these 42 institutions (and many others) have yet to give much serious consideration of new models of collaboration that might begin to address them.
In addition to the three consortial models mentioned earlier, colleges with space available in one program abroad have also tried trading their “empty seats” for space in another institution’s program. However, like any exchange relationship (or a tuition remission plan) one needs to pay careful attention to balancing inflows with outflows. A second alternative is for the program with the empty seats to make these available to other colleges at deep discounts (a “wholesale” price so to speak). The financial arrangement needs to be between institutions for Title IV Financial Aid reasons. Both of these arrangements suffer from the critical shortcoming that in the end MY students will be participating in YOUR program. While it is true that consortia require care and nurture, and thus staff time beyond the day-to-day business of the study abroad office, the greatest impediment to consortial collaboration seems to be the loss of the institution’s ability to claim the program as its “own.”
One answer is to take the “Agency Consortium” model and move it entirely overseas. Thus, the collaboration among the U.S. colleges and universities becomes mostly invisible back home, because it occurs in country. An in-country consortium allows all cooperating U.S. institutions to claim they have their “own” program(s) abroad, while at the same time, they work together to save money, expand the educational opportunities for their students, and often build the international capacity of the host institution. An in-country consortial arrangement differs from other types of programs such as direct enrollment or freestanding foreign programs in that the U.S. partners retain final authority for the academic and logistical operation of the program.
Typically this type of collaboration has a local person or agency (or NGO) to manage things. This is crucial—the greatest timesavings will come from having someone locally to make arrangements, hire staff, do housing placements, arrange courses, rather than try to do this from the U.S. The greatest cost savings come from having two or more institutions benefit from the efforts of this individual or NGO. It is silly to have the same language instructor teach the same course to different groups of students from different colleges at the same time for separate stipends when combining the groups would save money and offer the possibility of making several different levels of the language available to students. The benefits of an “in-country consortium” are much the same as with any consortial or collaborative effort:
• Time savings by having a local agency, NGO, or personnel to manage local arrangements
• Cost savings by having collaborating programs share
• Academic staff (lecturers, language instructors)
• Classrooms
• Computer/Library facilities
• Housing/Homestay coordination
• Arrival and departure orientation
• Academic, intercultural, and interpersonal counseling
• Administrative staff
• Cost savings through greater bargaining power with local vendors based on larger quantity
• Coordinated attention to health, safety and emergency issues
Finally, this type of arrangement allows public and private institutions to collaborate despite the differential in tuition. Because each institution is paying the net local cost for the services it wishes for its students, each institution can set its own fees (and can base these on financial aid net dollars). Moreover, because this is the institution’s “own” program, issues of financial aid transferability and the transcripting the courses should be greatly simplified, if not totally eliminated.
There are already a number of consortia of this general type that operate throughout the world. Among these are the Centre Baobab/Africa Consultants International in Dakar, Senegal (www.acibaobab.org, which has been in existence for more than 20 years), the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute (ISDSI) in Chiang Mai, Thailand (www.isdsi.org) and two informal in-country collaborations between Kalamazoo College and another U.S. institution. In the case of the Centre Baobab and ISDSI, the in-country part began with a NGO, which began offering various services to individuals. In short order they were approached by U.S. colleges running programs in the region for things such as: airport pickup, arrival orientation, language classes, excursions, academic courses, facilitation of university coursework and/or tutorials, internship placements, housing, homestays, etc.
The activities of these local NGOs can be funded either on the basis of fee-for-service or a yearly membership fee. The more institutions that use the NGO’s services, the more services that can be offered and the lower the per person cost.
In the case of Senegal, programs operating in collaboration with the Centre Baobab share the services of a housing coordinator, language instructors (in French and Wolof), intercultural orientation, and often permit students from one “member” college to enroll in courses offered specifically for another institution. Moreover, the in-country consortia agency can “customize” services, courses, and other educational opportunities for colleges, so the various programs located there look and feel different. In Strasbourg, Kalamazoo College is the beneficiary of an informal in-country collaboration, sharing staff, logistics coordination, and access to courses with Lewis and Clark College (www.lclark.edu). In Nairobi, Kalamazoo provides homestays for students from the African Studies Consortium of Bryn Mawr, Haverford, University of Pennsylvania, and Swarthmore (www.brynmawr.edu/oip/nairobi.html#Living ).
As the Centre Baobab and other similar collaborations have been doing quietly for years, in-country consortia provide the necessary continuity in both personal and professional relationships with the host institution that can lead to discussions of larger issues such as bi-lateral exchanges between one U.S. partner and the host. In-country consortia have also provided the starting point for discussions with the host about capacity building in areas related education abroad, and not only in the developing world.
In order to reach our goal of one million U.S. students studying abroad within a decade, regardless of the level of federal funding that we might receive, we will need to dramatically increase the number of opportunities abroad for our students, and do so in a cost-effective manner. Getting to one million students abroad will require rethinking and expanding the ways in which we collaborate with each other at home and abroad. With its flexibility, cost-savings potential, capacity to support both the comprehensive internationalization and individual distinctiveness of institutions and ability to bring together very different types of colleges and universities at home and abroad in a cooperative arrangement, new models such as “in-country consortia” should be one of the strategies employed in pursuit of that goal.
Joseph L. Brockington, Ph.D. is Associate Provost for International Programs at Kalamazoo College.
Works Cited
Baum , Sandy and Lucie Lapovsky. “Tuition Discounting: Not Just a Private College Practice.”
The College Board, New York, 2006 www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/press/tuition-discounting.pdf
The College Board, “Trends in College Pricing.” The College Board, New York, 2006
www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/press/cost06/trends_college_pricing_06.pdf
Dotolo, Larry “Consortia: How Institutions Can Work Together”, Association for Consortium Leadership. development.whro.net/acl/professional_development.html accessed 12-1-2006
Johnson, Stephen, Nana Rinehart and Leo Van Cleve “Program Designs and Strategies.” In NAFSA’s Guide to Education Abroad for Advisers and Administrators. 3rd Edition. Joseph L. Brockington, Patricia Martin, and William Hoffa, Eds. Washington, D.C.: NAFA: Association of International Educators. 2005. (344-371)
Vaughan, Derek and Gregory Wegner. Off-Campus Enrollments at Global Partners Colleges.”” Unpublished Study. Great Lakes Colleges Association. Ann Arbor, MI 2004-05.
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