Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) is a household acronym with academic bureaucrats who set goals and try to define cost-effective approaches for our colleges and universities. Traditional approaches to quality control are being swept aside, extended, or reinvigorated as U.S. higher education is pushed towards ever higher levels of accomplishment and assessment. Unfortunately, this trend does not include international education and student and faculty exchanges. The now somewhat discredited practice of regional accreditation of higher education institutions has mostly overlooked education abroad. Evaluation depends on the willingness of the U.S. institution to organize and to pay for an on-site visit to the program or institution abroad. Few U.S. institutions have felt the need to do this.
If education abroad really is important to American colleges and universities, as more and more admissions officers claim in their undergraduate recruitment literature, the assessment of quality must also be important. Study abroad will not achieve the major recognition it should have if: 1) the colleges and universities that offer it do not see it as an integral part of their ongoing educational programs, and 2) international education is not evaluated as part of regular academic offerings instead of as an exceptional opportunity.
Efforts to evaluate the quality of education abroad have tended to focus on the smooth functioning of a program and the student's satisfaction with and academic performance in it. The main concerns of the American colleges and universities that offer study abroad programs are the health and safety of students in the program, program funding (is it sufficient to cover basic costs plus those extra facilities and services needed to assure quality?), and the effectiveness of student selection and advising.
The common practice of study abroad programs to ask students to fill out questionnaires on their experience abroad tends to focus on students' reactions to the program and their stay in the foreign country. Students are asked questions such as how satisfied they were with the academic program, the extent and quality of their interaction with the host culture, and, if a foreign language country was involved, how they would rate their proficiency in the language at the beginning and end of the program.
Responses to these kinds of questions are useful to program administrators who wish to improve a program, to strengthen student advising, and, assuming student responses are positive, to use in recruitment activities and literature. The information can also be very helpful to prospective student participants as they try to choose among education abroad options.
What is surprising is that-given tighter budgets and growing pressures for accountability and "value for money"-more U.S. colleges and universities are not demanding that programs abroad be evaluated on the basis of how they compare with home-campus academic programs. While study abroad is still not generally regarded as an integral part of the curriculum, there are some important exceptions, such as some of the Univ. of California's education abroad programs.
Concern with quality in education abroad will make a quantum leap when courses taken in study abroad programs are regarded as important as those taken on the home campus courses in fulfilling degree requirements. When that time comes, the evaluation of the quality of study abroad will take on a whole new-highly important and long overdue-dimension, and the contribution of study abroad to the quality of higher education will be better understood.
If education abroad really is important to American colleges and universities, as more and more admissions officers claim in their undergraduate recruitment literature, the assessment of quality must also be important. Study abroad will not achieve the major recognition it should have if: 1) the colleges and universities that offer it do not see it as an integral part of their ongoing educational programs, and 2) international education is not evaluated as part of regular academic offerings instead of as an exceptional opportunity.
Efforts to evaluate the quality of education abroad have tended to focus on the smooth functioning of a program and the student's satisfaction with and academic performance in it. The main concerns of the American colleges and universities that offer study abroad programs are the health and safety of students in the program, program funding (is it sufficient to cover basic costs plus those extra facilities and services needed to assure quality?), and the effectiveness of student selection and advising.
The common practice of study abroad programs to ask students to fill out questionnaires on their experience abroad tends to focus on students' reactions to the program and their stay in the foreign country. Students are asked questions such as how satisfied they were with the academic program, the extent and quality of their interaction with the host culture, and, if a foreign language country was involved, how they would rate their proficiency in the language at the beginning and end of the program.
Responses to these kinds of questions are useful to program administrators who wish to improve a program, to strengthen student advising, and, assuming student responses are positive, to use in recruitment activities and literature. The information can also be very helpful to prospective student participants as they try to choose among education abroad options.
What is surprising is that-given tighter budgets and growing pressures for accountability and "value for money"-more U.S. colleges and universities are not demanding that programs abroad be evaluated on the basis of how they compare with home-campus academic programs. While study abroad is still not generally regarded as an integral part of the curriculum, there are some important exceptions, such as some of the Univ. of California's education abroad programs.
Concern with quality in education abroad will make a quantum leap when courses taken in study abroad programs are regarded as important as those taken on the home campus courses in fulfilling degree requirements. When that time comes, the evaluation of the quality of study abroad will take on a whole new-highly important and long overdue-dimension, and the contribution of study abroad to the quality of higher education will be better understood.
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