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Colleges Expand Overseas Studies
U.S. Grant Funds Research of Benefits
Atlanta (August 10, 2006) — This article originally appeared in the July 10, 2006 edition of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It was written by Andrea Jones.
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More students at Georgia’s public colleges and universities are studying abroad than ever before, and officials at the university system say they’re picking up more than a love of fine wine and funny accents.
Richard Sutton, the senior adviser for academic affairs and director of international programs, told the state Board of Regents on Wednesday that students who go overseas perform better academically after they get back and have higher graduation rates.
The system recently received a $500,000 federal grant — one of 21 awarded by the U.S. Department of Education — to expand a research project that looks at the skills students learn while they are away.
"It is important for our students to gain a global perspective,” Sutton said.
The university system has made increasing the number of study-abroad students a priority since the early 1990s, doubling from 1995 to 2000 the number of students who study overseas. Since 2001, the system has been encouraging schools to expand program offerings and to create new degree programs with study abroad components.
The number of students studying abroad has grown 15 percent each year, while enrollment has grown at 2 percent annually, Sutton said. More than 6,000 students will study abroad in the 2006-2007 school year, compared with fewer than 2,000 back in 1997.
Those figures are reflected on college campuses around the state.
The University of Georgia sent nearly 2,000 students abroad in the 2005-2006 school year, an 11 percent increase from the year before. UGA students studied in 47 countries around the globe last school year — from Fiji to Finland.
The university does not yet have a final tally on how many students in the 2005-2006 graduating class studied abroad at some time during their studies but reported that 20.8 percent of the previous year’s graduates had earned academic credit abroad.
The school hopes to send 25 percent of students abroad by 2010.
Georgia Tech currently sends about 33 percent of its undergraduates abroad and hopes to raise that to 50 percent in coming years.
Ronald Rousseau, chairman of the chemical and biomolecular engineering department at Tech, taught classes in thermodynamics and transport processes in Metz, France, this summer. Rousseau said he saw firsthand the benefits that studying abroad has for students.
"They grow, they mature, they just develop enormously,” he said. Students visited Verdun, France, where they saw the battlefields where thousands of WWI soldiers died.
"It was an experience that engineering students typically wouldn’t have gotten,” Rousseau said.
"But it’s exactly the kind of thing that students today need to function in a global environment.”
Literature professor Carol Senf, associate chairman of Tech’s School of Literature, Communications and Culture, said studying abroad helps students in ways that are intangible.
She has taught programs in Greece and England, most recently at Oxford, and encouraged her son, Andy Farlow, a Georgia State student, to study in Italy last summer.
"They walk around a place that has been there for 1,000 years and feel a little smaller, a little less significant, a little more fragile,” she said. “It’s a good perspective.”
Related Links
Altanta Journal-Constitution Article
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/0810metregents.html
Dr. Rousseau's Home Page
http://www.chbe.gatech.edu/fac_staff/faculty/rousseau.php
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation's premiere research universities. Ranked among U.S. News & World Report's top 10 public universities, Georgia Tech educates more than 16,000 students every year through its Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Management and Sciences. Tech maintains a diverse campus and is among the nation's top producers of women and African-American engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech Research Institute. During the 2003-2004 academic year, Georgia Tech reached $341.9 million in new research award funding.