Artículo aparecido recientemente en el Chronicle of Higher Education sobre uno de los temas cruciales para el futuro desarrollo de los estudios de posgrado en Chile.
American Graduate Programs With Overseas Partners Are on the Rise
By Aisha Labi, The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 20, 2009
American universities may still lead the world when it comes to the sheer number of students they attract. But in another measure of internationalization, Europe fares far better.
At the annual meeting of the European Association for International Education here last week, many educators focused on the booming field of international joint-degree and dual-degree programs.
In the European Union, both joint and dual degrees are increasingly common. Universities see them as an effective way to offer their students an international experience, expand their research partnerships, and tap into financing sources that promote such joint ventures. Interest is rising in the United States as well, presenters said, for many of the same reasons.
Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, who chaired a panel on best practices for joint- and dual-degree programs, said that such programs have been slow to catch on at American institutions, but that the tide is quickly turning.
In a 2007 survey, one-third of the council’s member institutions, which are primarily in the United States and Canada, reported that they had joint- or dual-degree programs. A year later, the tally had risen to half.
At the conference, the council unveiled the results of a new survey of joint and dual degrees at American graduate schools, which highlighted the growing interest in these programs as well as the challenges involved in setting them up.
“There is lots of enthusiasm around pursuing growth in these areas,” Ms. Stewart said.
Joint-degree programs offer graduates a single diploma, awarded for work at two more institutions. A dual, or double, degree is one in which students receive separate diplomas from each of the participating institutions. Many institutions prefer dual degrees because they are administratively easier to set up than joint degrees.
In both Europe and the United States, the majority of these collaborative programs at the master’s level are in engineering and business, while at the doctoral level, the physical sciences and engineering are the most common fields for formal collaboration.
“The greatest opportunities for these programs are to capitalize on those disciplines where the cutting-edge research depends on international collaboration,” said Daniel Denecke, director of best practices at the Council of Graduate Schools.
A report published this year by the Institute of International Education and the Free University of Berlin said both European and American universities are more likely to have collaborative degree programs with European partners than with institutions in other parts of the world.
Cash Infusion
Several European university officials who have been involved in establishing joint- and dual-degree programs credit their growth to the European Union’s Erasmus Mundus program, started in 2004, which provides financial support to universities to set up institutional collaborations as well as partnerships with non-European universities.
Last year the program was expanded to include doctoral as well as master’s-degree programs, and its budget quadrupled. The addition of doctoral programs was intended to help retain non-European graduate students who were leaving Europe for the United States to pursue their Ph.D.’s after completing their Erasmus Mundus master’s degrees.
The Bologna Process, through which 46 European nations are harmonizing their degree systems, has also helped facilitate inter-European collaboration. One of the greatest challenges to setting up joint- and dual-degree programs, those involved say, is trying to assess and compare course work across institutions. Bologna has made that first step much easier.
In Norway, a non-European Union nation awash in oil money, international collaborations have also been motivated by development goals and a commitment to stem the exodus of talent from the developing world. At a conference session on the different types of joint- and dual-degree programs, Unni Kvernhusvik, a coordinator of joint programs at the University of Bergen’s Centre for International Health, talked of her institution’s experience with research-based joint-degree programs in Nepal and Tanzania. Like any partnership, including those the university has in Europe, she said, their success is founded on sustained, long-term collaboration.
“You have to know your partners well and know that they can give added value to what you have, and together this will make a program of excellence for a joint degree,” she said.
Increasing American Interest
Joint and dual degrees are likely to become more common in the United States as American universities look to internationalize their academic offerings in a cost-effective way. Many of the degree programs that American institutions operate with European counterparts have been supported by the Atlantis Program, a U.S.-E.U. collaborative.
The Council of Graduate Schools’ new research found several reasons for the growing enthusiasm for pursuing formal international-degree collaborations. These include declining interest among American graduate students in science and engineering degrees and increasing reliance on international students to fill these programs; international recognition that graduate education is a crucial component of economic-competitiveness strategy; and indications that, with growing competition from European and other countries for international graduate students, American universities can no longer count on a guaranteed steady stream of foreign graduate students to come to the United States to fill their programs.
At a session focusing on American projects in Europe, H. Stephen Straight, senior adviser for international initiatives at Binghamton University, in the State University of New York system, talked about an undergraduate program it has under way in Turkey.
SUNY has an extensive partnership with a consortium of universities in Turkey that allows Turkish students to spend two alternating years at SUNY. The undergraduate dual-degree program, designed to deal with a severe lack of capacity in the Turkish system, allows some 150 Turkish students a year to be “offloaded” into the SUNY system, said Mr. Straight.
“We get a flow of interesting students, with the intellectual creativity that brings, and out-of-state tuition for two solid years from them,” he said. “Cynics would say we’re doing it for the money, but frankly, for the dollars spent on getting the program up and running and keeping it up and running, we would do much better just recruiting students for the full four years.”
Like many formal institutional collaborations, SUNY’s Turkish connection originated through personal links—between the former director of the Turkish higher-education council and a SUNY official. Sustaining such programs, several presenters emphasized, requires full support from the administrative hierarchy of participating institutions as well as enthusiasm among students and professors.
Major Hurdles
The logistical hurdles and costs involved in setting up formal degree collaborations can be daunting. Even among European institutions, legal issues can provide some of the biggest obstacles.
In the Netherlands, for example, legislation prohibits joint degrees but allows dual degrees. Tuition policies also differ widely among nations, and administrators may run up against legislation saying that degrees cannot be awarded unless students pay local university fees, even if institutions have worked out fee waivers.
For American institutions, which usually charge much higher tuition than their European counterparts, deciding on a fee structure for formal degree collaborations is among the biggest hurdles they face in establishing and maintaining joint- and dual-degree programs with international partners, the new Council of Graduate Schools study found. Other major challenges include sustaining such programs over the long term, securing adequate financing, recruiting students to take part in such programs, and getting formal accreditation.
The council will publish the results of its latest survey in January. Ms. Stewart said she hopes the findings will help provide guidance on best practices for the growing number of American institutions seeking to establish formal degree collaborations with their international counterparts.
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