Global Career Compass
Leveraging Education Abroad for Student Career Development & Employability
Internationalization of Career Services at German Universities: Part I of III
A Guest Post by Jerome Rickmann
Director, International Talent Acquisition & Project Development
EBC Hochschule (a private multi-campus business school in Berlin)
I’m very pleased to have Jerome begin a three-part post on internationization of career services at German universities. We met at the European Association of International Education conference in September, 2015, in Glasgow. He and I shared many common concerns about the marginalization of the critical function of career services on campuses, and the need to re-define the work of these offices in light of pressures from students and their families about the ROI of a university degree.
Of course, Germany is now committed to accepting and re-settling many thousands of refugees and the impact of those of age to attend university is yet to be fully understood. No doubt career service professionals will play a critical role in their transition from classroom to the workforce.
I hope readers will share comments about their campus commitments and responses to current socio-economic conditions in their country.
-Marty Tillman
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Internationalization of career services has become one of the new buzz phrases in German higher education. But what does that actually mean? How do German universities define internationalization? What are the challenges and how do institutions try to overcome those?
There is little research that specifically tackles this topic but some data is available. In 2014, a German rector’s conference conducted a survey amongst German career services and international offices, asking about their internationalization practices. The main findings serve as a good indication for the current state of affairs:
When speaking of internationalization in German universities, we mean activities designed to help international students find work in Germany or to support German students finding work somewhere else in the world. The survey found that more than 78 % of the answering institutions already provide some sort of activity aiming to internationalize their services (e.g. training, projects, classes). Most institutions target mainly their students with an international background (about 61 %). The main challenge is that international students are not accustomed to the specifics of the German labor market, may face prejudices in hiring practices, and likely must struggle with language barriers – so most career service’s offers somehow aim to minimize the effects of these “disadvantages.” Unfortunately, there is not enough data to really be able to assess either the extent of these measures or their impact.
Whilst we can assume providing these services is a useful undertaking, we simply don’t know if these efforts have proven to be an effective match for the known demand from students. Knowing the state of career services in general in Germany, my assumption is that the actual impact is modest (services are chronically understaffed – we have an average ratio of 6000:1 in terms of students per career service employee). I think my assumption is probably not too far off considering the answers to this survey question: “Which measures do you find necessary for a sustainable implementation of internationalized career services?”
The first four answers:
- More money
- More staff
- Clearer assignment and distribution of tasks
- More appreciation for the work
The current discussion about the integration of refugees in the German labor market suggests that the state will offer more and more funds for universities to provide assistance with their integration. Since needs of refugees will often be the same as the needs of other “migrants,” that might push the topic higher on the campus agenda. The fear though is that these will be targeted project related funds for a brief period of time, and as such, not really helpful for a sustainable long-term solution, since higher education institutions do not often consider career services of real strategic value.
In part II, I will write about the outgoing perspective (how German institutions support students wishing to gain work experiences abroad). In part III, I will write about innovative projects trying to push forward the internationalization agenda in German higher education.
Intelligence is NOT Enough
I’m going to try to pull together my thoughts this day following on the horrific attacks in Paris.
I’ve been an international educator for over 40 years. I’ve had to make sense of 60s student protests, the Vietnam War, the assasinations of two Kennedy brothers, of M.L King, of the murders of Israeli athletes in Munich, of two intifadas, of apartheid, of 9-11, of the deaths in Iraq & Afghanistan, of a sniper randomly killing citizens in Washington,DC and the suburbs, of the murders of children and college students, of police brutality –and now, of the murder of innocents in Paris.
And I’m feeling tired of all this killing and death. Of all the words in print and on TV and radio trying to think it through – to explain why. To rationally analyze our way out of the fog of unbearable loss of life.
And so I was drawn back to a book I’ve kept since graduating decades ago from the Experiment in Internatonal Living (since renamed World Learning) graduate school for international training in Brattleboro, Vermont. A beautiful place of learning. The book is a memoir by the founder of the Experiment, Donald Watt. The title is “Intelligence is Not Enough.” I’ve long thought this was merely a cute turn of phrase. An ode to the meaning of the early years of the Experiment which pioneered the model of “homestays” for US students with families in Europe…A way to explain the importance of the kind of experiential learning which comes from the living-learning experience of the homestay.
At the end of the book, Watt writes: “…in the future, fears and hates will not disappear without planned effort.” I doubt he realized how prescient those words were.
After Paris last Friday, there have been many statements on twitter about the importance of bringing about greater understanding through study abroad. Of course, this is true – and I’ve been working toward realizing that kind of “understanding” my entire career in many different ways. But today I’m thinking this is not enough. In the aftermath of the attacks in Paris, I believe we need to re-double efforts to bring greater clarity and meaning to international education; to programs whose goal, on paper, is to increase understanding between people of different cultural, religious or ethnic backgrounds. Or whose goal, as is often the case with respect to study abroad, is to widen the world view of students or to foster worldmindedness.
These words are not enough. My colleagues on campus need to sharpen the message and structure programs to achieve the outcomes they profess to achieve for their students. Sending Americans abroad in greater numbers is not enough. Sending students to study in classrooms abroad is not enough. Bringing more international students to U.S. campuses is also not enough.
We need a more sophisticated approach to all our efforts to bring about the kind of “understanding” we international educators seek for our students and for our communities and campuses.
Intelligence is not enough – not today.
Higher Education and the Employability Agenda – A Global Perspective
Dr. Cheryl Matherly and I have co-authored a chapter (Part Two, Chapter 16) on this topic in the just released Palgrave International Handbook of Higher Education Policy and Governance. You can review the book’s contents and see all contributors at – http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/The-Palgrave-International-Handbook-of-Higher-Education-Policy-and-Governance/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137456168 This link only provides you a look at the diversity of contributors and the table of contents. It is expensive, unfortunately; but I’d be glad to try to reply to specific questions.
We examine the term employability and its interpretation by many actors and differing institutions. Since the 2008 recession, there has been a renewed debate about the purpose of a college degree (largely driven by educators in the U.S.) and the need for greater attention to how academic institutions prepare students to enter the global workforce (regardless of their choice of majors!). Readers of my blog know I have focused on this linkage for many years!
In our writing and presentations over the past decade, both Cheryl and myself have placed special importance on the linkage of international experience to employability and the development of student careers. Our chapter strengthens this case. As we say in our chapter’s conclusion:
The recent global recession and resulting economic stagnation, rising university tuition costs and questions about inequality of access to higher education have raised new questions concerning the ‘worth’ or value of a university degree in both developed and developing nations. The mismatch of training and education of college graduates with the skills employers are demanding has created disruptive social conditions and unrealistic expectations for tens of millions of college-age graduates throughout the world. Labour market actors, including governments, companies and workers, need to ensure that occupational requirements are matched through adequate education and training. The extent to which this process is successful is a major factor shaping labour market outcomes, economic growth, productivity and competitiveness for nations, states and communities.
Having just attended the meeting of the European Association of International Education in Glasgow, it’s become more apparent to me that the United States is far behind in acknowledging the critical importance of linking employability to the design of learning outcomes for students within the curriculum. While we have a more robust set of student affairs professionals working in career service offices, this has not led to the integration of an employasbility agenda on most of our campuses. On the other hand, most EU systems of higher education do not have – apart from that of the UK- trained professionals working in offices of career services.
Our patchwork of institutional commitments to fully fund and support offices of career services does not serve our students well – and they are left to find their way into the marketplace after graduation on their own…Of course there are many exceptions around the country, often at land grants and state campuses with degrees in fields that are actively looking for talent in the state. And then we have our community colleges whose mission has always served as a bridge to the workforce.
Campuses are now focusing on “career integration” due to the immediacy of the crisis facing students who need to enter the workforce as soon as they graduate. As recent surveys point out, the demographic of the U.S. will radically change in coming decades; we are no longer a majority white nation in the future. This means that those attending our colleges and universities will represent, in all likelihood, a less privileged class of citizens. And this will place even greater pressure on our campuses to focus down on preparing a more diverse pool of graduates for the global workforce.
Closing the Expectation Gap Between Students and Employers
I’d welcome hearing from campus colleagues who have developed programs to close the gap! At martyjtillman@gmail.com
How Study Abroad Supports Graduate Employability
The full essay appears in the AIFS study abroad advisor newsletter, International Perspectives: http://www.aifsabroad.com/pdf/perspectives_2015.pdf
We’ve recently witnessed a spate of new books authored by policy wonks which aim to re-examine the mission of the university in the United States and whether we need to “unbundle” how we educate students. Their titles are provocative, like The End of College, and they consider rising tuition and debt which burden large numbers of students and their families. Although we’ve left the worst of the recession behind us –especially with a sharp rebound in the unemployment figures which always favor job seekers with college diplomas – there is a lot of attention being given to new thinking regarding the linkage of higher education to the global workforce and the so-called “return on investment” of a college education. What does this challenge to the traditional value –and return on investment -of a college degree have to do with the study abroad field? In my view, quite a lot.
For decades, students going abroad for study, work, or service was viewed as invaluable, and an end unto itself. There was little attention given to all but the intrinsic rewards to the student: gaining a wider world view, maturing through the usual ups and downs of being on your own in a new cultural environment, learning how to fend for oneself in a setting with different “rules” and expectations, and, of course, fulfilling a course requirement or learning to speak a foreign language.
In recent years, the rapid rise in the number of students studying abroad has resulted in greater attention to the deeper and broader reasons which now attract students to international experiential learning – in the classroom or in the community…
I believe there are three consequential extrinsic outcomes of studying abroad:
- Employers value education abroad
- Universities and employers ar forming new partnerships
- Building an international toolkit is an asset in a job search
…
On Increasing the Number & Diversity of Students Going Abroad in Future Generations
I’m sure you’re well aware of the ambitious initiative of IIE to support academic institutions in the United States with the goal of doubling the national number of students – from the current 300K to 600K – who study abroad by 2019. The Institute is sponsoring a “summit” in Fall, 2015 to serve as a catalyst for those institutions who sign up as “partners” – http://www.iie.org/en/Programs/Generation-Study-Abroad/About; to date, there are about 600 partners who have committed to set their own goals towards realizing substantial increases in the number of students they send abroad (either for credit or not). IIE is “investing $2 million in the initiative and seeking funds to provide scholarships to college and high school students and grants to institutions.”
As we all know, not only is the current number small as a percentage of currently enrolled students in all higher education institutions (20 million); but, the other important fact is that the largest numbers of students who go abroad attend a relatively small number of all academnic institutions in the U.S.(total is over 4,000). To realistically move the needle so far along in terms of the absolute number of students studying abroad will require an extraordinarily large increase in the overall number of academic institutions who send students abroad. This large-scale leap forward may take a decade or perhaps twenty-five years. It’s hard to predict and no one is going on a limb to do so. Whatever the pathway that proves successful, it will unquestionably require a long-term sustained commitment from our academic institutions and their leadership.
Increasing numbers may be the easy thing to do – however, measurably altering the portrait of who does go abroad will be a difficult task. We’ve known for decades that we send mostly white middle and upper-class white women abroad. And yes, many organizations, like NAFSA and CIEE (as far back as the 70s) have mounted efforts to increase the number of “under-represented” students, and apart from unqiue programs explicitly focused on a developing country in Latin America, Asia or Africa – which are designed to attract students of color – the overall percentages of students of color (or of low-income) who study abroad is very low. eEven as institutions have taken steps to recruit and admit more students of color and students from lower income families, the numbers of these same students who decide to study abroad remains low.
I’d like to call attention to one partner in the IIE initiative, MyWorldAbroad, which has made a commitment to provide its training materials and resources at no cost to students attending partner academic institutions or education abroad programs: http://myworldabroad.com/GenerationStudyAbroad. My World’s founder, Jean-Marc Hachey, whom I’ve known since he first published The BIG Guide to Living and Working Overseas in 2004, has developed a rich archive of resources which, I believe, offer campuses a broad array of important materials to prepare students to take full advantage of their time abroad – and to purposefully articulate the value of their experiences upon their return to campus and begin preparing to enter the global workforce.
I will be at the GenerationAbroad Summit in Washington, DC next Fall- in fact, I’m on the program. And I hope my colleagues at IIE in New York forcefully continue their own institutional commitment to advocate and support the higher education community to squarely face the moral imperative of diversifying the profile of students who have the opportunity of an international experience in their college years.
If we cannot succeed in this way, then all we will achieve in coming years is an increase in the number of students from privileged backgrounds who gain the advantages of international experience as they graduate and begin to build their careers.
‘American Universities Are Addicted to Chinese Students’
Is it that our educational institutions are “addicted” or rather that the Chinese have a special fascination (if that’s the right word) with the perceived quality of our higher ed system?
An International Educator in Vietnam
A startling number of Chinese students are getting kicked out of American colleges. According to a white paper published by WholeRen, a Pittsburgh-based consultancy, an estimated 8,000 students from China were expelled from universities and colleges across the United States in 2013-4. The vast majority of these students—around 80 percent—were removed due to cheating or failing their classes.
As long as universities have existed, students have found a way to get expelled from them. But the prevalence of expulsions of Chinese students should be a source of alarm for American university administrators. According to the Institute of International Education, 274,439 students from China attended school in the United States in 2013-4, a 16 percent jump from the year before. Chinese students represent 31 percent of all international students in the country and contributed an estimated $22 billion to the U.S. economy in 2014.
Here’s the
story du jour from The…
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Separate And Unequal Access to Higher Education & Impact on Equal Access to International Education
…if we cannot and do not diversify our campuses in terms of socio-economic “diversity” than, de facto, we’ll never be able to provide equal opportunity in our society to the type of global education required of all students to become competitive in the global economy when they graduate.
This report in the Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/08/01/how-to-fight-growing-economic-and-racial-segregation-in-higher-ed/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en is very troubling to me.
During the recession, I’ve had increasing concerns about the longstanding issue of unequal access to international educational experiences on campuses. We used to refer to this as a need to focus on “under-represented” populations but this often was a bit vague: men are in this category, but, most of the time we were really talking about race and not gender equality. And now this report focuses on an even more pernicious problem: the lack of access of poor students to a college education. The report states:
“Within university communities, there are organized constituencies for recruited athletes, the children of alumni, and underrepresented minority students, but by and large there are no such groups for poor and working-class students. Because racial and ethnic diversity is more visible than socioeconomic diversity, colleges hold themselves to a higher standard…
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Macroeconomics, Inequality & Study Abroad
I’ll be addressing this theme at the upcoming NAFSA international conference in Boston with Dr. Fanta Aw of American University and Dr. Richard Murnane of Harvard. The sesson is on “Economic Inequality and the Growing Gap in Access to International Education. If any followers are at the conference next week, it’s at 9:30am on Friday, May 29.
How do these come together? I’ve been thinking about this due to the surprising popularity of a new book by Thomas Pinketty called “Capital in the Twenty-first Century.” While I have not read it, I’ve heard him speak about it and read reviews —bottom line, we are a nation of growing economic inequality and it’s not going away. It’s a structural problem. We also know about the increasing concern about massive student debt – upwards of 1 trillion dollars; and the struggles of institutions to stem the upward turn of tuition (you gotta pay for fancy dorms and new eating spaces somehow…).
What’s this got to do with study abroad and the cyclical effort to increase numbers of students (e.g.: the new IIE Generation Abroad initiative). I fear that the economic realities we face will exacerbate the “employability gap” between those who go to college and have the opportunity to…
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WHAT DOES RESEARCH HAVE TO DO WITH BUILDING CAREERS IN INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION?
Michael is a longtime colleague whose views on the role and function of research not only make sense but seem compelling to me – MJT
Guest blog By Michael Smithee
President, SmitheeAssociates
Website: http://smitheeassociates.com/
Research rather than opinion
Twenty years ago, advancing knowledge in the field of international education was in a nascent stage. There were very few journals and books that spoke to issues embedded in the field of international education. Internationalization was a term that often drew quizzical looks from administrators. At that time, if one asked if their institution was internationalized, it would depend greatly on who was asked. At that time, it was difficult for practitioners to be acknowledged that they had something to say; that they should be accorded a place at the table in the discussions about the focus of university’s international dimensions.
Today, no matter where you work in the field of international education, you will find many people making decisions based on personal experience, gut feelings, so called experts, and consultants. This covers a wide range of supportive decision-making. Yet, what has been lost is the necessity for decisions to be evidentiary and based upon the best researchable evidence. This evidentiary basis for decision-making is rooted in good research. It is the collecting of data or a measurement or a process based upon what you want to accomplish; rather than simply using someone’s opinion. It’s easy to look at statistical studies (which can be biased) and repeat or report them because it is easy to do so. Without investigating the assumptions made as the basis for collecting the data, one may be repeating inaccurate information.
Research can advance careers
If you are just starting out in your search for a job, or if you have a job and find the need to transition, then heed this: research is a basic component of the role of the international educator.
Because the mobility of students around the world has continually increased over the past 10 years and, because U.S. and institutions abroad have invested resources in making the international component/dimension of their institution more visible, critics, thinkers, and practitioners in the field are now considering research as an important part of the internationalization process (but perhaps not in the ways they think). For example, faculty conducting research in their disciplines cross borders to do so and contribute important global scholarship to their institutions. On the other side of the coin are policy-makers and practitioners who need to collaborate more on the research basis for decisions made on behalf of their institution’s international dimensions (See Rumbley, University World News, #364).
You will likely not find research in the job descriptions you read. Still, you should prepare yourself to establish that you have the ability to conduct, support, engage in research that answers questions
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