FULL STATEMENT :
Goodman, Allan E., President and CEO

Name: Goodman, Allan E.
Title: President and CEO
Company/Organization/University: Institute of International Education

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A Message From Allan E. Goodman, President and CEO of The Institute of International Education

Dear IIENetwork Colleague:

The terrorist attacks of September 11 and the subsequent outcry over loopholes in the student visa process have held international education up to public scrutiny. In the coming weeks and months, we must reaffirm the importance of international education in an organized and responsible manner. Aside from the economic benefits of international education, what we do together contributes directly to making the world safer and more secure.

I call on you, the international education professionals that make up the IIENetwork membership, to help make sure that the academic community is doing everything possible to ensure that the terrorists will not succeed in their attempt to get America to close our markets, our minds and our doors.

1) IIE has issued a statement to the public and the press to make the case that the world needs more educational exchange, not less, in light of recent events. This statement follows. We hope that you will take every opportunity to speak out on the critical importance of international education's mission in today's world. Please feel free to circulate the Institute's statement among your colleagues and to quote from it in your outreach to the press.

2) There is strong public sentiment that the student visa process must be fixed. We believe that recently proposed legislation preventing the federal government from issuing any student visas for the next six months would be a terrible mistake. However, we wholeheartedly urge colleges and universities to do their part to help tighten U.S. control over who enters this country. The San Francisco Chronicle carried an editorial this week, titled "Scrutinize Student Visas" that articulates this position eloquently. We will be contacting editorial writers throughout the nation to encourage them to join in making this opinion heard, and we hope you will urge your campus leadership to do the same.

We are writing to members of Congress to offer IIE's help in examining and reforming the visa process, and we urge your full cooperation in these efforts. We believe legislation should require campuses to report immediately and proactively to a central office at the INS if a student who has been issued a visa fails to show up for their classes or drops out of their program. Specifically, we call for the following steps:

- Timely notification by schools/sponsors to a central office at INS about no-show visa holders. If an international student doesn't show up for classes or training sessions, the INS should be notified immediately.

- Timely notification to an INS central office of student visa holders who drop out of programs before the completion of their planned study.

- The creation of a central office at the INS to handle such tracking and reporting on an urgent basis.

Thank you for your cooperation. Please be assured we stand ready to assist you in any way we can in continuing your good work in further the cause of promoting mutual understanding.

Goodman, Allan E. "A Message From Allan E. Goodman, President and CEO of The Institute of International Education," IIE.



Statement on the Student Visa Debate
January 2002

Open Doors and the National Interest

Eighty years ago, the Institute of International Education led a national effort to assist international students who encountered problems with the U.S. immigration system. At the time, many were being detained at Ellis Island because U.S. law classified them as immigrants subject to the highly restrictive quotas imposed in 1917. The Institute took the position that such students were really temporary visitors and succeeded in having them so classified in 1921. The Institute then developed a standard application form and process for foreign students so they could be easily identified and processed by university officials as well as by U.S. consular officers. We also published for many years a Guide Book for Foreign Students in the United States that explained the immigration laws and advised on how best to cope with them in planning for academic studies here.

Throughout this period, we worked closely with Members of Congress and the Commissioners of what were then the Bureaus of Immigration and of Education, as well as with officials in the Department of State. We did this, as the first president of the Institute wrote, because "our experience… justifies the belief that international good-will can hardly fail to result from the coming of the foreign student" and that "upon them, to a great extent, may depend the attitude adopted by their countrymen towards our country."

Nothing has happened to change this belief -- or to make mutual understanding any less important. And so we are again engaged in a national debate advocating keeping our doors open for students, scholars, and other professionals with valid educational purposes.

Based on more than 50 years of experience in administering the Fulbright Program on behalf of the Department of State we know that educational exchange contributes directly to making the world safer and more secure. An educational experience in America, moreover, pays dividends to the nation's public diplomacy over many years. More than 50 of the world leaders called by Former President Bush and Former Secretary Powell to join the coalition fighting terrorism studied in the United States or came to America early in their careers as part of the International Visitors Program which we also assist the Department in administering.

We recognize that our nation must make some hard choices in determining the kind of society we want to have in a post-September 11 world. Recently, heated policy debate and extensive media coverage have focused on how to balance the need to eliminate the potential for abuse of student visas with the desire to maintain legitimate academic and cultural exchange for the many students who study here, get to know our people, and often become life-long friends for America when they return. We must find a way to balance these two mandates.

We at the Institute of International Education support urgent action to increase scrutiny of student visas. We must have an effective system that incorporates the kinds of reporting systems and requirements embodied in the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2001. This bipartisan bill, sponsored by Senators Diane Feinstein, Edward Kennedy, Jon Kyl, and Sam Brownback, addresses the gaps in the current student visa system, providing for heightened vigilance at U.S. consulates and better communication between the campuses and government. We also endorse the House version of this bill, H.R. 3525, and hope a conference early in 2002 will result in the passage of this Act. In addition, we commend the inclusion in the new anti-terror legislation of financing for the computerized tracking system (now known as SEVIS) that colleges and the INS have been piloting for the past few years. During the debate on this legislation we will also make clear that we do not support allowing students to overstay their visas or remain in the United States when they are "out of status." Those who do should be subject to the full enforcement powers of the INS. The good news is that the overwhelming majority of the 547,867 foreign students in this country are in legal visa status and engaged in the studies and research they came here to pursue. This is due to the professionalism of the nationwide network of foreign student advisors who work diligently and year-round to sort out the complex visa requirements and each student's unique personal circumstances.

What else needs to be done?

Throughout this period of national debate, we urge the Immigration and Naturalization service to communicate regularly and clearly the formalities and the new time constraints likely to be encountered by international students planning on coming to the United States. We will be glad to help disseminate such information on our web site, as well as to the foreign student advisors mentioned above. If it would prove helpful and needed, we would again consider preparing an electronic version of the "Guide Book" as a reference source for students coming from abroad.

The American public also needs better and less-sensationalized information on these matters. They need to be reliably informed about the numbers of international students in the United States, the rigor of the process by which they are admitted to our colleges and universities, and the benefit that their presence here brings to our local communities and to the many American students who will not themselves have a chance to study abroad.

The Institute's annual census of international student mobility, "Open Doors," which we publish with the support of the Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, will thus continue to be made available to the widest possible circle of journalists and others who are writing about trends in higher education. Institute experts from our Higher Education Resources Group will prepare periodic briefings and fact sheets to keep the public informed and we will all work closely with our colleagues at the American Council on Education and the Alliance for Educational and Cultural Exchange as further comment and testimony may be required to assist the Congress in its deliberations over the bills mentioned above and other legislation affecting the non-immigrant student visa.

U.S. leadership in support of international education remains central to the kind of world in which we are going to live. A few weeks after the awful events of September 11th, I had a visit from the director of the ministry of education and research of Germany. We spoke at some length about the need to keep the educational doors of both of our countries as open as possible. After our discussion he wrote that "We learnt from the United States how enriching it is to win the interest and support of the brightest minds from all over the world and we trust in your country to remain as open as it has been in the past. If you closed your borders again … you would set a model that others would follow all too soon."

America -- and the world -- benefits enormously from the international exchange of people and ideas. Some of the international students that are here today will win the Nobel prizes of the future. In the process they may well cure cancer, discover a vaccine for HIV/AIDS, and become the leaders of the governments upon which ultimate success in the wars against poverty, disease and terrorism will depend. We must remember that much of hatred is born of ignorance and repression, and there is no surer way to break down such barriers than to live, study and build relationships in a culture beyond one's own.

Goodman, Allan E. (January 2002). "Statement on the Student Visa Debate," IIE.



Educational Exchange for a Safer and More Secure World

The aim of the terrorists who attacked this country on September 11 is not to change American foreign policy but to close our markets, minds, and doors. The Institute of International Education will do its part in the days ahead to make sure that they will not succeed.

This Institute brings an unusual perspective to the challenge. Born in the aftermath of the First World War, IIE is the nation's and the world's senior voice for international education. For over 80 years, we have championed the cause of keeping the world's educational doors open and offered programs that promote mutual understanding.

We have received messages of support from people all over the world who have studied in the United States. Students and alumni of every nationality and religious and political background have voiced their hope, as one student said, that programs of exchange may help us to "stand together in solidarity with the voice of reason and work together to spread peace."

Our mission is more important than ever before. When more international students are given the chance for meaningful study and opportunities to gain an appreciation of our society, there will be less hatred of America and misunderstanding of our values and way of life. The personal and professional relationships that international students make while they are studying in this country help forge strong bonds with the United States after their return, as they go on to conduct research or do business with their counterparts here, and particularly when they move on to leadership positions in their home countries.

When more Americans have the chance to study in other countries, they will have an opportunity to share American values and aspirations while gaining an appreciation of different cultures and learning about the many different ways people see us and the world. Understanding of and knowledge about the culture and society of others is critical to the success of American diplomacy and business, and the lasting ties that Americans make during their sojourns abroad are important to our country in times of conflict as well as in times of peace.

Academic freedoms are among the most basic of our liberties, and it is important that we remain able to share these freedoms with the rest of the world. Those who come from societies that are less open and democratic gain a tremendous appreciation for the freedom that they experience here, and help us to better appreciate values that are often taken for granted.

Our message is clear and unwavering. Educational exchange helps make the world safer and more secure.

Goodman, Allan E. and Henry Kaufman. "Educational Exchange for a Safer and More Secure World," IIE.



The Closing of the American Mind: A Progress Report

“Now that the first-ever International Education Week is behind us, it is appropriate to reflect on how open (or not) Americans are to the world. Since seventy-five percent of those recently polled by the Gallup organization could not locate the Persian Gulf, fifty percent failed to locate South Africa, and twenty-five percent could not identify the Pacific Ocean, the news is not encouraging. And at the university where I served as a dean before coming to the Institute, I just learned that a grand total of 6 out of some 350 entering students to the School of Foreign Service passed infamous "map of the modern world" examination, which is a graduation requirement. Last year, the total that passed the exam was 4.

Professor Allan Bloom holds the university -- and the forces of insulation and isolation at play within it -- directly responsible.

While the United States is the number one destination of students from other countries, according to the Institute's "Open Doors 2000" report (which we publish with support from the Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs), half of the 500,000 foreign students that study here do so in only 100 institutions. Nation-wide, international students account for only about 3 percent of total enrollment. This means that most Americans are in school with other Americans and that in most classrooms there is no international or intercultural perspective. What is missing is what Professor Bloom said was so precious about a college student's intellectual space and time: "These are charmed years when he can, if he so chooses, become anything he wishes and when he has the opportunity to survey his alternatives, not merely those current in his time or provided by careers, but those available to him as a human being. The importance of these years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him."

I have always been haunted by that last sentence.

Civilization comes in many forms, not just in the books of literature and philosophy that Professor Bloom rightly reveres. The encounter in a seminar discussion or in a research task force an American might have with a foreign student introduces not only different and more ways of working on and solving a problem but also entirely different ways of thinking. Such interaction has the capacity to introduce the idea that civilization matters and that there may be more than one of them at work in the world. I also know that no one who studies abroad remains unchanged by the experience. Part of the change that occurs is the widening of a person's intellectual horizons and a dissolving of borders and boundaries. As the late Senator J. William Fulbright put it, "nations are transformed into people." There is something profoundly civilizing about that, too. Yet most Americans -- less than 1 percent, in fact, of all enrolled in college -- study abroad. And only 17 percent of all Americans even have a passport.

Civilization in the sense of which I am speaking about it is still not reaching American students today. And, despite the fact that many colleges and universities now have an aspiration to be full players in this era of globalization in their mission statement, there is little prospect that American students' stunningly limited contact with the world and opportunity for immersion in another culture will increase substantially without dramatic action.

Some trend lines, in fact, are even pointing in the wrong direction. According to a new report on "Internationalization of U.S. Higher Education," undertaken by the American Council on Education as part of a Ford Foundation project, for example, the number of students enrolled in foreign language courses has declined by fifty percent since the high-water mark of 16% in the 1960s. In the same time period, the number of colleges and universities that required the study of a foreign language for admission also declined from one-third to one-fifth. In the sixties (a decade which Professor Bloom mainly deplores), almost 90 percent of the 4-year colleges in the United States had a language requirement for graduation. Today the figure is under 60 percent and well under 10 percent for those who actually require the student to take college level courses rather than pass a proficiency exam. This is, perhaps, a reflection of trends in the faculty where, as a number of reports have found, "United States scholars are less likely than most other world scholars to regard international activity as important. They are the least likely to work abroad, collaborate with scholars abroad, or express interest in literature from abroad."

It is ironic that the isolation of the American student is occurring at a time when education is on the verge of becoming a global commodity.

Last year, more than 58,000 college and university courses in the United States were provided over the Internet. Some were quite expensive. But most were virtually free, and ranged from basic math to brain surgery. The real cost of these courses, it turns out, is the equipment to run them. So in that sense education is not universal.

But like so many of the goods that now traverse the world electronically and without regard to borders, the educational material contained in these courses is available globally.

What does this mean?

Education, of course, involves more than just taking courses. In most advanced industrial societies, it is a process of achieving adulthood (and gaining time and space apart from those who control "home") as well as credentials. It is the experience of being taught and on occasion mentored by another person who has specialized knowledge but who is also a part of a vocation that attracts people with the capacity to see students as what they can become.

At least that is what I used to think. What I have described in the previous paragraph is, in fact, "university life." Education -- the process by which one is drawn out of oneself -- is but a part of that experience. It can happen outside the campus and in ways that do not involve the traditional paradigm. That is what the Internet makes possible. And borderless.

And just in time.

According to the research department at IIE, sometime between 2020 and 2035, more people will be ready for post-secondary education than went to university in all of human history. And as the President of the World Bank observed recently, we are heading into "a world where the communications revolution holds out the promise of universal access to knowledge."

The conjunction of these two dynamics is not entirely good news. At present, some 88 million students are enrolled in post-secondary educational institutions. Most universities are already operating at full capacity and those systems that have the resources to grow may well be located in the wrong place. American and European universities enroll more than half of all students but two thirds of the world's college-age population lives elsewhere. Only 7 percent of China's college age population has been able to find a seat in Chinese universities, and unfortunately there are fewer seats in all of that country's universities than there are in California. Qualified applicants already outnumber the seats available just about everywhere; but in many developing countries, the ratio is 60:1. Moreover, no country appears to have the resources to build campuses and train professors fast enough to meet demand.

The problem is that by 2010, the worldwide demand for higher education will increase to well over 100 million persons, according to a recent study by the British government. And by 2025, this number could be as high as 150 million.

Responding to this level of demand will require higher education systems everywhere to adopt a new paradigm. This will involve not only making it possible for more people to "go to college" in the traditional sense, but also for many more of them to receive the equivalent of a college education by connecting to the Internet. As that happens, according to Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers, "education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error."

Will it also open what is closed about the American mind? I am worried. Ask any person from another country what the Internet has meant to them and they will most likely tell you that it has increased their desire to see, experience, and learn from the world beyond their borders. Nearly two million students are studying abroad today, and the numbers doing this appear to be doubling every two years or so. To Americans today, "abroad" still denotes a world primarily for vacations rather than learning.

To change this outlook in the successor generation, we need to change what we define as an educated person to include study outside America not as a luxury or an option but as a core requirement. The scholarship programs like the Fulbright, Rhodes, Marshall, and now Gilman, that promote the exchange of people and ideas are thus the leading edge of a paradigm shift that will have an even greater impact in this century than they did in the last. Perhaps more than anything else they hold the key to whether or not the generation of Americans we are now educating will prosper in an age when the most critical success factor for countries as well as companies are people whose minds are open to the world.

Goodman, Allan E. (February 13, 2001). “The Closing of the American Mind: A Progress Report,” IIE.



 Revising the Future

" . . . as I could not and did not aspire to venture beyond my little plot of cultivated land, all I had left was the possibility of digging down, underneath, towards the roots. My own but also the world's."
- from the 1998 Nobel Prize Lecture of Jose Saramago

Citing these particular words of this brilliant novelist may at first seem a strange choice to open a conference on the future of international educational exchange in an era of globalization. But what Saramago has consistently found is a global perspective about people, places and things. He just does it unconventionally and, what is especially appealing, he practices his craft without regard to the conventional boundaries (including geo-political ones) that separate people and cultures.

There are many moments during the period of their fellowship, I suspect, that the students and scholars we have the honor to serve find themselves searching for meaning in ways and in a sequence that would not immediately occur to us as practical. For many, the value of the experience is only clear after they have returned home. But whenever it occurs, the "digging down" is almost invariably transforming. As I am going to argue, nothing could be more important for the world. It gives the successor generation the chance, as Saramago put it elsewhere in his Nobel prize lecture, "to revise the future."

We Can Do That?

What is equally amazing is that the "little plot of cultivated land" where much of this is going to take place for Fulbrighters is the "modern" university.

I put the word "modern" in quotation marks because I am not sure about how ready universities are for globalization. For nearly a thousand years now, campuses have been defined by their walls and towers and are renown for the separation of the faculty and students from the life and commerce of the town. The chief academic officers of most American universities are even today called Provosts, a medieval word meaning the keeper of a prison. Elsewhere, the counterpart term of "rector" is used, which also has a medieval origin and denotes the spiritual head of a church parish. While we may think of our great research universities as having given birth to the modern (and all the technology that underpins it today), higher education is among the last to adopt changes in the society at large and the academic disciplines exist, in part, to protect themselves from forces just like that of globalization: unpredictable and especially potent at breaking down barriers and borders.

In sum, those who live and work inside universities are not unlike the inhabitants of the marvelous Iberian stone raft about which Saramago writes in one of his novels: oblivious to the pandemonium they may cause.

It is not surprising, then, that in perhaps the single best book about understanding globalization, The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman, the word education is not mentioned even once in the index. This compares with 50 citations for Internet, 16 for McDonald's, and 11 for Microsoft Corporation. There is, in fact, still surprisingly little discussion of the role education can and will play in the 21st century. This means that as an industry our customers are way ahead of us in preparing themselves for what is coming. One of the prime ways, in fact, that the successor generation is getting ready for life and work in an era of globalization is to seek study and teaching opportunities outside the culture in which they were originally educated. The demand for such opportunities will only increase. For our part, we have to make sure that as students and scholars participate in programs such as Fulbright, their home campuses and future employers highly value the experience and credential.

What's Ahead?

The Fulbright opportunity also will have an impact on one other set of problems being created by globalization. According to the research department at IIE, sometime between 2020 and 2035, more people will be ready for post-secondary education than went to university in all of human history. And as the President of the World Bank observed recently, we are heading into "a world where the communications revolution holds out the promise of universal access to knowledge."

The conjunction of these two dynamics is not entirely good news. At present, some 88 million students are enrolled in post-secondary educational institutions. Most universities are already operating at full capacity and those systems that have the resources to grow may well be located in the wrong place. American and European universities enroll more than half of all students but two thirds of the world's college-age population lives elsewhere. Only 7 percent of China's college age population have been able to find a seat in Chinese universities, and unfortunately there are fewer seats in all of that country's universities than there are in California. Qualified applicants already outnumber the seats available just about everywhere; but in many developing countries, the ratio is 60:1. Moreover, no country appears to have the resources to build campuses and train professors fast enough to meet demand.

The problem is that by 2010, the worldwide demand for higher education will increase to 100 million persons, according to a recent study by the British government. And by 2025, this number could be as high as 125 million.

The demands of globalization are likely to require that students learn to learn in ways and about things that extend beyond their borders, creating virtually everywhere unprecedented levels of mobility. Fulbrighters will be a key resource in helping universities adjust to these dynamics.

As this happens, like most other features of globalization, there is likely to be a backlash against America. The Minister of Education of France already believes that Europe needs to launch a counterattack. "That our students go and study in the United States and Britain is entirely desirable, but that Americans install their universities throughout the world, all on the same model and with the same courses, is a catastrophe." Assuring that such a polarizing event does not occur involves thinking of education as a global commodity and promoting what Simon Schwartzman has called the "universalization" of many things in higher education but especially the transparency of standards and unfettered access to distance learning. Again, Fulbrighters can help assure that such developments occur by creating new courses that draw from the best of a number of systems and disciplines.

Educational exchange, in fact, may turn out to be the way new fields of intercultural knowledge are invented. For example, I think the kind of exchange experiences that our organizations sponsor and facilitate are already helping to lay the groundwork for the following inter-disciplinary disciplines:
  • financial anthropology. It is now clear that markets, businesses, and banks of all types are exerting unprecedentedly powerful forces on governments, societies, and people. These dynamics are re-defining loyalties and generally flattening the hierarchies (gender, age, experience) that used to determine status and power. Because this is a transnational phenomenon, it cannot be studied in a single discipline, much less in a single country.


  • transnational demography. There are massive populations shifts underway that affect virtually everything that governments can do. The age, health, and location (rural vs. urban, homeless vs. sheltered, and the whole range of factors that affect mobility) of people may well define the limits for public policy and the responsibility of governments to provide security and prosperity. How these dynamics play out may increasingly have to be studied by examining units of analysis (such as Kenichi Omae's "region state") that do not involve (and are not constrained by) the nation state at all.


  • globalization sociology. We now know that globalization has not been kind to all countries or lifted all markets, and also that some initially very American things (e.g., McDonalds in East Asia, KFC in the Middle East and North Africa, and Nike apparel everywhere) get morphed in ways that enable consumers to think of them as part and parcel of the local culture. Understanding these mechanics will be as important to the future business leader who wants to successfully market a product as to a diplomat who wishes to restore peace or improve international relations. You cannot gain that understanding by virtual reality; it takes living in another society.


The returning Fulbright student and scholar will increasingly be bringing back a new knowledge base that is both interdisciplinary and intercultural. Appended to this essay are a list of thought-provoking books and articles where these themes and subjects are explored and which might also make up a "summer reading" list for Fulbrighters after they have had the experience in order to help them internalize and sort out the ways in which the perspectives they will have gained can make a difference in the societies to which they are returning.

Implications for Fulbright Commissions

When the headquarters of the IIE were built, the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations was Adlai Stevenson and he gave the dedication lecture. His words then still explain much about the special role that our organizations play:

" . . . education is . . . the process of acquiring knowledge and then communicating it, so that, generation by generation, a great deposit of shared understanding is accumulated, a universal city of the mind arises, insight by insight, discovery by discovery."

Programs that promote the international exchange of people and ideas are the intellectual power lines and thoroughfares of the future. The Fulbright Program sets a world standard for how those capacities ought to be constructed. It has the advantage, through your existence, of drawing on the best minds and resources for making this happen in even better and more profound ways in a century where knowledge has become a global commodity.

The work of the commissions represented here is thus central to shaping the future.

The binational concept that is at the core of your functioning will be more important than ever before in assuring that as higher education globalizes, it does not do so in a way that is complicated by the perception that this is just another facet of America's superpower status. At its root, binationalism - one of the first initiatives taken on a regional basis by the Institute when in the 1920s and early 1930s we helped established binational centers in Latin America - is about mutual understanding. We promote it because the result of the process is likely to contribute much more to human progress than if educational systems were restricted in their development to the influences and discoveries that happen only within the borders of one country.

In perhaps no other aspect of international relations does mutual understanding carry with it such potential for positive change. As Senator Fulbright liked to remind us, international educational exchange transforms nations into people and humanizes international relations with a certainty that no other form of diplomacy or interaction between societies can offer. Nothing could do more to make the world of this century a less dangerous place.

"Summer-after" Reading List

  • Philip G. Altbach and Patti McGill Peterson, eds., "Higher Education in the 21st Century: Global Challenge and National Response," (New York: Institute of International Education, 1999)


  • Montserrat Guibernau I Berdun, "Nations Without States: Political Communities in a Global Age," (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1999).


  • Derek Bok, "Universities and the Future of America," (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1990).


  • Paulo Coelho, "The Alchemist," (San Francisco: Harpers, 1993)


  • Council on Foreign Relations, "The Future of the International Financial Architecture," ( http://www.cfr.org/)


  • Peter F. Drucker, "Post Capitalist Society," (New York: Harperbusiness, 1993).


  • Francis Fukuyama, "The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order," (New York: The Free Press, 1999).


  • Allan E. Goodman, "A Brief History of the Future," (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1993).


  • Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds., "Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress," (New York: Basic Books, 2000).


  • Henry Kaufman, "Of Money and Markets," (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000).


  • Nicholas Negrponte, "Being Digital," (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).


  • Kenichi Omae, "The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy," (New York: Harperbusiness, 1999) and "The Invisible Continent: Four Strategic Imperatives of the New Economy," (New York: Harperbusiness, 2000).


  • Jose Saramago, "The Stone Raft," (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995).


  • Amartya Sen, "Development as Freedom," (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).


  • James L. Watson, "Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia," (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). “


Goodman, Allan E. (June 6, 2000). “Revising the Future,” IIE.



Education in a Global Age

“Universities are one of just three present-day institutions that existed for all of the last Millennium. The other two are the Roman Catholic Church and the British monarchy. None of these three institutions are known for being progressive and none of the historians who write about them argue that their remarkable staying power is due to openness to new ideas, especially those coming from foreign sources. As one colleague put it recently, each is like a "fortress built against the tide of time." The most important (and still surviving parts) of first academic spaces constructed in the Millennium just ended were the walls which separated the scholars from the populace and the vaults which housed the books and manuscripts. Even today, our chief academic officer is generally called a Provost, which is a word of medieval origin that meant the keeper of a prison.

Rhetoric Versus the Numbers

Most higher education systems, in fact, are not very open to the world.

Of the 193 sovereign states now in existence, in 170 of them foreign students make up less than one percent of university enrollment. Even for the United States, which annually receives the highest number of foreign students in the world (over 500,000) foreign students make up less than four percent of higher education enrollments. Germany and France have proportions twice as large. And the top three countries in terms of international students as a percentage of university enrollment are among the world's smallest in population states: Switzerland (16%), Australia (13%), and Austria (12%).

Most university students do not study aboard.

Less than one percent of all American citizens enrolled in colleges and universities do so. And I estimate that no more than five percent even enter college with a passport. And despite the fact that nearly three-quarters of all college-bound seniors have studied foreign language while in high school, less than ten percent study a modern foreign language once they actually get to college.

The good news is that the picture will change substantially. The focus of this talk is on why and what it means for those of us already engaged in internationalizing the campus.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Asian Century

Prior to 1997, one of the most hotly-debated topics in academic as well as governmental circles in America as well as Asia was the issue of the "clash of civilizations," a thesis advanced by my mentor Professor Samuel P. Huntington. He was looking for a way to make sense out of the post-Cold War era and to predict its disorders. He ran into a maelstrom of criticism over his characterization of societal norms and cultural value systems. His critics in Asia especially saw Huntington's analysis of Confucianism as anti-individualistic and tolerant of authoritarianism as evidence of a plot to deny Asia nothing less than the future. The perceived U.S. government policies that flowed from Huntington's approach, moreover, were seen as the equivalent of a form of economic containment aimed at thwarting the so-called Asian miracle and a last-ditch effort by a jealous West to deny Asia its rightful place as owner of the 21st century.

You don't hear much talk about the Asian century these days and recently the feature story in Business Week was entitled "The Atlantic Century?" I do not think that this is likely to happen either.

Instead we are going to see a new map of the post-modern world emerge as the international system "right-sizes." In just ten years, the international system has increased the number of countries in it by 20; population is growing at the rate of 90 million a year, more than twice what the growth rate was just a decade ago, suggesting that even more new countries may lie ahead. In the process, what constitutes a country and how it is held together is changing. And information and ideas -- the great reserve currencies of the educator's world -- flow so readily across borders, languages, regions, and cultures that regions of many countries conduct foreign political and commercial relationships with regions of other countries in ways that the central government can barely monitor and no longer effectively control.

The conjunction of the end of the Cold War, the advent of globalization, and the Asian currency crisis has so far changed the nature of international relations faster than our ability to understand it in theoretical terms. In fact, and in virtually every issue of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy magazines these days, we are engaged in a vigorous but unresolved debate about what the present era is all about. So far, all we can agree on is what it is not -- e.g., not the Cold War, not bipolar, not a system of world politics driven only by nations, and not one where ideology appears to matter very much. Consequently, we have no reliable guide to gauging the impact of ideas and the various forms of power or even of nations when they possess large supplies of both. So far, the spirit of the era is best-captured by Vaclav Havel: "this is an age in which everything is possible and nothing is certain."

The best any of us can say is that there are forces at work which we only imperfectly understand but which are changing the world of the educator just as surely as they are changing the space inhabited by diplomats and businesspeople.

What's Driving What's Ahead?

More persons will attend colleges and universities in the 21st century than in all of human history.

This singular fact will change the nature of world politics, the map of the post-modern world, and the structure of the international system because power will be diffused across cultures as well as countries. And since most of the capacity to meet this demand will probably be built in countries other than the United States, developments in higher education will affect America's place in the world just as surely as it did in contributing to what made the 20th century the American Century.

The most critical success factor for nations as they enter the 21st century will be people whose minds are open to the world. In fact, more governments than ever before are getting into the business of promoting educational exchange and attracting foreign students. The U.S. Department of Commerce considers the foreign students studying in America an export of services valued at more than $13 billion annually. And for many countries, gaining market share of such an industry is becoming a national priority. For example, British Prime Minister Tony Blair launched a campaign to increase the number of international students in the U.K. by 75,000. His stated goal is "to have 25 percent of the global market share of higher education students." Similar initiatives have been announced by the governments of France, Germany, Japan, and Australia.

In the coming century, more students will want international educational opportunities as part of their preparation for careers in business as well as the public sector. Top corporate and government leaders are telling us that their "high performers" are going to need to come to them already equipped to think and work on a global basis. This will change the hiring paradigm, as well as the content of many professional education programs. Many of the nation's top MBA programs now stress their international character, courses, and student bodies, for example. When I think about a new paradigm in American higher education, therefore, I envision a future in which government may no longer be the prime funder of international educational exchange opportunities and where the venue is both the university campus and the workplace.

Responding to the demands for access to higher education in other countries will also require out-of-the-box thinking. We cannot possibly accommodate all the qualified students from China and India that will be ready for college in the next decade, nor is there space for them in this hemisphere or in all of Europe. Education ministries will be unable to afford to build campuses along traditional lines or wait for all enough teachers to be trained. What needs to be transferred at a very rapid rate is the knowledge of how things (such as economies, governments, and machines) work and how they can be applied to improve human society. We do this now via the Internet to bake bread, increase crop harvests, teach surgery, open historical archives, and manufacture simple as well as highly complex machines. The contents of a basic college education already exist in cyberspace. What needs to be created is the political will among education ministries and institutions to open their societies to new forms of knowledge delivery.

And What We May Find

Now that the first-ever International Education Week is behind us, it is appropriate to reflect on how open (or not) Americans are to the world. Since seventy-five percent of those recently polled by the Gallup organization could not locate the Persian Gulf, fifty percent failed to locate South Africa, and twenty-five percent could not identify the Pacific Ocean, the news is not encouraging.

Professor Allan Bloom holds the university -- and the forces of insulation and isolation at play within it -- directly responsible.

While the United States is the number one destination of students from other countries, according to the Institute's "Open Doors 2000" report, half of the 500,000 foreign students that study here do so in only 100 institutions. Nation-wide, international students account for only a small fraction of total enrollment, as I mentioned before. This means that most Americans are in school with other Americans and that in most classrooms there is no international or intercultural perspective. What is missing is what Professor Bloom said was so precious about a student's intellectual space and time: "These are charmed years when he can, if he so chooses, become anything he wishes and when he has the opportunity to survey his alternatives, not merely those current in his time or provided by careers, but those available to him as a human being. The importance of these years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him."

I have always been haunted by that last sentence.

Civilization comes in many forms, not just in the books of literature and philosophy that Professor Bloom rightly reveres. The encounter in a seminar discussion or in a research task force an American might have with a foreign student introduces not only different ways of working on and solving a problem but also entirely different ways of thinking. Such interaction has the capacity to introduce the idea that civilization matters and that there may be more than one of them at work in the world. I also know that no one who studies abroad remains unchanged by the experience. Part of the change that occurs is the widening of a person's intellectual horizons and a dissolving of borders and boundaries. As the late Senator J. William Fulbright put it, "nations are transformed into people." There is something profoundly civilizational about that, too.

Programs that promote the international exchange of people and ideas are the intellectual power lines and thoroughfares of the future. In my view, they are also the surest way of making the world a less dangerous place.”

Goodman, Allan E. (February 8, 2001). “Education in a Global Age,” IIE.



Opening Doors and Opening Minds: Why Both Are Needed for the 21st Century

"Man's struggle to be rational about himself, about his relationship to his own society, and to other peoples and nations involves a constant search for understanding among peoples and cultures -- a search that can only be effective when learning is pursued on a worldwide basis."
--Senator J. William Fulbright

The most critical success factor for nations as well as companies in what is left of this century and in all of the next is people whose minds are open to the world. This can only happen, as Senator Fulbright observed in a classic speech in 1977, through international education because it "can turn nations into people and contribute as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations." These transforming qualities are especially needed today.

As Vaclav Havel so aptly observed, we are living in an era where everything is possible and nothing is certain. This condition predominates in world politics largely because power is being dispersed not only across nations but across cultures. What governments as well as companies can do, consequently, is determined by an ever-widening set of constituencies, and each has more influence over decisions than ever before. What these constituencies demand is increasingly being determined by what they know about and how they see their place in the world. Between CNN and the Internet, few lack access to the images and information that depict the benefits as well as the costs of globalization. As a result, isolationism has so far had limited political appeal and only a handful of states appear bent on closing their societies to the world. That's the good news.

The bad news is that the universality of the dollar, the English language, and the Internet makes us all think we are closer and more secure than we are. What is especially troubling is that fostering the pursuit of learning on a genuinely worldwide basis is proving increasingly hard for government programs to do in what USIA Director Duffey has aptly called "an era of frugal diplomacy."

It is also an era in which American educational institutions are themselves finding it increasingly difficult to fund foreign students as well as Americans seeking to study abroad.

While the U.S. government will maintain its leadership role in supporting flagship initiatives such as Fulbright, Humphrey, and the National Security Education Program, it is clear that the future of these programs will require enlarging the circle of private sector stakeholders as well. But for most of this decade, such sources of philanthropy have contributed only one out of every nine dollars in grant aid to international programs. The best and brightest foreign students, moreover, are now being aggressively recruited by many other countries, and until this conference was convened there has been little public or private discussion among U.S. stakeholders about the potential impact of this trend. If we want to continue to train the future leaders of other nations, and expose them to the values and professional networks of our society, we cannot continue to take for granted the flow of foreign students to U.S. campuses, or underestimate the intellectual, strategic and financial resource they represent.

While foreign governments (especially in Europe, Asia, and Latin America) are developing sophisticated and well-funded strategies to increase the international mobility of their students and faculty members, there is no parallel strategy or resource pool to encourage and facilitate international academic mobility by Americans. Despite the obvious advantages a global perspective brings to future professionals, there are also strikingly less in the way of resources to encourage American students to spend part of their academic career abroad. The increasing complexity of core curricula, moreover, makes it genuinely more difficult for students and their mentors to fit a year of study abroad in to even a traditional liberal arts program. Many academic advisors, as a result, are reluctant to make the case that study abroad is an indispensable route to achieving the understanding of other societies that will be required for professional competence and competitiveness in the future.

I have also observed that despite the wide circulation that Senator Fulbright's speech received through its publication in the Harvard Business Review, few American corporate leaders have ever articulated the importance of "worldwide learning". And, in any case, the message has not filtered down to the front line recruiters on U.S. campuses or those in the human resources departments who handle entry level hires. And yet no major business today can expect to survive without managers who are knowledgeable about and able to work across nations as well as cultures.

More foreign students still pass through our open doors than those of any other country, making the United States the world's most sought-after and diverse educational region. But the numbers of foreign students coming here have been flat for several years, and visas for studying in America have become harder and more costly to get. In the face of severe budgetary pressure, the U.S. government's contribution to the Fulbright and Humphrey fellowship programs have declined by 20 and 42 percent, respectively, since 1994. Overseas advising offices which provide free access to information about U.S. higher education for millions of students around the world have faced years of reduced budgets. The problem is not just one of federal funding. In the July-August issue of Change, CIES Executive Director and IIE Vice President Patti McGill Peterson and Professor Philip Altbach of Boston College wrote that "'internationalize' may be closer to a buzz work than a deep-seated reality for most colleges and universities....In an era of tight budgets, most institutions lack the financial resources for major international initiatives. And institutions with a lot of international activities often lack the coherent strategic direction that provides connective tissue across them."

All of us, in fact, can cite recent instances at universities where requests for more resources to teach foreign languages or support area studies programs have come out last in budget reallocations. And on the campuses where there exist stand-alone schools of international affairs, many of their deans are finding that university presidents and provosts no longer regard such programs as the jewel in the crown.

Faculty also do not appear convinced about the value of overseas experience and scholarship. Senior scholars often discourage younger faculty members from applying for Fulbright or other fellowships that would place them abroad for periods longer than a few months. Earlier this year, the president of Duke University, Nan Keohane, noted in a speech at Oxford University that we have become "...quite parochial. Since English is the dominant language of international scholarship...there is little incentive for American scholars to learn other languages. Because American scholarship is recognized as preeminent in many fields, there is little incentive to be current in the work done in other countries for many faculty members."

Compared to our colleagues in the European Union, the proportion of Americans who have had an international academic sojourn is remarkably low. While the absolute numbers continue to climb, less than 1% of American college students receive credit for study abroad, according to Open Doors data. What is equally troubling is that nearly a third of all those Americans who do study abroad head only for English-speaking countries. A continuation of these trends will not make America competitive in the world because it does not open minds far enough to enough new possibilities. This makes it even more important to assure that there is a steady flow of foreign students to American campuses. The presence of foreign students in the U.S. classroom represents perhaps the only chance for most American students to hear an international perspective and learn how to interact with persons from a foreign culture.

State governments, many of which are developing sophisticated marketing strategies to woo foreign investment, have virtually ignored the foreign investment brought to them in the millions of dollars by international students, an investment that yields long-range benefits when those students return home and become corporate or government leaders making decisions about where to invest abroad in the future. Only a handful of states (such as Massachusetts and Oregon) have developed a coordinated academic recruitment strategy abroad to parallel their substantial investment in Foreign Trade offices and high-level delegations to woo corporate investors abroad. The economic crisis that started in Asia but is spreading across many other countries should serve as a wake up call that we cannot take for granted those flows of foreign students to our shores, and that urgent attention is needed to retain America's pre-eminent role as the higher education magnet for so many talented students around the world. There is, in sum, work for all of us here to do.

The U.S. government as a whole needs to insure that the flagship programs remain healthy and their budgets increase to a level that assures students and scholars the support they need to undertake their studies. This requires a new, bipartisan consensus about the importance of international educational exchange. Embassies also need to remain in the picture and facilitate the dissemination of information about and access to U.S. higher education, so that students from all around the world continue to see American academic institutions as their destination of choice. State governments and state-supported academic institutions should be sure that the immediate and long-range benefits of training international students are clear to legislators and to the voters who elect them. Academic leaders, from the President to the Provost to the Admissions office must clearly articulate the value of international students on campus and the value of study abroad for U.S. students Deans and professors have to push students to seek out programs that take them across cultures as well as oceans, and then develop curricula that actually build on what was learned after they return to campus. Corporate leaders have to start speaking up -- especially to business school deans and prospective MBAs -- about the importance of pursuing learning on a worldwide basis.

And together we have to help make the case that international educational exchange is one of the surest ways left to make the world a less dangerous place.”

Goodman, Allan E. (September 24, 1998). “Opening Doors and Opening Minds: Why Both Are Needed for the 21st Century,” IIE.



Study Abroad Opportunities Abound: International Experience Vital For U.S. Students

"New York, N.Y, April, 1999 -- The number and diversity of study abroad opportunities and the number of U.S. students studying in other countries continue to expand, according to the Institute of International Education (IIE). This year's edition of IIE's annual directory, Academic Year Abroad 1999-2000 (March, 1999, $44.95; 717 pages) describes nearly 2,700 programs available in more than 70 countries. Academic Year Abroad is considered the standard reference on study abroad used by academic advisers, undergraduate, and graduate students in colleges and universities nationwide, as well as by high school and adult learners.

The number of American students studying abroad has doubled in the past decade, according to data collected annually for IIE's Open Doors report and reprinted in Academic Year Abroad 1999-2000. The number of U.S. students receiving credit for studying abroad increased 11% to a record 99,448 in 1996-97 (the latest period for which statistics are available). At the same time, the number of study abroad programs listed in the book grew by 33% from 1,841 in 1989/1990.

"Study abroad is no longer a luxury for only a privileged few," said Dr. Allan E. Goodman, president and CEO of IIE. "It is imperative that U.S. students study overseas as a way to prepare themselves to work and compete in the world market. I commend the many U.S. campuses that are putting international education at the center of their institutional mission. The most critical factor for the success of nations in the new millennium will be a population whose minds are open to the world."

Opportunities as diverse as international business studies in Beijing, field work in Brazil's rain forest, volunteer service work in Nepal, language studies in Kyoto, arts management in London, international relations in The Hague, African studies in Ghana, and urban planning in Helsinki are just a few of the thousands of choices available for students today. Though the majority of Americans studying abroad are still going to countries in Western Europe (65%), there is a continuing trend toward more variety in the selection of destinations. Students going to Africa increased by 27%, Southeast Asia by 28%, Latin America by 11%. Social sciences/humanities, business, and foreign languages are the three leading fields of study.

In Academic Year Abroad, the learning options range from lecture courses, semester studies, and intensive language immersion, to internships, student teaching, field research, and volunteer service. Each program description includes indexed information on costs and fees, program dates and duration, academic credit, eligibility and academic level, fields of study, scholarship and work-study opportunities, languages of instruction, and housing information, as well as phone, fax, e-mail addresses and web sites for program contacts. Many of these resources can also be accessed through IIE's own website, at http://www.iie.org.

Academic Year Abroad (Sara Steen, editor; $44.95) and the companion volume, Vacation Study Abroad ($42.95), have been the standard reference resources on study abroad for U.S. students and adult learners for over 40 years. They can be ordered from IIE Books at PO Box 371, Annapolis Junction, MD 20701 (iiebooks@pmds.com), 800-445-0443. There is a $6 shipping and handling charge for each book. A limited number of review copies are available upon request from IIE Public Affairs 212-984-5380 or Halstead Communications 212-734-2190.

Also available from IIE Books is Open Doors 1997-98 ($42.95), IIE's annual report on foreign students in the United States and Americans studying abroad, made possible by a grant from the United States Information Agency. The Open Doors report is based on a census of the international student population that IIE has conducted since 1949. The full report provides 200 pages of data, with graphics highlighting key facts and trends in the flow of international students and scholars. The New York-based Institute of International Education, founded in 1919, is the leading non-governmental agency in the international exchange of people and ideas."

Goodman, Allane E. (April, 1999). ”Study Abroad Opportunities Abound: International Experience Vital For U.S. Students," IIE..



Interest in International Educational Exchange remains Strong in the Aftermath of September 11th, According to IIE Survey

"Washington D. C., November 13, 2001 - In an online survey recently conducted by the Institute of International Education, 97% of the 600 international education professionals responding said that international education exchange, including study abroad, was regarded as more important or equally as important on their campuses in the aftermath of September 11. That response was part of a survey conducted on IIE's membership website over a two-week time period in late October. The survey findings will be released today in conjunction with the release of Open Doors 2001, IIE's annual report on international educational exchange. The survey provides a snapshot of what impact educators have observed on their campuses in recent weeks.

The survey also suggests that most American students are going ahead with their plans to study abroad and very few international students are dropping out of their U.S. study programs to return home in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The full survey and results are posted on IIE's membership web site (http://www.iienetwork.org/).

The Institute's annual comprehensive report on international student mobility, Open Doors 2001, shows that a record total of 547,867 international students studied in the United States this year, making higher education one of this country's leading exports and bringing over $11 billion to the U.S. economy. The number of international students increased by over 6% in academic year 2000/01. Study abroad by American students has also been increasing rapidly over the past five years (up 61%), although the total numbers who study abroad still represent a very small percentage of the total U.S. student population. Detailed breakdowns of the report's findings will be available on the Open Doors web site (http://www.opendoorsweb.org/)as of November 13.

"The exchange of knowledge and ideas between American citizens and the people of other nations is vital to American higher education and to the prospect of creating a peaceful, more secure world," said Allan E. Goodman, IIE's president and CEO. "With our nation's international education policy being held up to scrutiny in Congress, campuses examining the future of their programs, and crucial decisions being made by students and their families every day, we felt it was important to get a quick but far-reaching view of the impact of current world events on students who are studying outside of their own countries."

According to Dr. Goodman, "The student advisors, program providers and other professionals who are participating in the new IIENetwork on-line community have overwhelmingly indicated that their experience indicates that interest in both study abroad by American students and study in the U.S. by international students has remained strong, and is likely to do so in the coming year. This is welcome news, because we believe this is a time when our world needs more international exchange, not less. The terrorists wish to close our minds, our borders and our markets to the rest of the world, and we must make sure they do not succeed."

Asked about international students who were studying in the United States, 69% of the respondents (379 of the 545 who answered this question) said that they had seen no noticeable change from pre-September 11 enrollment levels, and an additional 28% (153) stated that only a few - less than 10% -- of the international students on their campus or program had decided to leave their programs early and return home, in response to concerns about security. Only 13 educators (1% of respondents) reported seeing more than 10% of the international students leave their programs prematurely following the September 11 events. When asked about students who had not yet arrived on campus as of September 11 to begin the new academic year, approximately 93% (403 of 430 responding) said that few or none changed their plans and decided not to attend after the attacks.

Reporting on their American students who were studying abroad or planning to study abroad for the fall term, 91% (460 of 500 respondents) reported that 90% or more of their students had gone ahead with their study abroad plans. Twenty-nine respondents (5%) estimated that some (11-30%) of their students who had planned to study abroad had cancelled their plans, and 11 educators (2%) said that a substantial number (more than 30% of the students) had cancelled.

Looking ahead to project the impact on future study abroad plans, approximately two-thirds of the educators reported that interest in study abroad had either continued to increase or remained the same on their campus despite recent events. Of the 456 respondents, 136 (29%) saw continued increase in interest, and 177 (38%) reported no visible decline in the number of applications or requests for information on study abroad for the coming term. Nineteen percent reported a slight decline in applications or requests for information for future terms, while 9% saw some decline and 2% saw a substantial (greater than 30%) decline.

These numbers support anecdotal reports that a small number of programs to some locations have been cancelled or have seen students withdraw. Programs that were cancelled were concentrated in areas where there have been substantial public demonstrations against the U.S. such as in the Middle East, South Asia, and Indonesia. But the majority of programs are continuing as scheduled, albeit with a careful examination of security and emergency procedures. In an open discussion on an IIENetwork Community Message Board, campus professionals noted that their students had experienced a great deal of support from people of their host countries and sponsors of their programs, and that there was a noticeable new interest in international issues in general and Islam and its teachings in particular.

While the responses were anonymous, a total of 577 respondents identified themselves as representing institutions as follows: 338 (58%) from universities, 165 (28%) from four-year colleges, 32 (5%) from two-year colleges, 11 (1%) from non-governmental organizations, and 31 (5%) from other types of institutions.”

Goodman, Allan E. (November 13, 2001). “Interest in International Educational Exchange remains Strong in the Aftermath of September 11th, According to IIE Survey,” IIE.



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