Today's Video: France DVD Trailer

Simpson College in France from Brian Steffen on Vimeo.

Smart Study Abroad hasn’t gone away — we’ve just been in documentary-production mode for the past month in preparing a film on our May study-abroad course in France. We’ve even prepared a trailer in support of our Office of International Education and now share that trailer here.

Back from France, Back Online

After a 2 1/2 week hiatus while I led a group of Simpson College students on a study tour comparing American and French cultures, Smart Study Abroad is back online. Give us a couple of days to get caught up on what’s been happening the larger world of study abroad, and we’ll be posting regularly again next week.

The plan had been for posting regularly from France. But Internet access in our hotels was spotty. Our Paris hotel had no access because the owner hadn’t paid his Internet bill, while our Bordeaux hotel would support only low-bandwidth email applications. A hotel in Nice provided reliable, high-bandwidth support (and at no charge to hotel guests!), but by then the 16-hour days were taking a toll on my ability to do anything other than shower and sleep.

As I tell my students, the key to success when studying abroad is in being flexible!

Prepping for France

Most of this blog is devoted to covering the world of study abroad for a growing audience, but my interest in the subject is more than journalistic — I'm also a professor who is leaving for France in three weeks with 11 students to compare French and American cultures and conceptions of good living.

This is the first solo-led study-abroad experience of my career. I've been on three previous travel courses to various locations in Europe, but always with the excellent folks at ACIS to make arrangements and put out fires on the road. If you’re thinking about study abroad for the first time without an on-campus office to help you through the process, ACIS provides high-quality service and a willingness to customize programs to your needs.

Still, cost is becoming ever more important to students and families, and I’m running our 2009 France course on my own to trim costs as much as possible. As things now stand, we’ll likely get our crew to Paris, Bordeaux and Nice for 15 days of meetings and exchanges with locals for about $3,000 a head.

Preparation is essential in study abroad. At Simpson College in Iowa, where I teach, time and resource restrictions limit our ability to prepare our students for abroad experiences to a 1-credit semester-before-departure course. It’s problematic, to be sure, in that there’s just not enough time to fully prepare my students — none of whom have been to France and only one of whom has been abroad at all (and, in her case, to the language-friendly confines of England).

Some of what we’ve covered in the prep course:

• A book on French and American cultures, Gilles Asselin’s and Ruth Mastron’s Au Contraire: Figuring Out the French, which covers a variety of public and private social and cultural norms in the two countries.
• Introductions to each of the cities in the travel course. These take place through discussion and video.
• Basic French words and phrases (I jokingly call the list our stay-out-of-jail list...) for a group that includes 10 students with no meaningful experience in the language and an instructor who also has little skill with the language (but a willingness to try!).
• How to avoid the “ugly American” stereotype that turns up with too much frequency.
• Images of the French as propounded to us as Americans by American mass media.
• Packing, money, electricity and the basics of everyday living in a culture other than your own.

It appears to be a good group of students who are eager to encounter the culture. We’ll spend good chunks of time together as a group but also give them plenty of time to explore in small groups on their own.

Now if I can just get the dining down... If you can recommend restaurants in Paris, Bordeaux or Nice that accommodate groups of 13 traveling on a budget, please let me know.

SSA Podcast: French Polynesia Edition

Here’s our first Smart Study Abroad podcast, featuring an interview with my colleague Sharon Wilkinson, an associate professor of world languages and culture at Simpson College. Sharon is in the process of setting up a semester in French Polynesia and took a break from her busy teaching schedule at Simpson to talk about the program and her ideas for setting up semesters abroad.

Sharon’s in her third year at Simpson, having come to the college from West Virginia University and having earned her Ph.D. at Penn State in 1995. In the podcast, she talks about the college’s new relationship with the University of French Polynesia, the work that goes into setting up a semester-length study abroad program, and tips she’s learned from her experiences.

Recruiting for Study Abroad

The economy may be in rough shape, but my colleagues at Simpson are still spreading the word about study abroad opportunities. Marilyn Mueller, a management professor who will take students to Argentina in May, spoke Jan. 29 at a panel discussion. Ryan Rehmeier, center, an assistant a professor of biology who will take students to the Galapagos Islands in May, and Jim Palmieri, an economics professor who's taken students to several nations, also participated.

Improving Short-Term Programs

Short-term internationl programs are increasing in popularity nationwide, the Forum for Education Abroad says, and now the organization has come up with standards of good practice in those programs.

FEA considers short-term programs to be those of eight weeks or less and says they represent the greatest single kind of study-abroad experience for American students. They're attractive to a variety of students who can't or won't consider full-semester programs for economic, personal or social reasons.

(Our three-week May Term program at Simpson remains the most popular option for students who wish to take their studies abroad, but we have invested considerable funding and effort to build semester programs in England, Spain, Germany, French Polynesia and Thailand.)

The FEA standards will be an item of discussion at the FEA "Being There: Teaching and Learning Abroad" conference in Portland, Ore., in February. (We'll be providing coverage of the conference at Smart Study Abroad.)

For now, the new FEA standards are that short-terms study abroad programs should:

• Be related to the education abroad mission of the organization and has well-defined academic and/or experiential objectives.
• Be reviewed in the light of its stated educational purpose for fostering student learning and development.
• Be maintained by organizations with clearly stated and publicly available policies on academic and non-academic matters.
• Provide pre-travel orientation and support for students that is consistent with the institution's mission.
• Maintain, and make publicly accessible, a commitment to fair and appropriate policies regarding student selection and conduct.
• Have adequate personnel and financial resources.
• Establish and maintain effective health, safety, security and risk management policies, procedures and faculty/staff training.
• Be organized with standards set out in FEA's Code of Ethics for Education Abroad, especially with regards to operations, staffing, cultural sensitivity, avoidance of conflicts of interest, law and marketing.

A full copy of the new FEA standards report is available here.

Simpson's National Ranking in Study Abroad

Simpson College finds itself ranked 36th in the nation among baccalaureate institutions sending students abroad in 2006-2007, according to the latest data handed down from the Institute for International Education.

According to IIE, Simpson sent 270 students abroad that year and granted 425 degrees, meaning 63.5 percent of the number of students graduating had gone abroad. (I know — potentially a misleading statistic, but we'll take the publicity.)

The top 10 baccalaureate institutions on the IIE list are: Austin, Hartwick, Minnesota-Morris, Centre, Wofford, Colorado College, Kalamazoo, Bates, Goucher and St. Olaf. One other Iowa school, Luther, ranks 20th on the list.

Among doctoral institutions, Yeshiva University in New York, sent 75.7 percent of its undergraduates abroad in 2006-2007 to lead that category. The leading master's institution was Arcadia University in Pennsylvania, which sent 126.1 percent of its graduates abroad that year.

Study Abroad Preparation for Students

Today I begin prepping my nine France-bound students for our 15-day travel course to Paris, Bordeaux and Nice in April and May. It's a one-credit academic course designed to help our students appreciate the difference between our travel program as an academic experience and what they'd likely experience if they were simply tourists seeing the country EuroTrip style.

The preparation for study abroad is crucial, which most leaders know but I've learned the hard way. When I first led a study-abroad course, in 2001, the preparation was limited to meetings at which we watched a couple of videos, filled out forms, made copies of passports and distributed airline tickets. Now we're a bit more rigorous about it.

Some institutions have detailed preparation processes for students. My own institution has but a part-time international education coordinator who is doing a great job of trying to systematize our study-abroad programs and introduce standards for what constitutes acceptable study-abroad opportunities.

The prep course increases in important when, as in my case, the instructor is leading a course on his or her own without the aid of a travel-course vender such as EF Tours or ACIS. I'll update the blog as we go through the process over the next several weeks, leading to our departure on April 27.

For now, it appears to me that preparation experiences need to focus broadly on the following themes:

• Systems and procedures of travel courses: Getting the forms and passports in, explaining the rules, etc.
• Defining culture broadly and the cultural ideals of the students' destinations.
• Specific content of the course. In our case, our course is designed to expose students — most of whom speak little French at all — to the differing values and ways of life of Americans and the French.

There'll no doubt be much more than this. 

The Economy and Study Abroad

Study abroad advocates are worrying whether the sliding world economy will have a significant impact on study abroad programs at U.S. universities. At Simpson, it appears to be putting the brakes on student willingness to spend time outside of the country as part of their studies.

The Institute of International Education says the past 10 years have seen phenomenal growth in study abroad among college students — from about 100,000 in 1996-97 to 241,791 in 2006-2007. We've seen similar growth at Simpson during that decade, but since then the question here is whether the numbers are going to hold out.

The initial figures aren't looking positive. Our popular May Term program has seen a precipitous drop in international travel over the past couple of years. Nearly 280 of our 1,500 students went abroad in May Term 2007, but that number fell to 197 last year and looks to be around 170 for this coming term.

We've had to cancel several trips for this spring due to low enrollment, and it appears that the only May Term excursions with guaranteed high interest among our students are those going to the United Kingdom or exotic warm-weather locales (such as a course that will travel this spring to the Galapagos Islands).

I've taught four study-abroad courses in Europe since 2001. Until this year, these all drew between 31-37 students. This year's course to France has only 9, a number secured only with intensive recruiting and budget cutting from our original plans. 

To be fair, we've beefed up semester study-abroad opportunities. In addition to our long-running programs in London and Germany, we've started or about to start programs in Thailand, French Polynesia and Spain. But my sense is that not enough students are flocking to those opportunities to offset the drop in May Term travel interest.

We'll be investigating what other colleges and universities are reporting  for their international education programs. For what it's worth, IIE says that in 2006-2007 (a year, remember, when terms such "mortgage meltdown" and "credit default swaps" and "economic bailouts" weren't in common usage):

• The number of students studying abroad was up 8 percent from the year before. But Iowa students, who tend to be more frugal with college education, actually went abroad in slightly fewer numbers than in 2005-2006.
• Nontraditional study abroad locations were rising in popularity. The big gainers among destinations in 2006-2007 were Ecuador, South Africa, Argentina, China and India.
• The biggest losers among destinations were Australia, Mexico and Costa Rica.
• The United Kingdom remains, by far, the most popular study abroad destination, followed by Italy, Spain and France. Almost half of all U.S. students who went abroad in 2006-2007 wound up studying in one of those countries.

One standout statistic that deserves greater attention is IIE's finding that 65 percent of those going abroad are women. Why isn't study abroad more popular among men?

Smart Study Abroad

Here goes with a new blog: Smart Study Abroad, and I'll be using it to help document my attempts to put together a study-abroad course on my own. It's the first time I've tried such a thing.

I'm no stranger to travel abroad. As a professor at Simpson College in Iowa, a liberal arts school that puts a focus on study-abroad programs, I've led study groups to various European destinations three times over the past eights years. I've also participated in a faculty exchange with Curtin University in Perth, Australia.

But this year is different: Due to escalating costs and the declining economy, I'm taking on the task this year of planning and leading a travel course on my own, taking 9 Simpson students and an assistant with me on a 15-day excursion to Paris, Bordeaux and Nice in France in April and May.

This is a bit of stretch for me in that my skills in the French language are, well, minimal. But I'm game for about any challenge, and I'm very much looking forward to taking students to see what I've always considered to be a warm and welcoming nation and people.

I'm also a professor of journalism at my college, trying to embrace the multimedia revolution. I'm fortunate enough to be on sabbatical this term — which provides me with plenty of time to put together this study course. But I'm also using the sabbatical to create, promote and maintain this site in hopes of creating a community of college and high school faculty who believe in the benefits of study abroad but also need help in putting it all together.

I'm coming to find that it can be done, as the Beatles said, with a little help from our friends. So let's get to it!