Privatized Pathways for Foreign Studentshttps://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/04/pathways U.S. colleges have increasingly turned to for-profit companies for help in recruiting international students. Now, with the growing popularity of “pathway” programs -- which feature a hybrid of credit-bearing coursework and instruction in English language and academic skills -- some institutions are also outsourcing the responsibility for teaching and supporting international students their first year on campus. By August 4, 2010 U.S. colleges have increasingly turned to for-profit companies for help in recruiting international students. Now, with the growing popularity of “pathway” programs -- which feature a hybrid of credit-bearing coursework and instruction in English language and academic skills -- some institutions are also outsourcing the responsibility for teaching and supporting international students their first year on campus. “We do everything from pick them up at the airport and make sure they’re safe and sound and taken care of the very first day, to provide them with enhanced learning opportunities so we can increase their chances to be successful academically and socially on campus,” said Dean Kahler, executive director of Navitas at WKU (Western Kentucky University). In his former role as associate vice president for enrollment management at Western Kentucky, Kahler helped broker WKU’s contract with Navitas, a Australian education company, to recruit for and manage a pathway program for international students. The 10-year contract, signed in January, was Navitas’s first such contract with an American university. But the company has since signed three more – with the Universities of Massachusetts at Boston, Dartmouth and Lowell. All four pathway programs are enrolling their first students this fall.
create more globally-aware and interculturally-competent citizens – and for financial ones. Virtually every college would also like to increase this population of students who, by and large, pay full freight. An import from Australia and the United Kingdom, pathway programs are just beginning to appear in North America. In addition to Navitas’ four new American programs, Study Group -- an Australian education company by a U.S.-based private equity group, Providence Equity Partners, for $570 million – is starting pathway programs at three of its U.S. partner institutions this fall: Dean and Fisher Colleges, both in Massachusetts, and James Madison University, in Virginia. Kaplan, Inc. started a “Global Pathways Program” at Northeastern University in 2007 and opened a second such program at the University of Utah in January (per “Your guaranteed route to a Bachelor’s degree from a top U.S. University.”) “The idea is that we each play to our strengths,” said Larry Green, senior vice president of Kaplan International Colleges. Northeastern and Utah faculty design and teach the Global Pathways courses and Kaplan markets, recruits, and provides a range of student services for the programs. “This is about using faculty and teaching methods and curriculum that you’re very, very comfortable with already,” Green said. “It’s about obviously increasing international student enrollment on campus. It’s about making sure those students are extremely when they matriculate, academically, socially and culturally.” The company that has made the biggest splash in the U.S. market is the INTO University Partnerships, which has study centers at nine universities in the United Kingdom and has forged long-term contracts with Oregon State University and, more recently, the University of South Florida. The INTO model differs from that of its competitors: David Stremba, INTO’s managing director for North America, describes the INTO model as “in-sourcing” as opposed to outsourcing, as the company enters into joint ventures with its partner universities and shares costs, profits, and management responsibilities, 50-50. Under this model, instructors remain employees of the university, which retains all control over academics. But INTO’s expansion has been a source of concern among many instructors at university-based intensive English programs, who watched as OSU and USF’s based
computer labs, office space to accommodate approximately 100 people (including 60 instructors) and about 350 beds. Strategic or Short-Sighted? Oregon State entered into the partnership with INTO with which had declined after September 11. As other institutions look to raise their international student enrollment, an increasing number are saying they can’t do it on their own. Particularly when it comes to international recruiting, many U.S. universities are simply deciding that they don’t have the resources to maintain a global presence of sufficient size and scope. As such, the controversial practice of hiring outside agents, is growing rapidly and privatized pathway programs – in which companies provide both recruitment and education services – are in many ways a natural extension of this trend. “International recruiting is hard, it’s time-consuming, it’s very expensive,” said Green, of Kaplan International Colleges. “There’s a trade-off for a university. A university can retain total control and cover a small part of the world, or yield some control and cover a much larger piece of the world.” Ceding control of the recruitment process continues to be one of the main arguments against employing outside agents in recruitment. And when it comes to offering credit-bearing, academic coursework, ceding control is precisely what opponents of pathway programs are most worried about. “Navitas has such a capacity for recruitment that it is appealing to university administrators, but I think it’s just terribly short-sighted,” said Carrie Dawson, an associate professor of English and president of the Faculty Association at Dalhousie University, in Nova Scotia; the union is opposing a proposed contract with Navitas. “We do need to attend to our enrollment; we just don’t think this is the way to do it. We want to do it with our own faculty, to our own standards.” In the association notes that administrators have emphasized that Dalhousie departments would “oversee” the Navitas classes. “But what that means is not entirely clear,” the letter states. “What isclear is that Dalhousie departments will lose a large measure of control over their courses where those courses are taught by Navitas’s staff and taught to Navitas’s standards. Those standards will likely be different than our own: because Navitas is primarily concerned with profit, it seeks to pass along as many students as possible while keeping its