Remarks to American Council on Education: A Strategic View of Study Abroad

Your conference theme of thinking strategically about education abroad could not be more timely -- and it dovetails perfectly with our highest priorities at the State Department.

I view my job overseeing America's public diplomacy as reaching out to the world in a spirit of respect and partnership. I'm trying to give special focus to partnerships that result in a better life for people in concrete, meaningful ways, especially in two areas that resonate for people everywhere - education and health. Whether you are a man or woman, whether you live in Africa, Afghanistan or America, people want educational opportunities and better health care for themselves and their families. I just returned from a trip to the Middle East where we announced the first ever public-private partnership on a women's health issue, breast cancer, because sharing our experience in battling this disease can help save lives.

And my office is committed to significantly expanding our education programs, especially student exchanges, because we know education changes lives. Education dramatically expands the horizons of opportunity. It gives young people something they want -something that helps them achieve their full potential, and something that opens a window to a wider world. Experience has shown us time and time again that learning is the most effective bridge to mutual understanding and mutual respect.

Since I started working at the state department 15 months ago, I have traveled to more than 30 countries. Earlier this year, I met with a group of students in an English language teaching program in Morocco and asked a young man: "Tell me what difference this English program has made in your life." And he said, "I have a job and my friends don't." That's the kind of real-world difference that education can make.

We know that learning provides people with more choices and a broader view of the world -- at the same time, our outstanding education programs offer a positive face for our country to the outside world. We've seen that education can be an antidote to hopelessness, misunderstanding and violence. All our U.S. Government agencies now are focusing more intensely on educational outreach of all types - from student and teacher exchanges, to English-language training, to literacy classes and scholarships for girls to increase women's access to education.

Today, I want to discuss four ways that we are dramatically strengthening our education programs:

• We are expanding capacity.
• We are building global competency, including better language skills.
• We are increasing the diversity of our exchange participants, and
• We are aggressively promoting the United States as a higher education destination.

In the first area, expanding capacity --

One of the unrecognized stories of America's public diplomacy today is that our scholarship programs for U.S. students to study overseas are now at historic highs - by next summer, the State Department will provide scholarships to more than 2400 American undergraduate and graduate students to study abroad - that's nearly triple the more than 850 we supported through the former US Information Agency just ten years ago.

The best known and flagship of our exchange programs - the Fulbright - is a good bellweather. At its previous height, in the 1950s, nearly 1,000 Fulbright scholarships were given to American students to study abroad. That number dwindled during the 1960s and dropped to below 300 by 1969. Fulbright grants to encourage Americans to study abroad didn't significantly increase again until 1991, when the Fulbright Scholarship Board called for a major commitment to offer more scholarship opportunities for American students. That year, 578 scholarships were given. By 1996, the number had increased to 853.

Today, thanks to the major commitment of this Administration, we are funding the largest total number of Fulbright awards ever for American students to study overseas- 1,309.

We want to see more and more students go abroad to study and learn about other countries and cultures - and so do many members of Congress. We have closely followed the work of the Lincoln Commission on international study and are pleased that it has prompted many expressions of support for expanded study abroad programs for Americans. Many of us were moved by the vision of the late Senator Paul Simon, who was known for traveling around our capital city after he retired from the Senate with his enormous flip chart outlining how he hoped to expand international opportunities for America's students. As you know, the source of funding for the bold expansion envisioned by the Lincoln Fellowship program is not clear. Perhaps we should consider a new paradigm, in partnership with the private sector and our academic institutions, to make an extraordinary expansion in study abroad possible. I'm sure that working together, we can match the Senator's vision with the diligent work of the Lincoln Commission to champion more study abroad for American students.

As we increase our capacity to send American students overseas, we are developing greater global competency in the next generation. Just as previous generations needed basic literacy in the three R's, the next generation will need technological and global literacy skills to be competitive in our increasingly diverse and interdependent world -- and study abroad has become the foundation of global literacy.

Tom Friedman, the well-known New York Times columnist who coined the memorable phrase "the world is flat" to explain the wide-open global playing field, has said, "We got from the Agricultural Revolution to the Industrial Revolution by making high school compulsory. To get to the Post-Industrial Revolution, we have to go one layer higher." The world has changed so dramatically, that for the Digital-Global generation, we need to shake loose the image of higher education as primarily a domestic experience and send more students overseas to learn about the rest of the world. And in a larger sense, it adds to world stability to have a free flow of intellectual capital and to keep movement flowing back and forth on academic highways.

As leaders in education, you well know that American universities and colleges are brainstorming about global education -- our government is eager to work with you to meet this new challenge.

Less than a year ago, a number of your institutions were represented at the first University Presidents' Summit. David Ward of ACE and others helped us develop themes for discussion. Building global competence for American students as a way to increase mutual understanding and this nation's competitive position was one of those themes. An important cornerstone of the Summit was President Bush's announcement of the National Security Language Initiative for America's students. The President believes that we cannot partner, engage, negotiate, or understand one another effectively unless we can communicate at a more fundamental and fluent level.

Currently, only 2% of American high school students study the combined critical languages of Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Korean, Japanese, Russian or Chinese. Only 44% of high school students are involved in any foreign-language course -- and 70% of those are enrolled in Spanish classes. While studying Spanish is obviously valuable in light of our own country's demographics and our close relationship with our neighbors in our hemisphere, we also clearly need to diversify our nation's language portfolio.

The National Security Language Initiative -- NSLI -- has become known in the world of bureaucracy as nes-ley, like the candy bar. I hope NSLI will become one of the most identifiable acronyms in government -- like the IRS but more popular --  because we must move aggressively to train more Americans for the languages we need in our diplomatic, business, scientific and security endeavors.

The good news is that with the strong support of U.S. academic institutions, we are moving forward more quickly than many had anticipated.

This past summer -- just 5 months after the announcement of NSLI -- the Department of State sponsored intensive pilot summer language programs for American undergraduate and graduate students in India, Jordan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, and Yemen.

A remarkable number of American students -- 4,200 -- applied for the first 165 awards. The interest is clearly there -- we now need to match it with quality foreign-language experiences. Next year, we will more than double the number of scholarships and include the other critical need languages: Chinese, Korean and Russian.

We also are devoting resources to language assistance to prepare American college students before they travel for study and research abroad.

Some of our summit partner institutions are among those cooperating with the Department of State to host Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistants, who will teach critical-need languages to your U.S. students. The Department of State also has added intensive language training for American Fulbright students this year before they began their grants and we expect to triple that next year.

One of the best features of NSLI is that it will start early, when students can absorb languages more easily. It supports language learning from preschool through graduate school so that we can build a pipeline of American citizens who can communicate in the languages of the world.

But to complete that pipeline, we will need many more language instructors. The Department of Education is cooperating with us in this goal by convening Teacher-to-Teacher regional summer workshops to enhance teachers' skills in critical foreign languages.

Our third commitment is to increasing diversity -- and that is in keeping with your theme of expanding access to new populations. As a nation, we constantly seek ways to open wide the doors of higher education to as many Americans as possible. No program is more in keeping with this goal than our Benjamin Gilman International Scholarship program. The Gilman Scholarships -- which are awarded based on financial need -- are making study overseas available to more of our citizens. The program is at the top of the charts in providing geographic diversity and minority participation. To date, 1,905 students with high financial need representing 527 colleges and universities have studied in 94 different countries.

We made a commitment to increase diversity and the results are dramatic.

Under Gilman, African American participation is more than 16%, compared to only 3% in traditional study abroad, Hispanic participation is almost 11% -- compared to just over 5 in traditional study abroad, Asian American participation is more than 8%, compared to 6 in traditional programs.

We are committed to expanding this high achieving program at a fast pace. This year we will award 777 Gilman scholarships, next year we will be above 800 and I want to see us reach 1,000 awards by the end of this decade. We want non-elite students to have the opportunity to participate in exchanges and develop skills that will allow them to contribute to society at large.

We also are making special efforts to more actively engage minority serving institutions -- and their students, faculty and communities in our programs. This includes Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions and Tribal Colleges and Universities.

Our diversity efforts also include working with America's community colleges. We are helping this important group of institutions, which attract many non-elite and non-traditional students, to increase their international activities. At the President's Summit in January, the Department of State announced a new scholarship program to bring diverse students from key countries throughout the world to study at U.S. community colleges. The initial participants will come from Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa and Turkey. My hope is that their presence on campus will encourage more American community college students to recognize the value of study overseas.

The study abroad programs that you develop do more than model inclusion -- they can result in beneficial change in host country teaching institutions. The quality that we demand for our American students studying overseas helps raise the bar for instruction and administration. Partnering with higher education institutions overseas, I believe, helps establish higher standards in curriculum development, preparation for classroom instruction, instructor-student contact time, and overall institutional administrative support. We take such things for granted in the U.S., but foreign students studying here tell us those attributes set our system apart from most others in the world.

We at State can provide scholarship programs, but we need your help to expand the capacity of foreign institutions to receive U.S. students. Through your study abroad programs and your influence, you can expand the vision of educational institutions around the world.

As we bring on line new study opportunities, we are keenly aware of the need to secure the safety of our citizens, so we work closely with our colleagues in the American Embassies and Consulates overseas to determine the suitability of locations for traditional programs and new initiatives. I urge all of you to pay close attention, as do we, to travel warnings and various advisories published by the Department of State. We want your institutions and your students to be secure.

Finally, the State Department is working aggressively to help you promote America as a higher education destination. At the time of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we were in the midst of processing student visas and applications that would lead to an all-time high number of foreign students studying in American in the 2002 academic year -- more than 586,000. In the aftermath of September 11th, as security measures were understandably tightened, visas became harder to get and many students chose to go elsewhere, resulting in a drop that we have been working aggressively to rebuild.

We redoubled our efforts to reach out to foreign students and to streamline the visa process -- some 500 new consular positions were created to address the increased workload for visa processing . A special program was created to put students at the head of the line for visas, and the effort is beginning to pay off.

We just received word that the student visa issuance rate overall has increased almost 14 percent this year and we are recovering from the losses of several years ago. But we need to do more to draw more students here for university study, to exceed the high-water mark back in 2002. We can't be content to merely stabilize the higher education enrollment level at the current 565,000.

We need to recruit many more higher education students to come study with us and share the American experience. There is no doubt in my mind that student exchanges have been our single most effective public diplomacy tool for the past 50 years -- there is simply no substitute for bringing people here where they learn with us and from us and make up their minds for themselves about America.

You can help us raise those student numbers even more by escalating your own efforts to recruit foreign students and by ensuring that their campus experience is a welcoming one. We now have greater competition for those students. Just today, I received an email from our embassy in New Delhi. They are concerned about the concerted effort that Europeans are making to recruit Indians to study in Europe. More than 100 universities from 25 European countries will gather under one roof in New Delhi in just a few weeks for the first "European Higher Education Fair." India has been the No. 1 country sending students to the United States for study and research - but this should alert us that other countries are aggressively recruiting those students. We must work together -- at a quicker pace -- to recruit the high-achieving students overseas to come to our campuses.

A major step in that direction will take place next week during International Education Week -- Dina Powell, our assistant Secretary of State for Education and Cultural Affairs, and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings will follow up on the successful University Presidents' Summit on International Education that was held in January this year. They will lead an historic delegation of American university presidents to Japan, Korea and China -- this is the first time that a U.S. Cabinet Secretary and the official in charge of exchanges at State have joined hands with America's higher education leadership to promote the value of study in the U.S. They will be spotlighting the broad range of higher education opportunities in the U.S. and sending a welcoming message to encourage the continued flow of international students to the U.S.

It makes good economic sense to bring greater numbers of foreign students here because foreign students make a valuable contribution to our economy -- foreign students contribute $12-13 billion per year to the U.S. economy - and many schools count on those foreign enrollments to make ends meet. It also is healthy for America to bring the best and brightest from other countries here because we learn from them -- our businesses benefit from them -- and they return to their home countries with a better understanding of the United States and lifelong ties to the U.S.

Working in partnership with you, we at the State Department look forward to providing more access for our American students abroad than ever before and at the same time, including more international students than before on our U.S. campuses. I am convinced that doing so will promote intellectual freedom and foster understanding around the world.

As I travel the world, I have become convinced that it is in our vital national security interest that American remain an open and welcoming country -- open to students, open to cultures, ideas, innovation and new opportunities abroad. I was in a low-income neighborhood in Turkey visiting a housing program there, and a young man asked a question that struck me in my heart. He asked through the translator, "Does the Statue of Liberty still face out?"

And he meant, is America still that open, inviting, hopeful country that we all want it to be? I would submit that we must remain not only welcoming, but also involved and more highly engaged in the world, especially through study abroad opportunities for our future leaders. This moment calls for all of us to work together to share our highest ideals, the benefits of education and the spirit of respect for others. I welcome your help in this great challenge and I welcome your ideas. Thank you.