In the July issue of The Greentree Gazette magazine, I wrote, “Mr. Cuomo’s easy success in the student loan business may be a symptom, rather than a cause…. Like any ambitious hunter, the New York attorney general sensed the weakness of his prey.”
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Jim Castagnera
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I continued, “He may also be signaling a shift. Higher education’s ‘customers’ -- consumerist Generation X parents and their in-a-hurry children -- will no sooner give a university financial aid officer the benefit of the doubt than they would a local lender. ... Where might seasoned hunters such as Cuomo shift their sights?”
The answer came quickly in a New York Times headline on Monday, August 13th: “In Study Abroad, Gifts and Money for Universities.” The lead runs as follows:
“As overseas study has become a prized credential of the undergraduate experience, a competitive, even cutthroat, industry has emerged, with an army of vendors vying for student money and universities moving to profit from the boom.” The story goes on to report on travel and other perks available to study-abroad staffers, echoing the emoluments reportedly received by some student-loan officers. “For example,” says the article, “the American Institute for Foreign Study offers college officials a free trip to one of its overseas sites for every 15 students that sign on and a 5 percent share of fees that students pay….”
The article also asserts that such arrangements “typically limit student options and drive up prices.” The cozy arrangements likely exist. And a student may be able to save some money by withdrawing from her institution for a semester or an academic year to set up her own schedule for studying abroad. But that is only half the story.
Here’s another dimension to the tale:
- Most colleges and universities send relatively modest numbers of their students abroad annually. Third-party providers are not panting to provide them with perks.
- Most students aren’t interested in doing the investigation and leg work necessary to plan their overseas stays.
- Parents often prefer to have their child's U.S. college lay the groundwork, set up the experience and follow through as needed.
Meanwhile, the services provided by a campus study-abroad office are far from trivial. They may arrange fairs and/or other campus events to get the word out. They negotiate and cultivate school-to-school exchange relationships, which include quality control visits, usually at the home institution's expense. They include meetings and interviews with as many as four times the number of students who actually go abroad, along with the application and review process. There is also a dizzying array of miscellaneous services before, during and after the student’s stay abroad.
In return for these services, a college or university may retain whatever portion of the student’s tuition is not passed through to the overseas host institution or to a third-party provider. Often this is very little, and can even result in a net loss.
A simple fact is that most colleges and universities vigorously support study abroad programs not because they are money-makers but because educators believe they owe students the opportunity to globalize their educational experiences.
Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia lawyer and writer who is the associate provost and associate counsel at Rider University.