In tandem with the enrollment hike, annual HSU funding for international programs has leaped to $175,000 this year from $30,000 in 2005. Scholarships awarded since Fall 2006 total $74,500, according to Professor Guy-Alain Amoussou, Director of International Programs.
The 99 students who arrived this semester hail from three dozen countries, spanning Australia, Canada, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and India. Campus-wide, HSU is currently home to 138 students from overseas.
Reciprocally, HSU has sent 180 students abroad.
The University’s growing recruitment drive stems from multiplying partnerships with institutions of higher learning, such as Humboldt College in Xi’an, China, and links with the World Learning Scholarship program at the U.S. State Department, the Fulbright Commission, Switzerland’s Haute ecole vaudoise and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
“Now we need to sustain the effort,” Amoussou said, by sending more HSU students and faculty abroad in an ongoing drive to internationalize the campus and the curriculum. Likewise, services to prospective and current international students should be centralized and expanded to meet the demand, he said.
HSU Provost Bob Snyder said the International Programs Office, formed in 2005, “has gone through a lot of growing pains and now we need to do an assessment of how best to make it work effectively. I think that’s probably a partnership, not only with Academic Affairs, but also a discussion with Student Affairs, primarily Enrollment Management, about how best to coordinate these activities.”
Amoussou is director on a half-time faculty release basis, and now that the office has professional staff, the logical next step is to move to a full-time director, Snyder said, adding, “We’ll have to have that discussion [about augmentations], but that seems right to me.”
Given globalization’s mammoth impact, it is clear that internationalizing all that Humboldt State does helps everyone involved, Snyder said, not only students, but also faculty and staff.
Amoussou suggested HSU shoot for an international component of 3-5% of total student population by about 2018. “We need to grow the program gradually, make sure we sustain the growth on all aspects: students, faculty, American faculty, international faculty,” he said. “And at the same time, do the same thing for our domestic students, [giving] them an opportunity to travel and study abroad. Our International Center should be developed concurrently, with a strategy to make it happen.”
The University will hold International Education Week Nov. 17-20.
Informational meetings about Study Abroad are held Tuesdays from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. and Wednesdays from noon to 1:00 in Nelson Hall East, Room 113.