Chair Joseph asks about sharing best practices; Stephen Ferst discusses field history
Chair Joseph asks whether campuses share best practices for recruiting underrepresented students. Ferst says education abroad liaisons meet monthly, then notes that study abroad historically served mostly white, upper-middle-income women and that moving the needle on diversity remains difficult nationally.
Copying the model, are you talking to each other to see what are some of the best practices that maybe we can transfer to other campuses for it to work?
We do.
We have a monthly liaison meeting of folks who work in education abroad, study abroad, and we do try to bring those best practices across campus to campus.
I will say this is my 37th year in this field.
I have been working on, the field has been working on underrepresented students.
For that entirety of the time, right?
When study abroad started in 1966, 1967, those first students went abroad on those.
They were young women.
They were studying languages.
They took a boat to France.
They spent a year.
They came home.
Until the 1980s, when we really massified or diversified studying abroad, that's who went abroad.
And it remains still mostly women studying abroad, mostly white women who are upper middle income and above.
These barriers exist.
They've been extremely hard.
to move the needle on students of color, on students of limited means.
There are a number of programs out there, 100,000 Strong in the Americas is a grant program, the Gilman program, and several others that I know all of us at CUNY have worked very hard to achieve those grants to overcome these things.
I think CUNY does better.
The national, honestly, in overcoming these barriers for first underrepresented students, but this is a needle that is extremely hard to move nationally.
Thank you.