US College Summit to Tackle Drop in Foreign Students

American university presidents are to meet with state officials in Washington tomorrow to discuss how colleges in the United States can attract more overseas students and strengthen the provision of non-traditional languages.

The summit on international education, which will run until Friday, is expected to be attended by the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, the education secretary, Margaret Spellings, and representatives from public and private universities and community colleges from across the US, along with the heads of higher education associations and federal science and humanities bodies.

The summit was announced last month amid renewed concerns over the drop in the number of overseas students choosing to study in the US following tighter controls placed on visa applications in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

"Through this summit, secretary Rice and secretary Spellings and their respective departments want to reach out to college and university presidents to reinforce a common interest in attracting foreign students and scholars to US institutions," said Karen Hughes, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. "Of equal importance is seeking investment in educating globally competitive US students to work in fields of international interest."

Although the summit’s agenda has not been published, the meeting is expected to examine how the US can revive its flagging overseas student market and boost the number of US students studying abroad.

Ministers are also understood to want to strengthen the provision of non-traditional language courses in universities - especially in military academies, which would receive funding directly from the Pentagon.

According to reports on InsideHigherEd.com, the US government is to announce plans to invest millions of dollars on language courses in subjects deemed critical to the US, such as Arabic, other Middle Eastern languages and Chinese.

Such a cash injection would be welcomed by some academics, embarrassed by the lack of language skills among US students, and by military colleges, who say there is a growing demand for these non-traditional languages.

Others, however, are reported to be wary of the plans.

Ali Banuazizi, the co-director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic studies program at Boston College, told InsideHigherEd: "Any time you put scholarly studies of a society within the military establishment, it creates those kinds of suspicions.

He added: "I welcome the attention to foreign languages, but we have tried very hard to show that language learning takes place best when it is within the teaching of various subject matters with the history, culture and literature of a people, and placing language learning within security studies, in the framework of security studies, I think is not good educational policy."