Julie Marie Pollard is Director, Program Operations in Turkey at KEI, a study abroad programme operator. She talks to The PIE about why there needs to be a focus on quality as well as quantity when it comes to boosting uptake of study abroad opportunities.
The PIE: Tell me about the Knowledge Exchange Institute, are you a third party provider?
JMP: Correct, which is a terrible word! There’ve been loads of conversations to change it. I’m quite partial to GEO: Global Education Organisation. I would like to champion that one, rather than third party provider.
I live in Istanbul, I’ve been there for four years and I oversee all the operations that we run with partner universities in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia.
We are in the development phase of a four-week tour, so two weeks in Istanbul, two weeks in Iran, as a part of a credit bearing US study abroad programme. We’ve got a professor specializing in history who is Vice-President of the Persianate Societies and a Farsi speaker. The professor will traveling with the group. The tour guide has to be approved by the Ministry in Iran to work specifically with Americans, so there are only about 200 people who can work with Americans, Brits and Canadians and that’s it.
When we’re writing up the student code of conduct we’re kind of between a rock and a hard place. Do we want to be very hard line and tell them absolutely everything that can happen, all of the requirements, questions you can ask, questions you can’t ask, subject matter that’s absolutely forbidden, or do we want to wait until they get to Istanbul because we don’t want to discourage them from coming on the programme too early in the process? So it’s kind of balancing it out.
The PIE: In general, do you think it’s really important for companies like yours to have somebody on the ground?
JMP: From our perspective it was wonderful. A lot of the time I am able to address and deal with an issue or a problem that arises before New York even wakes up. Also because our programmes are smaller, we know the students in a more intimate way. I know their names. I usually know their parents’ names. We tend to know a bit more about their personalities, issues that they might have when they go abroad. We can kind of foresee certain things just from experience, and I’ve been doing this for 10 years now.
“A lot of the time I am able to address and deal with an issue or a problem that arises before New York even wakes up”
I feel as though I’ve had enough of a perspective in the countries that we operate in, traditional and non-traditional, and the types of students that we receive, traditional and non-traditional. It is a large pattern, and it’s a bit concerning. There are loads of people who feel that just from an overall education perspective, until the US government makes student loans dischargeable through bankruptcy, that a lot of the educational culture might not change in the States.
The PIE: Can you talk me through that?
JMP: So the idea is that in the States, student loans are not dischargeable through bankruptcy. Therefore you can file bankruptcy but eventually the government gets their money from student loans, meaning that schools always are confident in always giving out student loans and financial aid. Therefore it’s always about recruiting students, getting tuition dollars, keeping students enrolled in programmes, making them progress through. So where’s the motivation to actually change your behaviour?
The PIE: And if the rules were changed?
JMP: Well, certainly I think we’d see a lower number of students enrolling in universities in general. It might also help with the idea of the inflation of the cost of attendance at a US institution. Because right now you’ve got things like rock walls going up and the “student experience” – schools are competing on giving students better experiences than the others, rather than academics or things that help you progress towards a career and a job.
“I feel like those people have definitely lost sight of what the purpose is of education”
I actually heard someone from the States say that their job isn’t to make sure that students are employable, but to make sure that students have a great college experience. I feel like those people have definitely lost sight of what the purpose is of education.
The PIE: What sort of student profile do you serve?
JMP: We have over 200 different universities that we’ve received students from in the US, and a couple more that send on a kind of consistent basis. Different students come on the programme for different reasons. They’re predominantly focussed on an academic discipline, they’ve thought about their career goals, they’ve thought about how this study abroad experience impacts their credit for their major, so they are a bit more mature. Occasionally we get students that come for the wrong reasons.
The PIE: How do you ensure students get the most out of their study abroad experience?
JMP: Our support is there to encourage students to actually go out and experience, rather than to say OK here’s your ‘safe little bubble’; all of our activities are in this nice little bubble, you don’t have to go out of this bubble if you don’t want to. It’s a bit frustrating and, if you really think about it, counter-intuitive to what the goal of international education is supposed to be about.
I hear about this from other countries as well, it’s not just the Americans that get into their bubbles. It seems to be that when I travel and I see the orientation sessions at universities for their visiting students, you’ve got the Chinese group here, you have the French group here, the Germans are all in a group here – they tend to stay together. When they have their breaks and they eat their lunch or they drink their coffee they’re still together. You know there are very few students that will cross the lines.
The PIE: And how do you as a company help pop the bubble?
JMP: From the very beginning. Honestly it’s as simple as assigning seats in an orientation, forcing someone to simply just introduce themselves to the person sitting beside them. Because that’s a new person, not someone from their own culture. There are small changes that you can make, and it’s not always just the host culture that you’re in, it’s the other cultures there as well.
The PIE: Do you feel like there’s been a decline in the quality of students then, just around motivations?
JMP: Motivations and the way in which they conduct themselves when they get abroad.
The PIE: Is this anyone’s fault?
JMP: I wouldn’t say it was any one particular community’s fault. In the States, we’re so focused on having the conversation about quantity, making it a competition about numbers going abroad. I assume the idea behind that is that with more outbound numbers, we have more people who are increasing their cross-cultural awareness or people who are more globally minded, and that’s not necessarily the case.
“You know there are very few students that will cross the lines”
You can’t expect those outcomes when your motivation is simply just numbers. You need to have good conversations about the types of programmes that you’re running. If you’re sending 200 American students in a big bubble to a university abroad and they don’t do any kind of interaction, and you’re providing them with all of the same services that they have on their home campus, someone in the field, an academic or an administrator at their home school would simply just say they’re maintaining quality of academics across their locations, but is that your goal?
You know it’s easy to process 200 students on your branch campus in London, but what are they really learning? And are you increasing their global awareness?
The PIE: Can you give me a kind of best case example and a worst case example of what students are taking away from their study abroad experience?
JMP: I have a student currently who’s in Istanbul. She’s a phenomenal student. She came to Turkey in a very difficult time for the country. She had zero support from her family, financial or emotional. They didn’t want her to come. She’s attending the programme, doing a homestay – she’s living with a Kurdish family and loving her experience. She’s learning Turkish, she’s learning how to cook Turkish food, she’s spending time with her family. She’s also trying to spend time with the local Turkish students, kind of popping that American bubble.
I’ve had other students that show up in a location frustrated that the academic system isn’t the same as theirs. Something as simple as the way a professor teaches “why won’t he give me the PowerPoint notes?” Just not really understanding that you’re in a different country and there are different rules and regulations, and throughout the semester, or the period of the programme, the complaints and things are all themed in that way: “well I have this at home, why isn’t it this way here?”
So that to me is someone who is not really opening up their mind to this experience. So there’s not much opportunity to change or to grow in any kind of way.
