ALL COLLEGE students should spend at least one semester in another part of the world. Most students who study abroad find their experience an unparalleled opportunity to become immersed in another culture and rediscover their own. Unfortunately, the University's stingy policy regarding foreign transfer credit throws up tall fences that block students from experiencing such cultural enlightenment.
The policy toward foreign transfer credit is unfair to students, for whom the college years might be the only chance they have to spend several months in another country. In order to catch up to its peer institutions study-abroad programs, the University must make it easier for its students to earn credit for their study abroad courses.
Currently the University strongly advises students to seek approval for foreign classes prior to going abroad. Ostensibly, this policy ensures that students do not return from foreign universities with nothing to show for their efforts.
Mandating pre-approval of study abroad courses, however, only restricts students' overseas academic experience.
Pre-approval is by no means an easy task. The director of undergraduate studies, the faculty member in each academic department in charge of pre-approval, typically requires a detailed course description or a syllabus before awarding credit for a foreign class.
These materials often are hard to come by, if not impossible to obtain. Many foreign universities do not make updated course materials available on the Web, forcing prospective enrollees to depend on slow international mailings.
This situation creates two problems. Students who wish to earn credit for specific University classes while abroad must collect course descriptions and syllabi from each prospective university, submit the materials to the appropriate faculty member and finally await approval.
This process is burdensome at best and forces students to choose a school based on inappropriate criteria - whether or not the school has made updated course materials readily available and whether or not the school offers courses similar to those offered by the University.
The second problem associated with the onerous pre-approval procedure is that students' choice of foreign courses becomes extremely limited - selection is restricted to those courses that easily can be identified as comparable to ones offered by the University.
The current pre-approval process thus discourages students from ever leaving the secure confines of the University.
This result is contrary to the well-publicized goals of the University. The International Activities Commission, under the guidance of the Virginia 2020 initiative, reported "it is not unreasonable to expect 80 percent participation in study abroad by 2020" assuming "the variety and accessibility of options has become irresistible."
The International Studies Office indeed has added to the variety of study abroad options - just this year the ISO developed five new summer programs in locations as diverse as Morocco and South Africa.
The ISO's initiative is laudable. The new programs allow students to travel abroad and take classes from University professors over a three to nine week period, effectively making credit transfer a non-issue.
At least for now, however, the programs focus on language instruction and take place over a short summer period. These programs thus exclude students who are uninterested in language programs, as well as students who want to study abroad for a semester or more.
The next logical steps for the University, therefore, are to expand these programs into other disciplines and to operate them during the normal school year.
With the University study abroad rate currently at 16 percent, the expectation of 80 percent participation by 2020 clearly is an ideal rather than a realistic goal. The irksome pre-approval process becomes unnecessary if the University makes two simple changes to its current policies.
First, the University should encourage open and free exchange of information between itself and overseas schools - if the University becomes familiar with the academic programs of other institutions, it will approve credit transfer more readily. This also will reduce the difficulty of obtaining course materials from overseas locations.
Second, the University must relax its strict standards governing the awarding of credit for study abroad courses. It simply is unreasonable to expect the content of foreign courses to correspond precisely to University course content.
More importantly, the benefit to a student of spending a semester abroad greatly outweighs the University's cost of awarding credit to the student for a class of different structure and content. The University must not sacrifice the quality of its undergraduate education for the enforcement of administrative nuances.
Improving communication with foreign universities and relaxing credit transfer standards certainly will ease the heavy burden on study abroad candidates, who currently must navigate their way through a maze of bureaucratic procedures in order to secure credit for their coursework abroad.
Streamlining the transfer credit process undoubtedly will encourage more students to participate in study abroad programs, and will cut down the fences that now prevent students from broadening their undergraduate experience.
(Sam Bresnahan is the Cavalier Daily Health and Sciences editor.)
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