Watershed Experience: International Education at Rice

International education is nothing new at Rice.
It began, in spirit, with Rice’s first president, Edgar Odell Lovett, who earned an MA and a PhD in Europe. In 1907, shortly after he was hired to lead Rice, Lovett concluded that he again needed to study abroad. With the blessing of the Rice Board of Trustees, he visited universities around the globe, and when he returned, he had a vision of Rice as a university of international excellence

I think Lovett would be delighted with the brochure we now send to all new students. It says, “Welcome to Rice. Now go away.” Because of Rice’s integrated advising, most students begin planning an overseas program in their freshman year.

By graduation, 42 percent of Rice undergraduates have had Rice-sponsored international experiences—and not just in the expected places such as France and Italy but also in the unexpected like Mongolia and Uganda.

And the effort goes both ways: we bring students and scholars from 87 countries to Texas, and faculty and staff participate in exchange programs worldwide.

You might ask why Rice should want to encourage study abroad. After all, we spend a lot of effort carefully selecting a student body that is the best in the world—the top half of 1 percent of America’s high-school graduates. Why would we want to send these bright young students away from Rice, where we help turn their razor-sharp minds into laser-sharp minds? The answer is that education is more than classroom experience. We want to provide our students with elements that are equally valuable: socialization, growth, maturity, communication skills, and understanding of others.

How does study abroad improve these areas? If college is coffee, study abroad is espresso. It has all the benefits of the “normal” curriculum plus the excitement and learning experience of a foreign culture. Its goal—the goal of all education, as far as we are concerned—is to produce a watershed experience that powerfully changes a student’s life.

We don’t know exactly why study abroad does that, but we do recognize factors in students who have overseas experience. One is that a journey out is always a journey in—when people move between cultures, their own personalities are clarified, sometimes in surprising ways. Second, international education provides touchstone experiences.

In surveys, people who have studied abroad call it a shaping experience and report that they return mentally to their time abroad again and again, remembering those experiences as they make decisions or attempt to understand situations happening in their lives.

A third truth is that international education fundamentally changes the way students think about the educational process and themselves. Students leave Rice for their international destinations asking, “What do I need to do to fulfill Rice’s graduation requirements?” They come back asking, “How can I leverage my Rice education to get me where I want to be?” In short, they change from being an absorber of knowledge to being a user of it, and that is a critical development in terms of their learning about themselves.

Finally, there’s an important practical benefit to study abroad: competition for major scholarships.

Rice students’ success in winning Rhodes, Marshall, Fulbright, and Watson scholarships has increased markedly over the last 15 years because of the deepening international awareness of the Rice student body.

In fact, over the last 10 years, Rice has led the nation in Watson winners. Without the study-abroad experience, our students would have lacked the language skills, the international savvy, and most of all, the feeling of independence and exploration that are required to formulate and win a Watson.

The field of international education today faces new issues, not the least of which is its fate in the post-9/11 world. Are students now rethinking study abroad? Just the opposite. Numbers are up, not just at Rice but across the nation, and that is a good thing. The events of 9/11, after all, were not caused by too much international understanding.

Rice remains very much involved in international education at the national leadership level. As a co-founder of an organization called the Forum on Education Abroad, Rice is involved in promoting curriculum integration, outcomes assessment, certification standards to ensure quality in the field, and advocacy at the national governmental level. And most of all, Rice is committed to providing our students with the best international education opportunities available.

—Mark Scheid
Executive Director of International
Programs and Scholarships