The Emergence Of The American University Abroad

The Emergence of the American University Abroad explores the development of the independent American university abroad model since the U.S. Civil War and situates it in the context of American higher education.

The American public is losing trust in its higher education institutions. Americans are increasingly divided about the purposes of a college education, with opinions split along partisan lines. The country's higher education leaders have responded with a litany of conferences, op-eds, and commissions aimed at regaining the public trust. While these efforts are necessary and important, they are more likely to be successful if supplemented with a view from abroad. The independent American university abroad is the oldest and most successful expression of U.S. higher education outside the United States. First established by Protestant missionaries in the Ottoman Empire during the U.S. Civil War, American universities abroad have since spread across the globe. Many enjoy widespread popularity in their communities and bipartisan support in the U.S.0'The Emergence of the American University Abroad' explores the development of this model as a distinctive institutional form in the U.S. higher education landscape. It traces the long history of support by American private citizens, the U.S. government, and stateside colleges and universities for these overseas institutions, and shows how leaders of American universities abroad have periodically come together to make sense of their changing environments and strategically align their messaging with potential supporters.0The author demonstrates that what is most valuable about American higher education emerges clearly when it is practiced outside the United States. While discourse about higher education in the United States and around the world has shifted unequivocally toward its conceptualization as a private good, leaders of, and advocates for, American universities abroad have been remarkably consistent in promoting their public benefits. As such, study of these institutions represents a unique opportunity to reflect on underappreciated, yet essential features of American higher education.

Published through a special agreement between Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad and The Forum on Education Abroad, this volume explores the complex and often intersecting topic areas in the development of the field of education abroad from 1965 to 2010.

Across the globe, American-style and liberal arts universities are being established. From the first, the American University of Beirut, established in 1866, to the liberal arts institutions being established in Saudi Arabia, Ghana, and elsewhere in the twenty-first century, there is a clear sense of the global desire for the American approach to higher education as a way of counteracting traditional, more narrowly defined university educations. However, these universities operate in a distinctive dynamic that must learn to bridge one culture with another, and leadership of such institutions must by its nature focus on such complexities and tensions. Throughout the chapters of this book, this unique element of these universities will be better understood through the stories and experiences as presented by their presidents, provosts, and other academic leaders.

The American university of today is the product of a sudden, mainly unplanned period of development at the close of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. At that time the university, and with it a recognizably modern style of academic life, emerged to eclipse the older, religiously oriented college. Precedents, formal and informal, were then set which have affected the soul of professor, student, and academic administrator ever since. What did the men living in this formative period want the American university to become? How did they differ in defining the ideal university? And why did the institution acquire a form that only partially corresponded with these definitions? These are the questions Mr. Veysey seeks to answer.

This book examines why study abroad is a marginal activity in American higher education and evaluates the role gender has played in the development and maintenance of this marginality.

A World of Private Higher Education is the definitive treatment of a sector accounting for a third of the world's 200 million higher education enrolment--yet remaining largely unknown even to scholars of higher education and widely mis-characterized when it is considered by stakeholders or the general public. Beyond the eye-popping numbers, several inter-related thematic findings regarding the Private and the Public underscore the subject matter's importance. First, private-public differences are significant-it matters that so many students are in a sector that not long ago was only marginal in much of the world. Second, private higher education (PHE) itself is increasingly diverse, with significant and private-private differences. Third, the overlaying of the first two realities yields increasing diversity in private-public higher education distinctions. Especially for its pioneering mapping of PHE globally, regionally, and nationally, the book draws on the pioneering dataset of the pioneering scholarly program for research on PHE (Program for Research on Private Higher Education). Unprecedented in geographical scope, the dataset is unprecedented in longitudinal coverage too, dating back to 2000. Empirical methods allow for extensive analysis, and theoretical analysis draws on key private-public concepts embedded in literatures on privatization, nonprofit studies, and policy models. For the major challenge of penetrating inside the increasingly diverse private sector of higher education, Levy revises his heralded and widely employed PHE typology.

Discussing American students studying abroad and the policies of both the home and host countries.