I recently spoke to an audience of Mercer University's finest freshman students. The purpose of my talk was to encourage them to plan a study abroad, research, or service-learning experience in their academic plan. Rather than 'talk up' the conventional aspects of study abroad: learn a language, have a once-in-a-lifetime experience, see a different place, backpack across Europe, etc., I decided to share some important and alarming information.
I explained that I learned during my recent trip to Qingdao, China (one of the biggest and fastest growing cities that you never heard of) that only 60% of qualified Chinese students have a space in a Chinese university. This means that 40% of qualified students in a country of 1 billion people will need to do their degree work abroad, and the USA is the #1 destination. In fact, there is a disproportionately high number of incoming international students and scholars than outgoing American students and faculty researchers. Education in the USA reflects this country's trade deficit. While the importation of foreign students and intellectual talent is actually a good thing for the USA and the world, what troubles me is that only a minority of American students study abroad and even worse, are not proficient in a second language, particularly a critical language such as Mandarin Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, or Arabic. This intercultural trade deficit, if you will, does not serve the US economic or political interests very well.
The 21st century in the 'developed' and 'developing' economies of the world is an informational, knowledge-based platform. Economic success depends on a population's set of intellectual skills that not only focus on innovative products, such as sustainable forms of energy, but also incorporate a set of intercultural skills, which enable our future leaders (a.k.a., current students) to engage with people who pose different perspectives, practice different religions, and speak different languages. The complacency of a post-Cold War America must transform itself from thinking itself as the only superpower to one that is both a competitive leader and a cross-cultural partner of other nations in the global political economy.
Students and other fellow citizens, I encourage you to read the works of Thomas Friedman and Fareed Zakaria. Think of ways you can truly engage the 'other' in the here and now and then imagine how these experiences can effectively change the trajectory of our country and world over the next few decades.
E.K.Spears (11 March 2010)
LEARN MORE! Fareed Zakaria on the 'Post-American World'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kg7_4og2Wk
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