Today I will be teaching a class for the Career Management course taught at Menlo College, and after gauging the students’ reactions to the required reading (the first two chapters of The Start-Up of You by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman), we will review three big categories in our world that disrupt the workforce: technology, globalization, and politics.
In reviewing for the class, I laughed at my own personal example for the final of the three, politics. I thought of how education as a field benefits significantly from globalization, but how dependent those positive impacts are on the political games played by world leaders. Within just the past couple of months, there has been significant tension around offering OPT (extended visa status for students graduating who want to work in the US), debates on whether to limit the number of Chinese intellectuals who come to the US (listen to episode “Freshman Orientation” of the podcast “Heartland, Mainland”), and, on the flipside, study abroad programs altering course after political protests in Hong Kong and Chile (I don’t have web references for these two, I just know that a program I work with canceled a trip to Hong Kong and a friend of my sister’s was due to study in Chile this spring, but the program was cancelled and she chose an alternative destination). Working in international education means your work is highly influenced by politics at every level, on a regular basis.
It’s difficult, therefore, to make a lot of confident predictions in the trends of international higher ed because your ability to predict these trends relies on your ability to predict political trends locally, nationally, and internationally. The ability for a group of people from Oregon can manage to bring OPT to court demonstrates how the local can connect to the global. It’s a fluid exchange, one does not solely rely on action from the other.
I think part of the goal for those of us working in international education is to take the positive attributes of globalization and propel them forward. I do feel confident in making a general statement that people who work in this field believe that intercultural exchange – global exchange – ultimately will lead us to understanding and, hopefully, more peace. Which is why we push to bring international students into the US to study as well as push people from the US to study in another country, too.
I mentioned in my last post that I am not looking forward to the day when I may need to choose whether I keep walking the path of study abroad or career services. The two are not mutually exclusive, but as I wrote last week, it’s the career services offices that are going to be more heavily invested in, at least for the near future. That’s not to say that study abroad won’t be – at many institutions, internationalization is a priority, and study abroad is a part of that. When it comes down to the wire, however, I do think career services prevails.
This means that, as I will echo to my students later today, I will need to keep an eye on the trends. And here is what I think we might start to see happen in the 2020’s as it pertains to international higher education:
Gap years.
I’ve mentioned it before, but I am slowly learning more. Many people think a “gap year” happens between high school and college, and that it entails a vacation in Europe of sorts. Yes – this does happen – but the definition of “gap year” seems to be expanding.
The Gap Year Association is the primary organization trying to promote and explore the benefits of gap years. The GYA accredits gap year programs in an effort to set up a standard to value these programs.
What would be ideal is to find ways to incorporate gap years into college degree plans, which is not a new idea. In 2018, Abigail Falik and Linda Frey argued for a gap year to equate as Freshman year; a year ago, Goldie Blumenstyk reflected on Falik’s work with Global Citizen Year; and earlier this month, Jonathan Zimmerman wrote an opinion piece that a gap year should be required by colleges – that is to say, a year of public service, not travel.
A gap year can be a year of work. A year of public service, as Zimmerman argues, where you meet people from all over the US. It can be a year of both. You can spend the first 9 months of your gap year earning money and using some of your savings to get yourself to another country where you volunteer in exchange for room and board. There are so many options.
Looking at the larger landscape, I think there’s more: A gap year can happen at any time. Who’s to say it’s not something we should encourage at any age? Ready for a career switch? Take some time off to explore through volunteer work.
Here is where these pieces – career exploration, international exploration, international and domestic intercultural exploration – can collide, along with one other key piece of the puzzle: life-long learning.
I will reiterate Hoffman’s idea to the students today, it’s important to be adaptable (pg. 24 of The Start-Up of You). The three big change factors – technology, globalization, and politics – are always at work, which means change is happening at a quickening pace. Technology, for example, is growing exponentially fast, and we humans can’t really keep up. But the scary thing is that we’re trying to.
This means we will always be learning, and it only makes sense as higher education is questioned, the world becomes more interconnected, and everything keeps moving faster than we can keep up, that we learn how to take an appropriate step back to reassess, reflect, and keep learning.
My 2020’s prediction for international higher ed: More people will start to realize the value in expanding their learning beyond the confines of “four years after high school,” age, and place. The term “gap year” will expand, and more people will be creating and pursuing their own version.