Five Fulbright Foreign Students will join twenty young American social entrepreneurs on the 2014 Millennial Trains Project. This cross-country train journey kicks off tomorrow, leaving Portland, OR and arriving in New York, NY on August 18th. The participants will pursue individual projects ranging from urban planning and sustainability to small business culture and food security. Everywhere the train stops, participants will connect with local leaders and experts, conduct research, and have the opportunity to explore their projects in the contexts of diverse U.S. cities. 

The Fulbright Foreign Students represent Colombia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia and Yemen and are studying at universities across the U.S. as part of the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, which IIE administers on behalf of the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Follow their journey on the Fulbright Student Blog and receive Twitter updates @FulbrightPrgrm.

Convening partners from diverse sectors, the IIE-SRF Summit will address the challenges and opportunities for a collective response to scholars suffering from censorship, harassment, violence and other grave human rights abuses that silence intellectual voices and stunt the essential elements of a more peaceful and educated world.

The summit will call upon universities, human rights organizations, NGOs, philanthropic groups, and government agencies to consider ways in which this diverse community can bridge emergency response services and longer-term support programs to raise awareness of and respond to the critical needs of individual scholars and entire academies under threat. Panel discussions will give participants the opportunity to share best practices, expand their networks and explore spaces of cross-sector collaboration. 

IIE’s Scholar Rescue Fund (IIE-SRF) offers critical assistance to professors, senior researchers, and certain public intellectuals whose lives and work have been threatened during times of repression, crisis and conflict. Learn more.

The Institute of International Education’s research center has added "Impact" to its name, becoming the IIE Center for Academic Mobility Research and Impact. Mirka Tvaruzkova, Senior Evaluation Officer with the Center, shares about the Institute’s growing emphasis on measuring impact, "This shift in our work reflects a growing awareness within the broader field of international education about the importance of assessing and documenting the profound and sustained influence that international education exchange can have."

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Transnational education (TNE) is growing not only in scale but so are issues of quality. These challenges of ensuring quality have become even more complex with the emergence of MOOCs, blended learning and competency-based models. An article by Dr. Rahul Choudaha, published by the European Association for International Education (EAIE), addresses questions about how institutions can adapt to a changing scale and complexity of TNE activities.

"So many students and their families are visiting Boston-area schools," writes Kelly Blessing in Bloomberg News, "that Hainan Airlines Co. (600221) started direct flights from Beijing to Boston in June and increased the number from four to seven a week in July and August." Blessing explains some potential reasons for this the surge in interest.

California Governor Jerry Brown praises a recent call to increase college student exchanges between California and Mexico in a video posted on the Sacramento Bee. "In a non-binding agreement signed at Casa de California, the University of California’s facility in Mexico City, the Brown administration and Mexican officials said they hope to encourage more student exchanges, fellowships and joint research," reports the Bee.

The U.K. government announced that it would introduce stricter rules on recruiting students from outside the European Union, reports David Matthews for Times Higher Education, leading to more British universities losing their licenses to sponsor international students. "Currently, institutions can lose their licence if more than 20 per cent of the students they have offered places to are refused a visa by the border authorities," writes Matthews. "But from November, this proportion will be cut to 10 per cent.

David Leonhardt writes in the New York Times about the U.S. government’s "infamous" statistic for college-tuition inflation. According to Leonhardt, this measure is "deeply misleading" and distorts the debate about whether college is worth it. The statistic was based on the list prices that colleges published in their brochures and ignores financial aid grants. "In reality, college tuition has risen less than half as much in the last two decades as the official data suggest," writes Leonhardt.

The call for proposals for the Third Annual Diversity Abroad Conference is now open. This year's theme is "Moving Beyond Barriers: Transforming International Education through Inclusive Excellence." The program will consist primarily of presentations selected through this open call for proposals. In addition, there will be invited speakers and symposia, panel discussions, round table discussions, and a poster session. Feature topics include:

• Student identity
• Academic disciplines and programming
• Partnerships and collaboration
• Inclusion and support
• Research and data
• Leadership
• Funding
• Innovations and emerging trends

The Washington International Education Council is pleased to invite IIE Members to participate in the 13th Washington International Education Conference taking place at the University of California Washington, DC Center and Embassies throughout Washington. The Conference is the premier event providing the latest information on the movement of international students to the United States. Register now to reserve your place and qualify for the early registration rate. The Conference in January will feature exclusive access to Embassies and sponsoring organizations as well as presentations by the leading authorities in international education. 

Registration forms are available at www.washcouncil.org or by emailing inquiries@washcouncil.org.

 

While university professors Barry Olsen (Monterey Institute of International Studies) and Gláucia Silva (University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth) were traveling in Brazil in 2012 with IIE’s International Academic Partnership Program (IAPP), they saw a great opportunity to help speakers of Spanish in that country to sound more Brazilian. The one-week university study tour provided the two with a broad perspective on Brazilian higher education and the current opportunities and challenges to increasing academic collaboration. Language was a recurring issue, but provided a logical opportunity for Olsen, a linguist, and Silva, a Portuguese language teacher, to create a practical language tool. Together with Earl Brown (Kansas State University), the three spent 18 months researching linguistic corpora of Portuguese and Spanish to identify 54 of the most common differences and pitfalls between Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish. The result is the app "Sound Brazilian!" which helps fluent speakers of Spanish learn how to avoid the most common mistakes in Portuguese for Spanish speakers and jumpstart their Portuguese conversational skills. 

 

Sound Brazilian! provides more than 50 of the most tricky words and phrases in Brazilian Portuguese that have been carefully selected from the 500 most frequently used words in Portuguese, as found in the Corpus do Português, a database of authentic language maintained by Professor Mark Davies at Brigham Young University. Each tip explains the difference between Portuguese and Spanish and provides real-world examples that can easily be incorporated into your "portuñol" to make it sound more like Brazilian Portuguese.

 

As an IIE Generation Study Abroad partner, Terra Dotta is committed to helping colleges and universities expand their study abroad efforts. In order to spark new ideas, the Terra Dotta team has reached out to one of its partner universities for insight on avenues through which to increase funding. The ideas and suggestions that came out of that discussion are featured in a recent article on Terradotta.com.

MBA.com, the official site of GMAT, published five unique skills gained by studying abroad that can help students stand out from the crowd. Number 1, "experience personal growth," emphasizes that "by living and studying in a foreign country, you’ll gain a new understanding of your personal heritage, culture and values. Additionally, you will become more independent, self-reliant, and self-confident as you learn to navigate and live comfortably in a different culture."

Joe Burris writes for The Baltimore Sun about Howard University’s Global Education, Awareness and Research Undergraduate Program, or GEAR-UP. "Funded with a $5 million National Science Foundation grant, the program began four years ago and gives students at the historically black college in Washington opportunities to conduct original research abroad," writes Burris.

The U.S. Department of State invites you to expand your world by hosting an extraordinary international student in your home or school. By living and studying alongside high school exchange students, you can make lifelong friendships and learn about different cultures.

The U.S. Department of State hosted a Google+ Hangout for high school educators, guidance counselors, and staff on May 22, 2014, to answer questions and discuss the benefits of sending high school students to study abroad. Scholarship opportunities are open to all U.S. high school students that meet program eligibility criteria. The U.S. Department of State seeks applicants representing the diversity of the United States.

IIE Scholar Rescue Fund’s (IIE-SRF) latest e-newsletter, The Beacon, features an interview with IIE-SRF’s host partner, Montclair State University, scientific achievements by an IIE-SRF Scholar, blog post about Syrian refugee student’s experiences in Turkey, and IIE-SRF’s work with the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack.