Leadership for Social Justice in Higher Education

The Legacy of the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program

T. Bigalke, M. Zurbuchen, T. Bigalke, M. Zurbuchen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137366498
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137361455
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Education
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a wealth of comparative information on social justice in higher education worldwide by examining how the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program, the world's largest private fellowship program in higher education, has succeeded in fostering social justice leadership over the past ten years.

Part I

International Fellowships Program (IFP) in Comparative Perspective

1

Social Inclusion in International Higher Education: Approach and Achievements of IFP

Joan Dassin, Jürgen Enders, and Andrea Kottmann

Introduction: IFP in Context

There is no question that international student mobility has transformed the international higher education landscape in recent decades. It has brought diverse benefits to students, institutions, communities, and countries. At the student level, these include enhanced future employability, personal development, language acquisition, and greater intercultural sensitivity—all seen as advantages in today’s globalized world. For the sending countries, the opportunity for the best and the brightest to study at the world’s great universities holds the promise that they will return with greater expertise and knowledge of diverse languages, cultures, and business methods, thus increasing their countries’ competitive edge in the interconnected world economy. For the host countries and universities, international students have become a fiercely contested source of brain gain as well as income. Such expectations have also been fueled by the explosive growth of foreign students at the tertiary level. According to OECD and UNESCO data, the number of foreign tertiary students enrolled outside their country of citizenship more than quadrupled over the past three decades, increasing from 0.8 million in 1975 to 4.1 million in 2010 (OECD 2012, 362).

Despite this trend, international higher education has by no means become broadly accessible. Even within Europe, where a period abroad during university study is now a centerpiece of European higher education policy, the quantitative goal of one in five students having studied abroad before graduation has not been met. In the United States, international education organizations have promoted study-abroad programs for decades. While the absolute number of US students who studied abroad has more than tripled over the past two decades, in 2010–2011 it totaled just 1.4 percent of the total US higher education population (IIE 2012). At the global level, mobility is exercised by only somewhat more than 2 percent of students (OECD 2012, 362), 10 times less than the recommended European one-in-five benchmark. Except for some major sending countries in Asia, access to international higher education remains limited for many parts of the global South.

Within the highly restricted universe of international higher education, access is further circumscribed not only by financial factors but also by students’ socio-economic background. Foreign enrollment in Europe is socially selective, with the educational level of one’s parents a key predictor of the next generation’s access to international study. In the United States, recent research indicates that race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic factors inhibit participation in study-abroad programs (Beerkens 2012, 96). Students from developing countries face similar constraints but with the added obstacles posed by marked disparities in access to quality education at all levels and few opportunities for fully funded international study (Volkman et al. 2009, 22–24).

If educational mobility is only for a selected few and global student flows are still marked by regional and socioeconomic disparities, can more diverse socioeconomic groups from the global South successfully participate in international higher education? How could a fellowship program support such participation, and what types of institutional and financial arrangements would it require?

The experience of IFP, discussed below, demonstrates that wider inclusion of excluded social groups in international higher education can be achieved with no loss of academic quality. Results based on selection, placement, and academic attainment of IFP Fellows show that members of groups underrepresented in higher education can achieve success in a variety of educational systems. In addition, by targeting fellowships to candidates committed to development and social justice, IFP demonstrates that educational opportunity is an important path not only to individual advancement but to broader social change.¹

The Founding Ideas and the Architecture of IFP

In November 2000, the Ford Foundation approved the creation of the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program (IFP). Funded for 10 years, IFP was intended to provide postgraduate fellowships for individuals from 22 countries including Russia and countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, where the foundation had long-standing programs. The program was funded by a $280 million grant, the single largest donation in the foundation’s history. In 2006, the Ford Foundation pledged up to $75 million in supplementary funds, allowing IFP to award about 820 additional fellowships beyond the original projections. In selections held between 2001 and 2010, the program awarded a total of slightly more than 4,300 fellowships for master’s (82 percent of the Fellows) and doctoral degrees (18 percent of the Fellows). Fellows undertook studies in a variety of academic fields in the arts and humanities, the social and behavioral sciences, and environment, health, and applied sciences. As of June 30, 2013, 4,125 IFP Fellows had completed their fellowships at 560 universities in 46 host countries, while 187 Fellows were enrolled at 79 universities in 22 host countries (Figure 1.1).

The IFP design is based on a model that is strategically different from other international scholarships. The model, in turn, is based on two key premises that directly address questions of access and equity in higher education, as well as broader issues of socioeconomic development and social justice in the global South (Clift et al. 2013; Dassin 2012). First, IFP believed that given the proper enabling conditions, students from marginalized groups can succeed academically in highly competitive international programs. This premise challenges the prevailing notion— the basis for many international scholarship programs—that the best overall candidates are those with the highest grades and prior academic achievements. IFP, in contrast, sought to recognize academic talent and potential among individuals who had completed and done well in their studies despite serious obstacles created by poverty, discrimination, and lack of access to high-quality schools. Second, by targeting fellowships to candidates committed to development and social justice, IFP sought to demonstrate that educational opportunity helps build leadership for social justice and thus contributes to broader social change.

Figure 1.1 Selected IFP Fellows by country

From the beginning, IFP saw itself as much more than an international scholarship program. Rather, it was intended as a social justice program that would operate through higher education. This orientation is consistent with the overall goals of the Ford Foundation, IFP’s sponsoring organization, but also with a philosophy that regards educational opportunity as a powerful way to reduce inequality and increase social cohesion in societies marked by high degrees of social inequality.

Achieving its ambitious goals required IFP to adopt an innovative approach to a myriad of design and implementation challenges. The program developed a multi-actor structure encompassing the local, national, and regional/international levels in order to address the multiple needs of IFP’s target groups, Fellows, and Alumni. The program architecture included the International Fellowships Fund (IFF), a separate legal entity, which acted as the principal grantee for the program and made subgrants from the Ford Foundation funds for IFP to various organizations. IFF hosted the IFP Secretariat, based in New York, which developed the program’s global parameters and set policy guidelines for the program as a whole. International Partners (IPs)—a diverse set of local, regional, and international organizations based in the participating countries—were another key element of the program’s architecture. The IPs played a crucial role in the local program design, in the outreach, selection, pre-academic training, and monitoring of Fellows during their study programs, and in Alumni-related activities. International placement organizations provided placement and monitoring services to Fellows based on their international study region.

Over time, IFP established special relationships with a number of universities around the globe hosting its Fellows. These partner universities provided tailored support in managing the application, admissions, visa, and orientation process. They expanded their services for international students, and advocated new approaches to on-campus orientation, living arrangements, counseling services, tutoring, and emergency support.

Because the program design was so experimental, IFP also took the unusual step of incorporating a formal evaluation strategy from the outset. In 2002, the IFP contacted the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS) at the University of Twente, the Netherlands, to develop and undertake a formative evaluation of its program development and outcomes (Enders and de Boer 2003). Intended to accompany the program over a decade of operations, the long-term CHEPS study enabled IFP to make ongoing improvements. It also provided data and analyses that could be used for a subsequent summative evaluation (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Organizational development and structure of IFP

The methodology for the CHEPS study was primarily based on asking the actors involved about their activities, experiences, and backgrounds through questionnaire-based surveys. The evaluation team conducted interviews with Fellows and analyzed program documents. Participatory observation (e.g. in various types of meetings, international conferences, site visits, etc.) was also used to gain insight into the program. Between 2004 and 2012, CHEPS conducted eight surveys of Fellows-Elect, four surveys of active Fellows, three surveys of program partners, and six Alumni surveys. Response rates were between 53 percent and 100 percent. For the Alumni, we calculate that approximately 75 percent of more than 3,200 Alumni had responded to at least one survey by early 2012 (Enders and Kottmann 2012).

In the following sections, we will look at results from the most important stages in the IFP in the light of selected findings of the CHEPS evaluation study. We address the following questions:

1. Was IFP able to define, reach, and select its global target group(s) in the context of national/regional circumstances?

2. Did pre-academic training and placement lead to successful postgraduate experiences and outcomes?

3. Did the fellowship and postgraduate experience and outcomes lead IFP Alumni into successful professional careers?

4. Are IFP Alumni motivated and enabled to use their education and career to promote social justice?

Taken together, the findings from nearly a decade of continuous evaluation provide us with data-based evidence of how the program performed at the global level on each of its key dimensions. This evidence, in turn, allows us to reflect on the extent to which the program achieved its primary goals, demonstrated the validity of its underlying assumptions, and highlighted the relevance of its basic philosophy to broader issues of social change.

Defining “Disadvantage” and “Leadership for Social Justice”: Target Group Definition, Outreach, and Selection of IFP Candidates

Attracting and selecting the most eligible candidates as variously defined by IFP partners around the world was the first major challenge. IFP aimed at excluded social groups in the participating countries but intentionally did not apply a universal standard set of criteria for defining the target group characteristics. Instead, the program employed an intensive, iterative process of consultation in each country or subregion to discuss the nature of access and to identify target groups and communities that lack systematic access to higher education. Defining the target groups of IFP, therefore, was a complex and multilevel process that included ongoing reflection within countries as well as further refinement at regional and subregional meetings.

IFP partners developed a variety of methods to investigate the nature of access and exclusion from higher education in their specific social settings. These included secondary analysis of available statistics and research findings, consultation with national and international experts, roundtables with leaders from higher education and government, and dialogues with nongovernmental organizations and social movements. In some countries reference could be made to generally accepted definitions of marginalization and legally enforced policies of antidiscrimination, while others had to produce new baseline data and policy analyses because issues of access and equity in higher education were not on the agenda of either researchers or policy-makers.

Intense discussion led an Asian IP, for example, to determine that the most underrepresented people in higher education came from ethnic minorities living in mountainous regions and in remote and rural areas. Among these groups, women were more disadvantaged than men. Another IP, from Africa, developed guidelines for target group definition that included nomadic tribes characterized by perennial poverty and deep cultural biases against higher education for females. In Latin America, most IPs targeted groups that had very limited access to higher education because they were residents of remote areas and came from indigenous or Afro-Latin American ethnic-racial groups that had suffered centuries of discrimination.

What can be said beyond the diversity of contexts and conditions is that poverty, coming from or living in a remote or rural area, race or ethnicity, and gender were important exclusion factors that impeded candidates’ access to higher education in nearly all cases. Overall, IFP targeted countries with very limited and socially biased access to higher education. Within these countries, moreover, the program focused on groups and communities that were more marginalized than the average population.

The International Partners undertook frequent outreach activities and used multiple mechanisms to reach their target groups, sometimes under difficult national and local circumstances. After the initial selection rounds, IPs invested considerable effort in reaching farther into remote or rural areas and toward marginalized groups. The integration of IFP Alumni into the outreach process was another element of proactive program development. Outreach turned out to be very successful in regions ranging from the Anambra State in southeastern Nigeria and the Mixtec Indian community in Mexico to China’s Guizhou province. These efforts demonstrated that there was a significant demand for postgraduate education among these groups. With nearly 80,000 completed applications since its inception, IFP attracted many more candidates than it could support. The program thus maintained high selectivity, with an overall selection rate of 5 percent.

Having recruited candidates from its locally defined target groups, the International Partners organized selections in accordance...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Breaking New Ground, Opening New Pathways
• Part I: International Fellowships Program (IFP) in Comparative Perspective
• Part II: Restructuring Higher Education Systems for Inclusion
• Part III: Diversity and Enrichment of the Learning Environment
• Part IV: IFP, Social Justice Perspectives, and Institutional Experiences
• Conclusion: The Wisdom of Audacity in Purpose, Scope, and Scale
• List of Contributors
• Index