U.S. Universities Summit on International Education

Go to the Summit webpages at the State Department's website.

The Summit was held January 5 through 9, 2006 at the Department of State in Washington, D.C. The Summit focus was on invigorating the U.S. government and higher education partnership on international higher education in the national interest. It was hosted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

The Summit was a forum on how to attract foreign students and scholars to the United States, as well as how to encourage more American students to receive part of their education abroad. In addition, participants were to discuss:

* marketing of U.S. higher education programs abroad,
* reaching out to underserved populations,
* understanding visa and regulatory processes,
* cooperating to meet exchange priorities, and
* utilizing fully the international education resources of community colleges.

The Summit also was intended to draw attention to the key investments required to strengthen international higher education for Americans, including increasing access to study abroad, encouraging non-traditional study abroad locations, strengthening non-traditional language acquisition, developing coherent international strategies at U.S. universities and colleges, and engaging the public and private sectors in a shared national vision for the future.

Remarks made by President Bush to the assembled university officials are available.

Summit attendees come from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and included those from leading public and private Ph.D. granting institutions, as well as community colleges, historically black institutions, Hispanic-serving institutions, religiously affiliated institutions, and women’s colleges. Also invited were the principal presidential higher education associations and the heads of the federal science and humanities bodies.

The Summit was the venue for the announcement of a "National Security Language Initiative". The Initiative

"encompasses three broad things. One, to expand the number of Americans who are mastering critical need languages and start them at a younger age. And by younger age, it includes pilot projects to start them at the kindergarten level and work them up through elementary school, middle school, high school and colleges. And I can get into details about other such programs focusing on younger, younger students.

"Second, to increase the number of advanced-level speakers of foreign languages with the emphasis of critical needs languages. So think about a continuum. You already have some students who have been exposed to some of this language. How can we press in order to advance? How can we help them advance their mastery of this language? That's the second component.

"And the third component is teachers. Because it is not simply a matter that not enough Americans are learning these foreign languages; we don't have enough teachers to teach these foreign languages. We were struck by the fact, for example, that less than 2 percent of high school students in the United States combined today study Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Korean, Japanese, Russian or Chinese. And so we need programs to help them study. We also need teachers to teach, to teach these critical languages."