Benefits of International Education and Exchanges in the Western Hemisphere

Introduction
Thank you very much for your kind introduction. It is a real pleasure for me to be here in Cambridge today to talk with the leadership of LASPAU, one of the Department’s most valued partner institutions, and with leading members of the Harvard community involved in developing and implementing international educational programs. I appreciate having the opportunity to share ideas with such a distinguished audience this afternoon.

The topic you have asked me to address -- the role of international education and educational exchanges in the hemisphere’s future – is an especially timely one. As you all know, President Bush will meet with other hemispheric leaders in Monterrey, Mexico, in January at a Special Summit of the Americas. A prominent agenda item for the Summit is the goal of strengthening our investment in education. International education plays a central role in achieving American foreign policy goals in the hemisphere. Today, I’ll discuss how the Department of State works with program partners such as LASPAU to strengthen the scope, relevance, and effectiveness of its programs.

Appropriately enough, this week is “International Education Week 2003.” On the occasion of its launch just four days ago, Secretary Powell noted, “We are all students of the world we live in, and today our world is more interdependent than ever before. The challenges we face. . . cannot be addressed by any country acting alone. International education . . . promotes the free exchange of ideas, allows us to seek joint solutions to problems, and helps create lasting partnerships to meet our shared concerns. Through [exchanges], the Department of State works to deepen understanding and strengthen voices of moderation around the world.” This belief in the value of international education and exchanges has been shared by all Secretaries going back to the inauguration of the Department’s sponsorship of exchanges in the 1940s. I think it is fair to say that the Department has a distinguished record in that respect.

Fulbright and International Visitor Programs
A brief look at two of the Department’s flagship exchange programs – International Visitors and Fulbright -- will serve to make the point. The predecessor of what is known today as the IV program began in 1940 when Nelson Rockefeller was named the Coordinator of Commercial and Cultural Affairs for the American Republics. He initiated the exchange of persons program with Latin America by inviting 130 Latin American journalists to the United States. Since that time, more than 500,000 International Visitors, IV, have traveled under the program, over 200 current and former IVs have achieved the position of chief of state or head of government, and 1,500 have been cabinet-level officials. Current Western Hemisphere leaders who were International Visitors include President Lagos of Chile (1988), President Uribe of Colombia (1998), President Maduro of Honduras (1986), President Mejia of the Dominican Republic (1995), President Portillo of Guatemala (1992), and President Mesa of Bolivia, who was twice an IV, in 1979 and 2001. Internationally, such leaders as Kofi Annan, Tony Blair, and Hamid Karzai are alumni of the program. Every year, another 5,000 distinguished young leaders are added to the rolls of IV alumni.

The Fulbright program, launched five years later in 1946, has achieved similar success. Since its inception, the United States Government has spent $2.7 billion on the exchange of 250,000 Americans and foreign participants. Like the IV Program, the Fulbright Program boasts an equally impressive list of alumni, including 32 Nobel Prize laureates. Last year alone, the Department spent nearly $15 million on Fulbright academic exchanges with the Western Hemisphere, which funded the exchange of around 1,100 students and scholars.

The United States Government, however, cannot manage these complex exchanges alone. We rely on the commitment and skills of 95 community-based organizations across the country, 80,000 volunteers, and 1,500 private-public partnerships to conduct our exchanges. Last year, for example, in addition to $15 million in Department funds, we received an additional $10 million in cost sharing from non-USG sources for Western Hemisphere Fulbright programs. LASPAU has long been one of our most valued partners, especially in its administration of the Faculty Development Program and the Fulbright-OAS Ecology initiative.

LASPAU has also agreed to place in U.S. universities a limited number of Latin American students who have been the recipients of interest-free OAS student loans. LASPAU cooperation with OAS Scholarships and Training Programs will allow us to stretch our dollars so that more students can benefit from OAS programs.

In addition, the United States has provided core funding to the $5.5 million OAS Capital Fund for Scholarships and Training, an endowment that will provide a sustainable source of funding for OAS academic programs in the years to come.

Finally, I want to mention that the USG financed the creation and first phase of the OAS’s Education Portal of the Americas. The Portal is the gateway to online training for teachers and other government and private sector professionals to continue their education while remaining in their jobs. Many U.S. universities, including Harvard, have participated in developing educational materials and conducting classes. The Tecnologico de Monterrey, which helped develop the technology used for the Portal, is now contributing e-fellowships for degree courses.

Private Sector Efforts
While the Department’s investment in international education is significant, private sector investment is substantially higher. Every year, over half a million foreign students study in the U.S. These students constitute a significant cultural and economic resource for our country. Foreign students spend an estimated $13 billion dollars here each year and support 100,000 jobs for Americans. In the 2000-2001 school year, almost 100,000 of these half-million students came from our own Hemisphere, 70,000 from Latin America and 25,000 from Canada.

Unfortunately, the decade of the 1990s saw the U.S. share of the total number of foreign students decline from around 40 percent to 30 percent. New security measures introduced in the wake of the terrorist attacks in 2001 have no doubt exacerbated this decline. We are working to meet all new security requirements, while still encouraging the very positive contributions from foreign students in the U.S.

Another area that troubles me is the comparatively low number of U.S. students studying abroad. Only around 120,000-140,000 American students receive credit annually for overseas study. This number is low compared to the nearly 15 million U.S. students currently enrolled in colleges and universities here. To share the full range of the American experience effectively with the people of other nations, we simply must do better in creating more study abroad opportunities for our young people.

Regional Challenges
Looking at the successes of the Fulbright and IV Programs, and at the huge flow of foreign students into America’s higher education system, we might be tempted to grow complacent about U.S. leadership in international education and academic exchanges. That would be a great mistake in my view, especially with respect to our own hemisphere. As you all know, while the countries of our region have made great strides in the last 20 years in liberalizing their economies and in restoring democratic institutions, significant challenges remain. Key trade partners in the region have been adversely impacted by the economic downturn in the U.S., and growth rates are simply not high enough to generate sufficient employment for growing populations or to diminish chronic poverty. Corruption has stunted economic development by diverting scarce resources and, in the process, caused disillusionment about the potential of democracy and free trade to produce change. The dispossessed fall prey to demagogues of the right or left, as in Bolivia. Political institutions are simply not strong or agile enough to deal with popular discontent, which can produce spasms of violence and unrest. And finally, terrorist groups and drug lords create fear and instability, which threaten effective democratic governance.

The U.S. is working to meet these challenges by forging with our hemispheric neighbors a true Inter-American Community. To achieve this community, we are cooperating on efforts to bolster mutual security, to foster open markets, and to strengthen democratic institutions. You have all read and heard, I’m sure, of our support for President Uribe’s struggle to defeat narco-terrorists; our border security agreements with Canada and Mexico; our support for anti-corruption, judicial reform, human rights, and other hallmarks of good democratic governance; and our free trade agreement with Chile and our commitment to free trade with Central America and to a hemisphere-wide FTAA. The region even boasts of several hemisphere-wide innovative instruments for cooperation on these and other issues: the Inter-American Democratic Charter, the Inter-American Convention Against Terrorism, the Inter-American Convention Against Corruption and, of course, the Summit of the Americas process.

With respect to the FTAA, I would be remiss if I did not briefly mention U.S. efforts in the area of trade capacity building, an especially timely topic as the FTAA Ministerial concludes today in Miami. The U.S. has an active program under way in the region to help countries strengthen their capacity to trade. The focus has been on improving data services, writing new trade-related regulations and legislation, and conducting studies of the impacts of trade liberalization. In the case of ongoing negotiations with Central America and for the FTAA, the U.S. has committed $150 million to Latin America and the Caribbean for this purpose.

The Role of Education and Exchanges
President Bush believes that a good education is the foundation for creating economic growth, social advancement, and democratic progress. At home, the President made education a priority through his “No child Left Behind” initiative. He shares this commitment to providing a quality education with many leaders in Latin America and the Caribbean who understand that education is critical to achieving hemispheric security and prosperity, in addition to addressing the real world needs of people, especially the historically dispossessed.

The value-added that education provides is indisputable. According to the Inter American Development Bank, recent research reveals that there is an impressive rate of return on our investment in education; on average, an economy obtains a nearly 18 percent rate of return on primary education and a nearly 13 percent rate of return on secondary education. In addition, we know from experience that a more educated workforce learns to use increasingly sophisticated technologies in their jobs and that the level of direct foreign investment is greater in countries with an educated work force. Greater investment in education can also contribute to alleviating chronic poverty among the historically dispossessed populations, giving them a greater stake in the future of their countries.

Yet assessments of education in Latin America and the Caribbean conclude that schools are simply not educating their young. The best school systems in the region do not rise above the bottom quartile of world-wide achievement tests. Although more students than ever are enrolled in school, fewer are completing their studies. Almost half of the students who enter primary school fail to make it to the fifth grade and only about 30 percent finish secondary school, resulting in the region having the highest repetition and dropout rates in the world.

This has significant economic ramifications. The region’s workforce averages less than six years of schooling, two years below world patterns and most developing country competitors. In the 1990s, the average years of school of the region’s workforce grew at a rate well below the world average and other developing countries, resulting in the region falling further behind.

Education is the best means of reducing inequality in our populations. The gap between rich and poor is the greatest source of friction in the countries of the hemisphere, and study after study concludes that the key to reducing this gap is education. In a few months, the World Bank will officially launch its report “Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean: Breaking with History?” Its conclusion is another clear mandate that if we want progress in this hemisphere we must guarantee a quality education for every child. In short, we cannot afford to leave a child behind in the United States, nor can we afford to let this happen anywhere in the Americas.

Summit of the Americas Initiatives
The President has used the Summit of the Americas as a vehicle for implementing his vision of a quality education for every child in the hemisphere. Beginning with the Quebec Summit in 2001, the U.S. Government has launched several initiatives designed to demonstrate the U.S. commitment to education in the hemisphere. These initiatives have included the “Centers for Excellence for Teacher Training,” a $20 million effort to establish regional centers for the purpose of training both teachers and those who train teachers. Thus far, these centers, run by the U.S. Agency for International Development, have been established in the Caribbean (Jamaica), the Andes (Peru), and in Central America (Honduras) and have trained around 2,000 educators. The Commerce Department has launched an Inter-American E-Business Fellowship Program in which regional fellows participate in training programs at top American hi-tech firms. To date, the program has graduated 46 fellows. The Department of Education has started a “Civitas Latin America Program” which carries out exchanges designed to strengthen civic education in the region. And the Department of State has awarded a grant to Partners of the Americas to administer the American Fellows Program, which sponsors exchanges of outstanding civil servants to promote excellence within governments of the hemisphere. Funding will sponsor up to 20 Fellows on these three-month long exchanges.

The Summit process has also launched the Inter-American Education Ministerial, the purpose of which is to create strategies for advancing education in the hemisphere. At its last meeting in Mexico City in August, convoked under the auspices of the OAS, the Ministers established the Inter-American Education Committee to provide a policy forum for abetting education reform and implementing projects in the hemisphere.

These are all exceedingly promising programs that emerged from the 1998 Santiago Summit and the 2001 Summit in Quebec. At the upcoming Summit in Monterrey, the U.S. would like to focus on the issue of holding education systems accountable for results. Increasing accountability requires empowering parents and communities to improve their schools through well-defined educational standards, regular assessments of student learning (testing), and education report cards to identify where the standards are not being met. We are encouraging our Summit partners to develop report cards that can clearly and concisely document how education systems are doing, help set priorities, generate recommendations for change, and promote transparency and accountability to stakeholders.

Deparatment of State Agenda for the Future
The Summit agenda for education is an ambitious one. So too is the Department’s agenda in broadening the scope, relevance and effectiveness of its exchange programs. The Fulbright Program, for instance, has instituted within the last couple of years a new effort called the New Century Scholars Program, which brings together scholars from all over the world to focus on a single overriding international issue. The first group dealt with challenges to global health, including HIV/AIDS, and the second group is winding up its work on sectarian, ethnic and cultural conflict. The third group will concentrate on international women’s equality and empowerment.

The Fulbright Branch for Western Hemisphere affairs has worked with LASPAU to propose incentive English-language funds for countries to reach out to groups and regions in which English ability is often insufficient for acceptance in U.S. universities. Most teachers and professors in the region fall into the category of disadvantaged as elites shun the teaching profession in favor of more remunerative occupations.

The International Visitor office has already proposed a schedule of hemispheric IV projects in FY ‘05 that focuses on the highest priorities of the USG, among them counter terrorism, free trade, and good governance. The Youth Exchange division is seeking to broaden its reach with expanded school connectivity and academic year programs. I believe very strongly in this effort; we need to place more emphasis on the primary and secondary sectors in order to help make the playing field more level for non-elites. The Bureau’s Public Diplomacy office is planning to bring 20 economic journalists from the region to New York to attend the March 2004, Columbia University conference on “Covering Globalization.” After the conference, the journalists will be brought to Washington for briefings with senior USG trade officials.

Also in the mix is a Mexico-U.S. Bilateral Education Initiative in which President Fox and President Bush have agreed to pursue educational initiatives between the two countries, one of which is a special teacher exchange program funded by over $500,000 in Economic Support Funds. Already, 74 Mexican English-language teachers have received training under this program.

Conclusion
Such programs are not, as I said at the beginning of my talk, incidental to U.S. foreign policy, they are central to it. They build the relationships on which a successful foreign policy rests. They open people’s eyes to what might be. We don’t conduct exchanges or support educational reform to remake others in our image; we do it to give people the tools and freedom to make their own, hopefully good, choices. Ultimately, our support for exchanges and educational reform reflects our inherent idealism, our belief in the power of individuals to shape and transform the world.