New Era in International Higher Education :: Inside Higher Ed

In the not too distant past, international education at many colleges was about sending students abroad and welcoming foreign students to American campuses.

Such efforts are alive and well, to be sure, but an announcement Tuesday by Georgetown University that it will be opening a campus in Qatar — to which students will be admitted and will graduate with degrees from Georgetown’s foreign service school — reflects what some see as a dramatic shift in how American colleges interact with the rest of the world.

“We’re all international today in some ways already,” John J. DeGioia, Georgetown’s president, said in an interview Tuesday. “We’ve got students coming from all over the world. We have faculty members doing research in 44 countries.”

But he said that the movement to open a full, degree-awarding campus abroad reflected a desire to be “global,” to consider changes that might come from offering a Georgetown education in another country, primarily to students from other countries. “I don’t think we quite know yet what it will mean to be global,” he said. “I think we are going to find out.”