Today I found this story about the State Department intending to promote more student exchanges between Latin America and the United States. As the story points out, the government has determined that it is important for us to promote much more student exchanges between the two regions as we are geographically, politically and economically linked. The article also points out that at this time these exchanges are quite limited in relation to our actual relations. As a long-time professor at UMass, this doesn’t come as a surprise to me, and I must confess that I am disappointed by the limited scope of this relationship. My experience is that many more of my students, for one reason or another, tend to prefer Spain over Latin America as a study destination. The irony, however, is that often the interest in Spanish is because of the geographical proximity to our southern neighbors (and the increased Latin American population in the US), but the choice of a place to study the language is dictated by other reasons. A few years back I read this interesting article about the history of Spanish studies in the United States which in a way addresses some of the reasons behind this contradiction.
Beyond this, I’d also like to point out that I find another interesting aspect to this story: the fact that much of the $1,000,000 (a small amount if you really consider it) is going to be dedicated to make Latin American universities better cater to US students. On the surface, a good proposition, but I wonder to what degree specifically catering to US students and creating special programs for them defeats part of the purpose of going abroad – to learn the way in which other societies function.
Any thoughts?
UMass Spanport Integrative Experience Blog
This definitely seems like a typical American initiative to foreign affairs. It seems that our country is practically incapable of learning that going abroad and doing business abroad is about understanding the culture on the other side of the table, not implanting our own ideals. We also need to get off our high-horse of our own standards. “It means making sure the curricula is to the standard that we require,” says the group’s president Brian Whalen, “the students are well looked after in terms of their cultural orientation, health, safety and security issues, and so on.” Did anybody else see those education ratings that came out a month or so ago? The U.S. isn’t that high and from my personal experience, Uruguay was more than accommodating in terms of health, safety, and security. As for cultural orientation? That’s why student’s are there, it’s not going to come in a one day guided city bus-tour. When’s the last time you think a policy maker studied abroad?
This is a pretty interesting topic on why so many American students choose to study in Spain instead of Latin America. You would think it would make more sense to study in Latin America simply because there is such a larger Latin American population in the US than a Spanish population.
I think a main reason why students choose to study in Spain is just because it is more common and more talked about. Everyone that comes back from Spain loves their time there and loves to talk about it. I was planning on studying in Oviedo, Spain originally, but I quickly talked to a girl that studied in Chile. She raved about her time and really encouraged me to look into programs in Latin America. After that simple conversation I was curious of the idea of Latin America, going somewhere a bit different from the norm. I started to realize how there are tons of option in Latin America and I was kinda shocked to think that I never really considered to study there before.
I’m pretty sure that if I studied in Spain, I would have loved it. But I’m still really happy with my decision on Buenos Aires. It will be a good mix of the two places for me. I just think that there isn’t enough publicity about studying abroad in Latin America. Most of the things we hear about Latin America are all the negatives, which is a shame.