Community College Recruiting Abroad

To be fair to Santa Monica College, the sunset photo of the pony-tailed jogger framed by palm trees against an ocean backdrop is not the only way its brochure recruits foreign students.

The pamphlet also boasts that the school sends more graduates to the University of California than any other community college. And it touts the tuition--$151 per unit--as a bargain.

Still, the cover image of “sun and sea and the beach” was what caught the eye of Ute Braun, who came from Germany to enroll. “I always imagined this as ‘Baywatch,’ ” she said.

The power of that image--spread around the world by the popular TV show--is not lost on recruiters for Santa Monica and other California community colleges. They have made it a centerpiece of campaigns to bring in foreign students, who now make up more than 10% of the student body at Santa Monica--the clear leader of the pack when it comes to playing the recruiting game.

“We are careful to say we are near Los Angeles, but not in Los Angeles,” said Elena Garate-Eskey, who, as dean of international education, canvasses the globe for prospects. “We are 16 blocks from the bay where they film ‘Baywatch.’ ”

The reason for the roundup of foreign students? They are the cash cows of higher education.

“That’s where the money is,” said Mary Ann Keating, who has made overseas recruiting trips for El Camino Community College in Torrance.

While California residents pay a mere $13 a unit--averaging $350-$400 a year in fees for a full load of courses--international students pay about 10 times as much. For them, fees, surcharges and nonresident tuition totals $3,500 to $4,000 a year.

Unlike U.S. citizens who come from other states to enroll, those holding foreign student visas cannot establish California residency to avoid nonresident fees after a year.

At Santa Monica College, the fees from more than 2,300 international students add up to $11 million a year at a school whose total budget is $70 million.

The surplus cash helped the college avoid cutbacks when Sacramento began providing fewer tax dollars in the early 1990s. More recently, it helped buy an $8.5-million building for the college’s just opened Academy of Entertainment and Technology, which is training 140 students in computer animation, visual effects and other skills needed by the entertainment industry.

All of which makes other community colleges envious.

“I would love to have a beach one mile from my campus,” said Robert Frost, international program director at Parkland College in Champaign, Ill., who also serves as national community college coordinator for the National Assn. of Foreign Student Affairs.

Frost has heard “all of the stories” about Santa Monica’s success at drawing foreign students. “The surf’s always up,” he said. “Coming from corn country, I don’t have corn plastered across the front of my brochures.”

High-profile American universities for decades have been a magnet for foreign students, whose education has become a $7-billion-a-year industry in the United States. For while American public schools have suffered in international rankings, the nation’s higher education institutions have been lauded as the best in the world, revered for their research and instruction and their ability to encourage creativity in students.

Universities such as UCLA and USC have well-established followings around the globe. USC has been recruiting overseas since the 1920s and its enrollment of 4,183 international students last fall was third highest in the nation, behind Boston University and New York University.

Financial Impact

Community colleges, in contrast to the big universities, are simpler places--more reliant on state funding--where the full tuition paid by foreign students can make a big difference. Eight of nine campuses in the Los Angeles Community College District, for instance, face budgets cuts.

“The potential is enormous,” said Philip Weston, chancellor of the three-campus Ventura County college district.

Weston last year reassigned Oxnard College President Elise Sneider to join the ranks of community college recruiters who venture overseas to find students.

Since then, Sneider has traveled to Asia three times, including a 33-day expedition in May that took her to Hong Kong, Indonesia, Thailand and Russia.

Foreign students are beginning to trickle in to the Ventura County campuses, but not enough yet to cover her six-figure salary, staff and travel expenses. “We anticipate that within three years we will be self-supporting,” she said. “Like any business, it takes a while to get going.”

It’s not a trickle elsewhere. Foreign student enrollment at all types of U.S. colleges and universities jumped by about 15,000, or 2.5% nationwide, during the 1996-97 school year, said Todd M. Davis, research director of the New York City-based Institute of International Education. He attributes much of that to how many community colleges have plunged into overseas recruiting.

“Roughly 40% [of the new foreign students] are going to community colleges, and a lot of that growth is in California,” he said. “These two-year institutions are beginning to figure out that they are key players in this international market.”

And Santa Monica is the biggest player of all. On one typical day, foreign students swarmed the International Student Center. Chatter could be heard in half a dozen tongues.

In the foyer, peer counselor Thian Jong of Malaysia helped a freshman from Hong Kong fill out a form. The paperwork was in English. They tackled it together, in Chinese.

Seated at a desk, a middle-age woman explained housing options to another student: renting an apartment or a “homestay” with an American family. Nearby, another woman spoke slowly in English, trying to explain a health insurance policy to a baby-faced Japanese woman with a befuddled expression.

Another shy student--this one from Taiwan--walked into the buzzing hive with Laurie Frederic, a counselor who teaches an orientation class on navigating U.S. colleges. It’s a mandatory course for first-semester foreign students. “It’s OK if you don’t understand,” Frederic told the young woman. “We don’t mind repeating the information.”

Santa Monica Reinvests

Santa Monica opened its international student center in 1987 but did not begin its aggressive recruiting until the early ‘90s, when the state’s economy soured and enrollments dipped amid Sacramento-imposed budget tightening, which forced many community colleges to cut classes. The situation worsened when the community colleges tripled regular student fees and socked those with a bachelor’s degree with a $50-per-unit surcharge. Enrollment at most community colleges continued to decline until the surcharge was dropped at the end of 1995, and only now is spurting--a trend expected to continue as more children of baby boomers reach college age.

But although Santa Monica’s recruitment drive began with the bottom line in mind, its president, Piedad Robertson, has instructed her administrators to pour more money back into the program, which helps foreign students with everything from homework to homesickness.

“She wants to assure that it isn’t just a cash cow and that the program does not die from overexposure,” said Tom Donner, the college’s chief financial officer. “At this point, we have to wean ourselves from becoming too dependent on that money. We need to use it for the extras, the special things, and not for keeping the door open like we did in the ‘90s.”

But all this coddling of foreign students angers some, like Charles A. Johnson, 59, of West Los Angeles, who attended Santa Monica College decades ago and regularly attends the meetings of its Board of Trustees.

It irks him that foreign students don’t have to stand in line with other students to register for classes. Moreover, the thought that international students might be taking seats away from poor California residents really sets him off. “It smells racist to me,” he said. “Santa Monica does not recruit in the ghetto.”

College officials acknowledge that is a common perception--that the foreigners somehow must be supplanting domestic students. It’s also a misperception, they say, because Santa Monica--like other California community colleges--has an open admissions policy, accepting any California resident with a high school diploma.

Foreign students, in fact, face stricter standards: They must pass a language proficiency exam, write a personal essay, send letters of recommendations and offer written proof of financial support. In practice, fewer than 10% are rejected, school officials say, but those who get in are often a higher caliber of student than their domestic counterparts.

Furthermore, Donner said, foreign student fees enable the college to offer a greater variety of courses and duplicate sections of popular courses.

“I don’t want an uprising by these students thinking they are paying too much,” Donner said. “But if it wasn’t for these foreign students, there wouldn’t be as many [California] resident students, because they underwrite part of our costs.”

The increasing enrollment in community colleges reflects a shift in the sort of students coming to the United States from abroad.

Traditionally, U.S. colleges and universities attracted mostly graduate-level students in engineering and the hard sciences. But those numbers have leveled off or dropped slightly.

Instead, the growth has been in women and students coming as undergraduates to study the humanities, the softer sciences or for career enhancement in business.

No longer just for the wealthy, an American college education is drawing the sons and daughters of the rising middle-class in many countries, particularly those in Asia.

The result is a diverse mix of students who--no matter where they’re from--often wind up acting much like their American counterparts. At Santa Monica College last spring, for instance, they ranged from student body President Bassalla Mutua of Kenya, who talked excitedly about her acceptance by UCLA, to Toshiyuki Nakada, who lamented how he had to redye his hair black before returning to Japan for the summer.

“Many people here think this is cool,” said the goateed 20-year-old, fingering one of his shoulder-length dreadlocks with golden roots and blue-green tips. “In Japan, my parents say, ‘Ugh.’ ”

In all, 19,226 foreign students were enrolled last semester in the state’s 106 community colleges. There they can spend their first two collegiate years in smaller classes with less academic pressure, and more attention from instructors, before moving on to four-year institutions. And they can do that, the community college marketers point out, at a fraction of the price of attending larger or more prestigious schools.

But few of California’s community colleges have reputations that extend beyond their communities. So how do the foreign students learn of them?

Enter the recruiters.

The Beach as a Draw

Savvy salesmanship, of course, has long been used to promote colleges and universities. The brochures of elite New England private colleges are filled with pictures of students romping on green grass and hiking through amber forests--and give short shrift to the harsher realities of frigid winters.

Following that tradition, California’s community colleges promote images of sand, surf and sun--even if they’re not on the beach.

“When you are from Calcutta, that’s the idea of what California should be,” said Saeeda Wali Mohammed, international center director for Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. Though situated five miles inland, her school’s brochure features pictures of teenagers sailing in Newport Harbor.

El Camino Community College’s brochure says that it “is located in Torrance . . . on the beautiful Pacific Coast of California.”

So what if it’s not exactly on the water--but 4 1/2 miles inland, on the other side of the 405 Freeway? What’s a few miles to someone who has come halfway around the world? The college’s theme-park style map of its South Bay location includes a cartoonish drawing of a surfer, a sea gull and a smiling sun wearing shades and dancing like John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever.”

Santa Barbara City College promotes itself as “minutes from the beaches and mountains.” Its recruiters, like those for Santa Monica, get to trade on the powerful influence of television--because of another TV series.

Though off the air locally, “Santa Barbara,” the soap opera, continues to be broadcast overseas. “It is real big in the Ukraine,” said Keith McLellan, dean of student development. “It has some draw still in some countries.”

Read: Elevating Santa Barbara’s desirability.

While representing Ventura County’s colleges at recruiting fairs overseas, Elise Sneider sets out poster-sized photos of Channel Islands Harbor and of Anacapa Island’s Arch Rock, the landmark of the Channel Islands National Park.

She also hands out information that highlights the “safe, family environment” of Moorpark, Oxnard and Ventura colleges, and says the campuses are “located on California’s ‘Gold Coast’ between Santa Barbara and Malibu.”

Safety is paramount for fretful parents sending their children to a strange land. Although shows like “Baywatch” present a soft image of Southern California--with a few bad guys thrown in to be taught a lesson--a competing image bounces around the globe.

Los Angeles, in particular, is always in the media’s cross-hairs for its murders, gang wars and riots. That’s one reason recruiters from Southern California colleges are careful to specify that their campuses are “near” but not “in” Los Angeles.

Keating recalls how, on one of her overseas trips for El Camino College, a protective father repeatedly stopped by her booth at a college fair to check things out before introducing his daughter. “He took his daughter’s hand and put it in my hand, and said, ‘I’m trusting you with my daughter.’ ”

Overseas Competition

In the end, educators admit, image will only go so far in attracting foreign students--if the reality is far different. That’s why some worry about other community colleges rushing to mine this pool of students without having the sort of programs set up at Santa Monica to serve their special needs.

It’s something, they say, that could harm the overseas reputations of all American colleges--at a time when Australian, Canadian and Japanese schools also are mounting marketing campaigns to lure students to their shores.

“One of the major ways that students come to the United States is by word of mouth,” said Davis, of the Institute of International Education. “If individuals have unsatisfactory experiences, it doesn’t take long for the word to get back.”

Still never underestimate how the image of bronzed bodies on the beach can sway impressionable minds halfway around the world.

Ute Braun makes no bones about “Baywatch’s” role in her selection of Santa Monica College, where she planned to study physical education. But since her arrival from Germany 18 months ago, she switched her major to music, began singing in the choir and got a role in a campus production of “M. Butterfly.”

“It’s kind of crazy,” she said. “I came here because of the beach and now I don’t go there. I don’t have time.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Coming to America

California community colleges aggressively recruit overseas--often promoting location as much as academics--in a bid to share in the $7 billion a year that tuition-paying foreign students bring to the United States. Here is data from 1995-96:College: Northern Virginia Community College

No. of Foreign Students: 2,191

Total Enrollment: 38,530

*

College: Santa Monica College (California)

No. of Foreign Students: 2,152

Total Enrollment: 20,770

*

College: Montgomery College-Rockville (Maryland)

No. of Foreign Students: 1,388

Total Enrollment: 14,355

*

College: Miami-Dade Community College (Florida)

No. of Foreign Students: 1,155

Total Enrollment: 44,287

*

College: La Guardia Community College (New York)

No. of Foreign Students: 1,134

Total Enrollment: 10,598

*

College: Borough of Manhattan College (New York)

No. of Foreign Students: 1,022

Total Enrollment: 16,334

*

College: Pasadena City College (California)

No. of Foreign Students: 859

Total Enrollment: 25,000

*

College: Los Angeles City College (California)

No. of Foreign Students: 813

Total Enrollment: 14,500

*

College: Broward Community College (Florida)

No. of Foreign Students: 800

Total Enrollment: 28,904

*

College: Mt. San Antonio College (California)

No. of Foreign Students: 790

Total Enrollment: 21,039

*

College: Houston Community College System (Texas)

No. of Foreign Students: 727

Total Enrollment: 39,321

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College: Edmonds Community College (Washington)

No. of Foreign Students: 722

Total Enrollment: 9,569

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College: Seattle Central Community College (Washington)

No. of Foreign Students: 698

Total Enrollment: 4,500

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College: City College of San Francisco (California)

No. of Foreign Students: 685

Total Enrollment: 28,000

*

College: Orange Coast College (California)

No. of Foreign Students: 615

Total Enrollment: 22,000

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College: Pima Community College (Arizona)

No. of Foreign Students: 601

Total Enrollment: 28,268

*

College: Collin County Community College Dist. (Texas)

No. of Foreign Students: 594

Total Enrollment: 10,300

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College: East Los Angeles College (California0

No. of Foreign Students: 538

Total Enrollment: 14,502

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College: Grossmont College (California)

No. of Foreign Students: 529

Total Enrollment: 14,500

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College: Bellevue Community College (Washington)

No. of Foreign Students: 527

Total Enrollment: 17,319

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College: Santa Barbara City College (California)

No. of Foreign Students: 523

Total Enrollment: 11,174

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College: DeKalb College (Georgia)

No. of Foreign Students: 466

Total Enrollment: 16,075

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College: Rancho Santiago College (California)

No. of Foreign Students: 442

Total Enrollment: 20,529

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College: Mongomery College-Takoma Park (Maryland)

No. of Foreign Students: 441

Total Enrollment: 4,830

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College: Glendale Community College (California)

No. of Foreign Students: 421

Total Enrollment: 14,792

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College: Nassau Community College (New York)

No. of Foreign Students: 407

Total Enrollment: 21,737

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College: Moraine Valley Community College (Illinois)

No. of Foreign Students: 405

Total Enrollment: 12,813

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College: Sacramento City College (California)

No. of Foreign Students: 401

Total Enrollment: 16.039

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College: Mesa Community College (Arizona)

No. of Foreign Students: 388

Total Enrollment: 22,302

*

College: Foothill College (California)

No. of Foreign Students: 375

Total Enrollment: 12,000

Note: Despite its No.2 ranking, Santa Monica College leads in students carrying foreign student visas. Northern Virginia Community College--a cluster of five campuses near Washington D.C.--counts refugees and students in the country on diplomatic or foreign worker visas. Santa Monica’s foreign student enrollment has increased 10% since this survey to 2,360.

U.S. Enrollment

Despite a 1,200% increase in their numbers since 1954, foreign students make up only 3.1% of the total U.S. higher education enrollment.

Top 10 States for Foreign Students

California: 55,799

New York: 47,987

Texas: 27,883

Massachusetts: 25,739

Illinois: 19,408

Florida: 18,982

Pennsylvania: 17,897

Michigan: 16,284

Ohio: 16,161

Washington: 10,257

Source: Institute of International Education, 1995-96

Profile: Santa Monica College

The average age of international students is 22

51% of international students are men.

The students come from 96 countries.

The top 13:

Japan: 661

South Korea: 328

Hong Kong: 280

Indonesia: 175

Sweden: 162

Taiwan: 103

France: 44

Germany: 32

Brazil: 31

Thailand: 29

Kenya: 28

Switzerland: 24

Singapore: 20

Source: Santa Monica College