Back in the days when I was promoting student and scholar international mobility (and particularly undergraduate education abroad) through U.S. college and university posts, I enjoyed close working relationships with numerous organizations abroad. Most were formally affiliated with my institution and approved by faculty members or departments on campus, which enabled students to gain credit upon successful completion of courses taken abroad. This, I’m sure, is a familiar scenario to most readers of Gateway Voices. When things went well, we were all proud, and students had high-impact and meaningful learning experiences.
The problem, of course, was that faculty or departmental approvals could be rescinded for any number of reasons (and through no fault of the organization or the education abroad office), thus leaving organizations—especially small ones—in precarious positions, not to mention leaving students and/or the education abroad office in the lurch. I was sometimes able to intercede and assure continuity or resumption of programs and could build or sustain agreements with other institutions to supplement the flow of students from mine. While my interventions resulted in continued enrollment, the precariousness of the partnerships remained unchanged.
Precarity seems to be a constant for organizations that provide education abroad programming for U.S. students but lack accreditation from regional or national authorities to grant tertiary credit. The inability to grant transferrable credit thus becomes a key impediment to the enrollment growth of such organizations. Moreover, students’ inability to rally advocacy on their campus to ensure that one-off, unofficial grade reports are sufficient to receive credit, limits their choice of programs.
Establishing a School of Record partnership, however, can ease that element of precarity. It can increase the organization’s enrollment, visibility, and stature, and it can offer new curricular breadth and revenue to a recording institution. And for students, it removes the obstacle posed by the lack of legible credits for their studies at non-university organizations abroad. Gateway International Group offers a unique service to broker School of Record partnerships.
As a case in point, the Spanish Institute for Global Education has been providing instruction and student services in Seville for forty years, and has been sustaining enrollments based on institutional agreements. But the shifting seas and fortunes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic underscored to the Spanish Institute that it was time for change. They decided to seek a School of Record partnership and, after exhaustive review of its curriculum, recently partnered with the University of Montana. U.S. students at the Spanish Institute can now return to their home campus with an official transcript from the University of Montana, legible indeed to any college or university registrar’s office.
This bodes well not only for the prospect of recruiting individual students, but also for establishing new institutional affiliations (and this is already the case for the Spanish Institute). The recording institution’s willingness to stand behind the organization’s curriculum is, of course, a vote of confidence. But the ability to transfer credit from another U.S. institution can offer a more cost-effective financial model for students, for example, at an affiliated institution that would otherwise charge its own (potentially high) tuition and fees per credit.
As such, School of Record partnerships offer an antidote to precarity for education abroad organizations and foster growth on both sides of the partnership, while offering students more choice in programs, a win-win-win proposition.
