Boston University President Robert Brown is considering an initiative to provide greater financial aid to international students in an attempt to attract a more economically diverse group of students from abroad.
The President’s Council on Boston University and the Global Future, formed by Brown in December 2005, recommended that the university work to draw more international students by making need-based financial aid available. Currently, only U.S. students are eligible for need-based aid.
The recommendation to increase international financial aid arose from the Council’s deliberations, culminating in a report released in late September.
In the “Student Experience” section of the report, the Council said the interaction between domestic and international students may not represent as genuine of an exchange of cultures as possible, partly because “these [international] students are often from the wealthiest stratum of their country.”
“From a socio-economic perspective, unless they got aid from their government to come here,” Brown said in an Oct. 27 interview with The Daily Free Press, “we’re getting a very narrow socio-economic slice of the international students.”
BU currently enrolls 4,518 international students from 140 countries. The Institute of International Education reports BU has the eighth-largest international student body among all American universities.
The Council recommended the university “make financial aid more available to meritorious students from other countries — as a strategic effort to better represent the countries of the world in our student population, beyond only those who are most able to pay our tuition rates.”
Council Co-Chair Jay Halfond said if the university is to maintain its enrollment of international students, it must first attract more foreign students and then fully integrate them into the fabric of the university.
“The goal should be to benefit domestic students as well by the presence of other cultures,” the Metropolitan College and Extended Education dean said in an email. “And this can only be accomplished by creating a global melting pot on campus and an intellectual environment that embraces a cross-cultural perspective.”
Halfond said in order to make the Council’s goals a reality, the university must attract a more diverse student body from abroad and overcome the real or imaginary perception of most international students at BU.
“I suspect there is much truth to the perception that foreign students are wealthier than domestic students,” he said, “if only because our financial aid policies have traditionally favored those within the United States.”
Halfond said the President’s Council on Boston University and the Global Future was created to help concentrate and mobilize the university’s leadership and assets, solidifying BU’s reputation as a “global” university.
“When I saw this, when I came into the institution, I said, ‘What we really need to do is step back and say, is this strategic, or is this just opportunistic?'” Brown said. “We did need to do a whole university strategic plan that’s going to take more time, but this we’ve got to do fast.”
Brown said the university’s plan for domestic student aid should run parallel to an initiative for foreign students.
“A major fundraising initiative that we’re pushing on is to raise financial aid dollars to give students access,” he said. “And to make sure, just in the U.S. context, that we have an adequate financial aid to get the population of students in here who are bright and motivated and represent a cross-section of the country. What the report says is, ‘Yeah, we should do the same thing for the world.'”
International Students Consortium President Bilal Bilici, who worked with Council member and International Initiatives Assistant Dean Paul Greene, said he believes BU should open several campuses throughout the world to students, an idea Brown said is another practical way of giving international students access to a BU education.
Bilici said BU should reach out to foreign governments and foundations paying for international students’ tuition at American universities.
“I think that if BU is able to do it, they could create a fund together,” the College of Arts and Science senior said. “Or, they could do a partnership with those foundations or governments that will help BU to get more qualified international students who are not fortunate [enough] to pay the [current] tuition.”