 "Photo: Anna Pickrell '14")
After more than a year of deliberation, Macalester College Student Government (MCSG) is still working with the administration to find cost-neutral solutions to the Equity in Study Abroad resolution that will permit international students to study away, despite restrictions on their financial aid.
When domestic students go abroad, their financial aid dollars generally do too. But because international students on average receive more money per capita than do domestic students, allowing them to study away costs Macalester a marginal amount more. Though many international students have expressed interest in going abroad, this possibility is not in the foreseeable future.
As Macalester policy stands now, international students cannot apply their financial aid to study abroad programs unless the student is accepted to the Macalester-Maastricht Perspectives on Globalization Program or an abroad experience that is required for a major that is not International Studies.
The Equity in Study Abroad resolution, passed last year by MCSG, is meant to make this policy more flexible for international students studying abroad with Macalester aid.
A far higher proportion of international students, roughly 88 percent, are receiving aid from the school this year.
According to Dean of Financial Aid Brian Lindeman, the average Macalester scholarship for an international student this year is about $34,300, or $24,900 if money from the Davis Foundation is excluded. The average size of a Macalester scholarship for a US student is about $26,300.
At this point the holdup on the resolution is purely financial, as both MCSG and the administration feel that available study away options for all students are in the school's best interest.
"It's a really long process. We're trying to create cost-neutral options and exchange programs both for domestic students and, feasibly, international students," said chair of MCSG's Academic Affairs Committee Kate Hamilton '13. "There's also the potential for cost-neutral options within the United States, so we really just have to set up those connections."
Provost Kathleen Murray has been working on such alternative solutions, which were first introduced by the Resource and Planning Committee in 2005. These changes are happening slowly over time, the first of which the school saw last year in a single application deadline to balance the number of students studying away in the fall and spring.
Murray said the next goal would be "creating exchange opportunities in which a student from an international university comes to Macalester and our student goes there, they both pay home tuition and no dollars exchange hands, which is revenue and expense neutral for us."
Additionally, Murray said that the college has been "exploring shorter term opportunities, specifically for the summer," as they are less expensive.
Though the school could potentially make cuts from other areas in order to shore up money for international students to apply to their study abroad, such a solution would mean that domestic students who are qualified to go overseas could potentially be denied the opportunity. This decision could be made on a number of criteria – academic standing, international experience, and so on – but it is not a path the administration wishes to take.
"They're not going to say no to any domestic student [who wants to study abroad]," Hamilton said. "They haven't so far, and I think that's great."
Murray made a similar comment on this issue, saying that while she supports study abroad options for all students, the reality of the financial situation is that eligibility has to be cut off somewhere, as a highly competitive process is not the most fair solution.
"We've never, ever told a student they couldn't go because we were over budget," she said. "But [in allowing international students to go abroad] we would be at a point where we would have to look at [domestic] students and say ‘you can't go.' And I'm just not ready to do that at this moment."
Macalester has not always had trouble financing study abroad, but the numbers fluctuate so much from one year to the next that trends mean everything.
Because of the recession and inflated class sizes for the current junior and sophomore classes, financial situations have changed and the school has exceeded its study abroad budget this year.
"The budget up until 2008 had been growing in very significant ways annually. Then the recession hit and we saw two years of less student interest, so we had lower numbers of students wanting to study away in the two years following the recession," Murray said.
"This year we have recovered in an extraordinary way," Murray said. With 340 students planning to study abroad this semester, up from past numbers around 240, Murray said that the study abroad program could go as much as $1 million over budget.
What Murray believes is necessary in order to reach some kind of conclusion on this issue is more time to survey study abroad trends.
"I will need to watch what happens with the numbers and with our savings lot I'm going to arbitrarily say, three years," she said. "An awful lot can happen. If we start to feel a genuine recovery, more things become imaginable at that point. If we stay in this very slow-growth environment where our endowment is essentially flat for a while, that limits the choices we get to make."
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