KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Expo Hall at the 62nd annual NAFSA: Association of International Educators conference evokes Disney’s Epcot Center. Foreign countries have staked out territory here in America’s heartland to promote themselves as destinations for international students: Study in Japan , Malaysia , Korea ; “Study in the heart of Europe !” (in Belgium ). Over in Canadian country, signs prompt passersby to “Imagine studying” — “?tudier en” — British Columbia , Ontario , Saskatchewan …. Quebec ‘s universities have a separate booth nearby: “A unique crossroads.” The international student market is booming. Foreign student enrollment in the United States is at a record high of 671,616 students. Worldwide, upwards of 3 million students now study outside their home countries, an expanding pie that every country wants a piece of. “As the pie’s increased, more countries are hosting more international students,” Robert Guttierez, senior manager for research and evaluation for the New York-based Institute of International Education , said during a session Tuesday on trends in global student mobility. “So actually the relative share, if you want to call it that, of the United States has dipped from 28 to 21% [from 2001 to 2008], though we host the largest number of international students worldwide, followed by the U.K., France, Germany, and Australia .” Among the countries clamoring to increase their share, China hopes to play host to 300,000 international students by 2020; its current enrollment, per the Institute on International Education’s Atlas of International Student Mobility, is 195,000. Japan, too, has a target of 300,000; it’s at 123,000. “We’ve also seen increased competition, from the U.S., from the U.K and from Canada,” Jen Nielson, manager of education for Australian Education International, said during the session. “Canada has told us that they want to overtake Australia as the third-most popular English-speaking destination. They’ve been really ramping up in certain markets. But also I think [we're facing competition] from more nontraditional competitors, like Singapore, for example, which has positioned itself in the Asia-Pacific region as a hub for attracting international students.” U.S. COMMUNITY COLLEGES: Strive to boost study abroad OPEN DOORS: More U.S. students studying abroad and vice versa Q&A: How to raise ‘global students’ International student inflows and outflows are complex. Students from different countries tend to go to different countries for different reasons. Australia’s largest source country for international students is China, and 40% of Chinese students in Australia are undergraduates, the most popular major being business. Australia’s second-largest source of international students is India, and about two-thirds of Indian students in Australia are in the vocational education sector; the most popular degree is in hospitality management. In the United States, by contrast, Indian students are concentrated at the graduate level, in engineering, computer science, management and business programs, and they are mainly clustered geographically in five states — California, Florida, Massachusetts , Texas and New York , said Rahul Choudaha, associate development of director and innovation for World Education Services, during a session on international student mobility. India sends more foreign students to the United States than any other country, and Choudaha doesn’t expect the numbers to drop any time soon. INTERNATIONAL RECRUITERS: Ethical debates remain as practice grows INSIDE HIGHER ED: EU business schools look for U.S. respect, market ON THE WEB: Entangling alliances between British recruiters, U.S. college Although India has rapidly been building up its own higher education system — enrollment in Indian engineering programs grew from 115,000 to 653,000 between 1997 and 2007, for example — the expansion, he said, has come at the expense of quality. Much of the growth has been among poor or average-quality institutions, which he called the “laggards” (as opposed to the “achievers” and the “aspirers”). (“Maybe,” he said, laughing, during a follow-up interview, “I should be more politically correct.” He cautioned, too, that he was speaking of the quality of the institutions and not of the students they attract.) The whole point is that, while the system is developing, there aren’t yet enough high-quality Indian institutions for high-quality students to attend. This being the case, Choudaha said, “I believe that the demand for international education will remain very high.” In Latin America, demand for international education is very low, as is supply: “Mobility to and from Latin America is unfortunately very low, and not only is it low, it’s uneven,” said Thomas Buntru, director of international programs for the Universidad de Monterrey and president of the Mexican Association for International Education. Just 0.17% of students in Latin American universities are of foreign nationality, and just 0.87% of Latin American students study abroad. Most exchange that does happen involves the United States (65%) and Europe (21%), followed by Asia (8%), Oceania (3%) and Africa (3%). Buntru cited a number of limiting factors, among them low academic reputations of Latin American universities (as measured, for instance, in international rankings), insufficient course offerings in foreign languages, especially English, and financial constraints, as most countries in the region have either developing or emerging economies. All that said, Buntro said he was cautiously optimistic about the potential for growth, in part because of the growing importance of Spanish as an international language. Back in the Expo Hall, countries and colleges promoted themselves, as did a wide range of for-profit companies that have developed to support study abroad and international student recruitment and services: credential evaluators, insurance companies (Cultural Insurance Services International: “You can’t imagine what kind of trouble your students can get into”), study abroad providers, testing companies, and recruitment agencies (the use of agents in recruiting in international students to the United States is on the rise). At the very back of the expo hall were the hometown institutions — Kansas State and Park Universities, the University of Missouri at Kansas City and the Study Missouri Consortium all have booths. Of the 671,616 foreign students studying in the United States in 2008-9, 11,285 came to Missouri, and 8,668 to Kansas.

Come fall, the ground beef used in school lunches will be as safe as ground beef sold to the nation’s fast food chains — a major improvement, critics say. The U.S. Agriculture Department announced Friday that it will require all ground beef purchased for the National School Lunch Program to adhere to new safety standards after July 1. The program supplies ground beef, chicken and other food for more than 31 million schoolchildren. The rules bring school lunches “right in line with contemporary standards,” says Dave Theno, a food safety consultant who developed a rigorous safety program for the Jack in the Box chain before retiring in 2008. “In fact, I’d make the case that the school lunch standards will now be above some of our major retail grocery chains. Not all, but some. They’ll be up there with the best.” LUNCH TROUBLE: See previous stories The department announced in February that it would raise standards for school lunches and has spelled those standards out in detail. The rules call for more stringent microbiological testing and say beef should be sampled every 15 minutes on production lines. Previously, ground beef bound for schools was sampled an average of eight times during an entire production day, and then those samples were combined and subjected to testing once a shift. The rules make suppliers with “a long-term poor safety record” ineligible to sell to the school lunch program without a complete analysis of why their products failed inspections, says Michael Jarvis, a spokesman for the USDA ‘s Agricultural Marketing Service, which purchases beef for the school lunch program. No currently eligible contractors would be ineligible under that requirement “if it were in effect,” he says. The standards “look very good,” says Carol Tucker-Foreman with the Consumer Federation of America. A former USDA administrator herself, she has long fought to raise the USDA’s meat safety requirements for school lunches. “The new standards announced today ensure our purchases are in line with major private-sector buyers of ground beef,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand , D-N.Y., who has pushed the USDA to raise its safety standards, said she was pleased with the announcement. “For too long, a McDonald ‘s hamburger has been safer for our kids than those served in some school cafeterias. I applaud the USDA for taking action today to protect millions of American schoolchildren,” she says. The standards come in the wake of a USA TODAY investigation in November and December that found failures in government programs meant to protect students from food-borne illnesses. The newspaper’s investigation showed that fast food companies such as McDonald’s and Jack in the Box had more rigorous programs for bacteria and pathogen testing than the USDA. The changes put the school lunch program back in the forefront of safety practices, a place it once held a decade ago. As the best companies in the industry continued to move forward, often in response to E. coli outbreaks at restaurants and the toll they took on sales, the school lunch program did not, USA TODAY found. The program will put pressure on the meat grinding companies supplying the school lunch program “to make absolutely certain that they have raw materials of the highest quality,” Theno says. “My guess is that most of the people that were supplying were already in compliance. But what this does is ensure that the products we’re supplying to our kids are as good as what’s available commercially.” The National Academy of Sciences , at the USDA’s request, is also reviewing AMS’ ground beef purchase requirements to provide recommendations on how the agency can best follow industry-recognized best practices. Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director of the non-profit Center for Science in the Public Interest, says it’s “good that USDA isn’t waiting to implement new standards until the NAS completes its review. These steps will push the meat industry to implement tough new testing for all products going into the school lunch program.” The announcement comes a week before AMS’ annual conference for contractors, meat suppliers and processors on changes and updates to its purchasing requirements, just before the yearly purchasing cycle begins. The meeting, to open Thursday in Kansas City, Mo., is “where people get into the nitty-gritty” on what USDA wants, says Les Johnson of Les Johnson Associates, a consulting firm that works with companies that sell to the AMS program. The new requirements don’t come as a surprise to the meat industry. “After the series of articles, a number of industry people I talked with expected the standards would be strengthened and changed,” Johnson says. “It will require additional inspectors, and they’ve got to pay USDA more to get it done. But, since the new rules apply to all suppliers, it doesn’t give anyone an advantage over the rest.” There may be some complaints that the new standards could make the school lunch program more expensive. Theno doesn’t buy it. “How can a guy offer a quarter-pound, 99-cent hamburger commercially if that’s the case?”