The number of U.S. students earning college credit abroad dipped in 2008-09, the first decline in the 22 years since the data have been tracked, a State Department-funded report out today shows. The dip is mostly due to the recession. The economic downturn also may have accelerated a trend in which students increasingly travel to less traditional destinations, says the report, based on a survey of about 3,000 colleges by the Institute of International Education , a New York-based non-profit organization. Europe still attracted the largest share of U.S. students — more than 140,000 — but enrollments dropped 4%. They rose in Africa (16%), Asia (2%) and South America (13%). That growth was fueled in part “by new and sometimes more affordable” programs in developing countries, the report says. “The economic situation around the world, not just the U.S., is clearly having an impact,” says Peggy Blumenthal, executive vice president of the institute. Although the 2008-09 figures are the latest available, there are signs that the most recent year has begun to see an uptick in U.S. students going abroad. For those who didn’t go abroad, money wasn’t the sole factor. Mexico ‘s H1N1 virus outbreak probably contributed to a 26.3% decline in the number of U.S. students studying there, the report says. Also, many colleges pulled programs there based on State Department advisories about drug-related violence along the border, Blumenthal says. Family finances and campus budgets were top concerns. “I heard stories about parents losing their jobs and students who would really like to go, but could not afford it,” says Howard Davison, a program coordinator for at Central Penn College in Summerdale, Pa., who canceled a 2008 student trip to Ireland. State Department Assistant Secretary Ann Stock said study abroad is an important part of making U.S. students more world-conscious. “In a globalized economy, this just makes sense for our young people and our country,” Stock said of student travel to more diverse locations. Among the highlights of the institute’s “Open Doors” report: •260,327 U.S. students earned credit for study abroad in 2008-09, the latest year for which comprehensive data are available. That’s more than double the number from a decade ago but down 0.8% from the previous year. • In a “snapshot” survey last month of 238 colleges, 55% reported an increase in the numbers of students going abroad last fall, a sign that the 2008-09 decline could be a short-term blip. •A similar slowdown occurred among foreign students enrolling in U.S. institutions last year. Enrollments increased 3%, to 690,923, and pumped about $20 billion into the U.S. economy, according to Commerce Department estimates. However, the growth was driven primarily by a 29.9% surge among Chinese students; more than half of countries that send large numbers of students to the USA showed decreases. Some, such as Davison, say they are hopeful that things are turning around. He took nine students abroad last year, and returns today from seven weeks in Croatia with 17 students. They “have had their horizons not only expanded, but exploded,” he says. “Students come back from this program with a new confidence.”

For many community colleges around the country this fall semester, the song remains the same. Yet again, enrollments are at an all-time high, and waiting lists for classes remain long, but the search continues for ways to accommodate the growing demand. In California , where public institutions have struggled mightily amid a well-documented budget crisis, the number of students being turned away from open-access institutions is swelling for a second straight year. Many of the state’s community colleges have had to cut sections, meaning that enrollment is down. Demand, however, is higher than ever. Take Los Rios Community College District, in greater Sacramento , for example. Classes at its four colleges started four weeks ago, but the institutions have a total of 40,000 students on various waiting lists for courses — or about one for every two students actually enrolled in a course. ON THE WEB: Defining the enrollment boom MORE FROM INSIDE HIGHER ED: Access to what? “We had to cut course offerings by about 6% this fall (which equals about 850 class sections) and so our enrollment is down by nearly 5,000 students from last year,” wrote Susie Williams, associate vice chancellor for communications and research at Los Rios, via e-mail. “We have 85,593 students enrolled this year compared to 90,563 who were enrolled at the same time last year. Given that for a number of years we have seen annual growth between 5% [and] 6%, we should have increased enrollment by 5,000 to 6,000 students this fall.” Maximizing class space One state eastward, state budget cuts have made their mark at the College of Southern Nevada, located in metropolitan Las Vegas, but they have not forced the institution to turn away students by the thousands like some in California. Instead, sacrifices are being made in other areas to accommodate for the 5% or so growth in the college’s enrollment. “Nevada, like much of the country, is experiencing a very serious budget crisis (shortfall could be $3 million in the next biennium — 50% of the state budget), thus adding large numbers of new faculty positions to add a plethora of new class sections is simply not possible,” wrote Darren Divine, vice president of academic affairs at Southern Nevada, in an e-mail. “Having said that, we are trying to keep our entire full-time faculty lines already in the budget staffed, and are relying on part-time employees as much as ever to try and squeeze every single class section we can into the schedule.” Divine explained that the college is offering some “specialized courses with lower demands” on a less frequent basis so faculty members are freed up to teach “higher-demand classes.” In keeping with this move, he noted that the college is seeing increased interest in general education classes that are “designed to meet core degree requirements and transfer efforts” in addition to entry-level courses in “more applied” disciplines. Though Southern Nevada does not maintain waiting lists per se — it does not have registration software capable of handling them — it does keep track of the number of “attempted enrollments” past the capacity point of its classes. By this measure, college officials note that their efforts to maximize classroom space are making some progress. Take biology 187, a key “gateway course” for many science majors at the college. Last fall, the course’s 22 sections had 925 students. Another 1,691 tried to enroll but did not get a spot. This fall, the course has 27 sections and a capacity of 1,082 students. The number of students who tried to enroll but did not garner a spot declined to 1,541 — still, of course, more than the total who actually got into the course. There were similar declines in attempted enrollments in some of the college’s other gateway courses, including commerce, sociology, and psychology 101. Some of the new sections offered at Southern Nevada this semester, however, meet at some very nontraditional hours. Last year, inspired by a string of institutions that had done the same, the college introduced late-night classes between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. Now, enrollment in these sections is up and the college is offering 20 different courses at these unconventional times. Devine said that these late-night offerings are here to stay for the foreseeable future, as at least one way to keep students from being turned away from the college. Temporary fixes Growing enrollment — in many cases continuing year after year — is testing many community colleges nationally. At Central New Mexico Community College, in Albuquerque, enrollment has grown by more than 25% in the past three years. Currently, at 26,689, enrollment is at an all-time high. Interestingly, though, noted Phillip Bustos, the college’s vice president for student services, students are taking more credit hours than they did in the past, by nearly a class or two per semester. This accounts, he added, for some of the waiting lists in the college’s core courses, such as introductory English and math. Sections of these courses during what Bustos calls the “bottleneck times” of 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 to 7 p.m. usually have about 50 students still waiting at the start of the semester. To accommodate those who cannot get into a section of a course essential for graduation, transfer, or continuance to a higher-level course, Bustos said, the college is getting some faculty and students to work together for something akin to an “independent study” — meaning faculty do additional one-on-one work with a few students. Also, though the college has not done so yet, Bustos said, it may alter its traditional practice of keeping classes to less than 30 or so students before the beginning of spring registration. Meanwhile, at Calhoun Community College, the largest two-year institution in Alabama, students are being advised differently than in the past if they are unable to get into the class of their choice. Recently, the college topped the 12,000-student mark for the first time in its history — up about 6% from last fall. Alicia Taylor, the college’ vice president for instruction and student success, noted that the college is increasingly granting more students the ability to substitute equivalent courses within programs of study for one another if they are a course or two short of graduation or transfer. This offer is never made for “core” or “general education” courses; it is most often used for “prescribed electives” within disciplines. “Let’s say a computer science student missed taking a Java course, we would let them take a C programming or advanced Visual Basic instead,” Taylor said. “These equivalent courses would prepare them for the market, albeit with a slightly different slant. We’ll allow this mixing and matching as long as it’s not impacting students in the overall training.” At Tulsa Community College, in Oklahoma, the answer to meeting increased demand is more adjuncts. This fall, the college had a 35% increase in the number of first-time students. The college’s overall enrollment, now 20,000, is at an all-time high. But, perhaps more telling of today’s economy, the enrollment for its Tulsa Achieves program — which waives tuition for many local residents — is also serving an all-time high of 1,637 students, up 187 students from last year. “So far, we have been able to keep up with the growth,” said Lauren Brookey, college spokeswoman. “Our state budget got cuts last year, the year before and our employees haven’t had raises in two years. But we haven’t had to lay off employees.” The college is, however, relying on more part-time faculty, Brookey noted. The college has seven more full-time faculty members than last year, pushing their number up to 300; meanwhile, it has 48 more adjunct faculty members, for a total of 1,185.

SEATTLE (AP) — The U.S. Education Department on Wednesday announced 49 finalists for a share of the $650 million it plans to give away to encourage innovation. The finalists were chosen from nearly 1,700 applications to the Investment in Innovation program. They include one of the country’s most successful charter school organizations, and a nonprofit group that trains top college students to teach in poor communities. RACE TO THE TOP: 18 states, D.C. named grant finalists OBAMA: Defends education policies Finalists have until Sept. 8 to find a 20% private match to secure the federal grant. A group of private foundations has set up a website to help the grantees find matching dollars. Grants of up to $50 million are being awarded for scaling up education programs with a chosen track record; grants of up to $30 million for growing a program with emerging evidence of success; and up to $5 million for development of promising ideas. The applications came from school districts and nonprofit organizations, as well as colleges and universities, across the country. Finalists were chosen by independent peer review panels. They include a charter school group called the KIPP Foundation, to scale up its principal training program; and Teach for America , in partnership with school districts around the country, to increase the number of new teachers it recruits and trains. In a news conference Wednesday, the head of the innovation program said he was thrilled with the number, quality and variety of the applications. “I couldn’t have asked for a better diversity of solutions to a range of problems that will benefit the field broadly,” said Jim Shelton, assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement. The 49 finalists designed their projects to take place in more than 45 states and Washington, D.C., affecting 250 communities. Shelton said the department would do whatever it could to find money from other sources to pay for the projects that won’t get federal dollars this year, including organizing a summit for November where nonfinalists could take their ideas directly to nonprofits and others with dollars to invest. The department has requested another $500 million for the program in fiscal 2011, and it is expected to be part of the reauthorization plan for the federal No Child Left Behind law. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The alarming spike in demand for mental health services on college campuses that began about a decade ago appears to be leveling off, a just-released survey of counseling center directors suggests. The findings of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors’ 2008-9 poll of hundreds of member institutions point to a new stasis, where the number of students arriving on campuses in need of counseling or psychotropic medications is remaining constant from year to year, though still likely to keep counseling centers strained. STUDY: Students more stressed now than during Depression SUICIDE SCHOOL? Cornell sees 6 deaths in 6 months “In the last few years, I think we’ve seen stabilization,” said Victor M. Barr, the survey’s lead author and a director of counseling and psychological services at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. “That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of students to see, just that it doesn’t seem like it’s changing as rapidly as a few years ago.” The survey was sent to members at 752 institutions in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. In all, 363 responded. Across all respondents, 10.2% of students sought counseling during the 2008-9 academic year, about the same as in the directors group’s two previous surveys. At institutions with fewer than 1,500 students, an average of 18.3% of students sought counseling. At institutions with enrollments of more than 35,000, it was 7.2%. (Another study, the National Survey of Counseling Center Directors, found that 10.4% of students at four-year institutions sought help in 2008-9.) Perhaps related to the stable proportion of students seeking counseling was a decline in the perception by counseling center directors that mental health problems were on the rise at their institutions. In this year’s survey, 94% of respondents said “the number of students with severe psychological problems is [a] growing concern on their campuses.” In the 2007-8 survey, it was 96%. In 2006-7, it was 97%. ON THE WEB: College suicides a call to action INSIDE HIGHER ED: What spurs violence like Virginia Tech, Alabama? Despite the onslaught of national and local economic problems during the survey year, fewer counseling jobs were cut than were added. Respondents reported a total of 82 new professional clinical positions created, while 34 were lost. “We saw these small gains in staffing, but I’m not sure the same thing will happen in our next survey because of economic conditions,” Barr said. Counseling services aren’t a popular place to cut budgets, he added, but they’re not likely to be the first place where institutions direct funds, either. Colleges aren’t out of the woods yet. Seventy-three percent of respondents said there had been an increase in the last year in the number of students already on psychotropic medications who were seeking counseling services, and 71% said they thought the number of students with severe psychological problems had risen during the survey year. The most common conditions seen in students were depression (seen in 37.5% of students visiting a counseling center), anxiety (36.8 percent) and relationship issues (35.9 percent). Nearly a quarter of patients seen in counseling centers were taking psychotropic medications.