CIC Global Collaborations: Working Together to Prepare Tomorrow’s Global Citizens and Scholars

The CIC Senior International Officers (SIOs), who are responsible for providing executive leadership in the global arena for the CIC universities, are working together to lead their universities to include a comprehensive international perspective that flows throughout all aspects of the educational experience at CIC universities—including teaching, research and service.

After years of meeting together and sharing best practices, the SIOs agreed to deepen their collaborations and asked CIC staff to develop a proposal.  The proposal, approved by the SIOs this summer, will result in the CIC universities working together to: 

• Increase students’ access to international experiences—both here and abroad—which are key to students’ understanding of their role as global citizens. 
• Increase opportunities for faculty to expand their awareness through international travel, enhancing their ability to integrate a global perspective into coursework at home. 
• Establish and operate global research partnerships which match CIC researchers with their international colleagues, sparking innovation and discovery which today comes from many different places in the world. 
• Leverage both investments and ideas to provide leadership and save money, staff resources and time related to global initiatives.
• Raise awareness of the leading practices of the CIC SIOs in forwarding the internationalization of CIC campuses.

A recent CIC SIO executive brief on Benchmarks and Trends for International Collaborative Degree Programs at CIC Universities highlights that 10 of the 13 CIC universities sponsor a total of 62 collaborative degrees. Of those, 38% are offered with Chinese universities, 11% with Korean universities, and the remaining 50% with 30 various universities in 21 different countries. The top five programs are Business, Engineering, Agriculture, Technology, and Law.

These findings echo the recent Institute of International Education (IIE) report on Joint and Double Degree Programs in the Global Context. As Daniel Obst, deputy vice president for international partnerships at IEE and one of the report's authors, notes in a Chronicle of Higher Education article, "joint-degree programs "are much more complex to implement and hence are a lot less popular." In some instances, the report notes, local legislation even prevents the establishment of joint-degree programs."

In addition, the CIC, along with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,will be hosting the 5th Global University Summit in Chicago from April 29-May 1, 2012. Presidents of leading research universities from the U.S. and around the world will be meeting to discuss this year’s theme of Developing Talent to Drive Innovation in a Global Society. Held in parallel with the events of the G8 Summit taking place in Chicago in May 2012, the Summit's aim is to engage university leadership at the highest levels with the major global social challenges facing higher education in the 21st century.

Please visit the CIC Global Collaborations web page for more information on the executive brief, the CIC Open Doors Report, student opportunities, and the efforts of the CIC SIOs.