by Josh Cooley
Beginning next year, students applying to study off-campus during the 2005-2006 academic year will have to select first and second-choice programs in different semesters, both fall and spring.
Under the current policy, students choose a single program for a given semester and the Off-Campus Study Board ensures that the college has an appropriate balance of students going abroad during both the spring and fall semesters. But during the past four years, this system has forced several students desiring to study abroad in the spring to switch to a fall program. Since students weren’t required to have a fall back-up program in mind in case they weren’t approved for spring, some students who were asked to switch to the fall semester scrambled to change their four year plan while trying to find a new program of off-campus study and secure housing.
“What [the Off-Campus Study Board is] doing now is formalizing what’s already been occurring,” said Richard Bright, director of Off-Campus Study.
“For most of the history of the college, the numbers have fallen into place,” he said, explaining why having students choose a semester of preference was not necessary in previous years. According to Bright, the imbalance in the numbers has been part of a nationwide trend, which has seen students wanting to study off-campus in the spring rather than in the fall.
Bright explained that the need for a balance stems from Grinnell’s desire to capitalize on its resources. Housing, class sizes, class schedules and dining services are all are affected by the number of students studying off-campus. “You’re looking at what is in effect a large population movement,” he said, emphasizing the magnitude of the changes involved in determining how many students study off-campus.
Bright wishes to assure the student body that the new policy is not an effort to curtail students from studying abroad. Forty-seven more students studied abroad last year than did this year, but Bright says that this year’s numbers are an anomaly and that usually over 200 students per year are given permission to study abroad.
“I don’t know of any other college where there is no cap on the total number of students who can study off campus and which also guarantees that financial aid will roll over,” said Bright.
Bright presented the change to over half of the first-year class two weeks ago in a meeting for first-years preparing to study off-campus study during their junior year.
“My understanding is that they’ve already been arbitrarily shifting people from one semester to the other,” said Christian Conkle ‘07, who attended the meeting. “It seems better than what they’ve done in the past.”
Bright agreed that the new policy will be an improvement over the current one but emphasized that the Off-Campus Study Board does not randomly select juniors to switch to the fall program. “Shifting students from one semester to another … has always been carefully based on both academic need and merit,” he said. “The college would never require a student to move semesters if there were seriously negative academic consequences.”
According to Helen Scott, associate dean of the college, no changes are currently planned for the Grinnell-in-London program or for the Grinnell-in Washington programs. Next spring, the committee will evaluate the success of having limited Grinnell-in-London to the fall semester for the 2004-2005 academic year. Then they will decide whether or not Grinnell-in-London will occur during both the fall and spring semesters of the 2005-2006 academic year.
Within two weeks, the Off-Campus Study Board will have finalized all of these changes.
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