OSA Should Rethink Options
By Joshua Tremblay
Opinions Editor

Imagine, just as your sophomore slump is really bringing you down, you get a letter in your mailbox. This is not the average ad for a campus event you would never go to. This is an invitation to come and "check out" the Office of Study Abroad's offerings.

This is incredibly exciting, it's your first chance to go abroad and experience the variety of cultures that exist worldwide. Among the offered programs, support for your major is minimal-but you hear that an upperclassman before you solved the same problem by going on a better-suited (albeit not Pomona-sponsored) program. Assuming that Pomona College's elders, wisepersons, and powers-that-be are fair enough, there is no reason you couldn't use the same program to suit your needs. After all, "The College believes that the opportunity for interested and qualified students to study for one semester in a foreign country may benefit the student's academic program and enrich the life of the College community." So saith the OSA website.

Unfortunately it's not that simple. There is, instead, a rigid framework for going abroad, and it tends to encourage force-feeding students programs that may not suit their needs, or may not even help their major. Indeed, a maximum of nine non-Pomona program petitions are approved each year. The applicant pool is small, though, thanks mainly to the OSA's constant wearing down of students' desires to the path of least resistance: tried-and-true Pomona programs.

It's admirable that the OSA makes a reasonable attempt to match students' desires and needs to one of their programs. Given the incredibly diverse nature of Pomona's self-determined students, however, it is unreasonable to think that a student who wants to go to India to study native Indian texts would have his or her needs better served at Oxford.

The world is a dramatically changing place, and the relative importance of cultures and countries has shifted significantly since study abroad became popular. Countries in Africa and Asia are gaining more cultural recognition. Out of the 40 or so study abroad programs Pomona offers, 21 are in Europe. Only six, including the indefinitely suspended Nepal program, are in Asia. According to the Population Resource Bureau, of 6.1 billion world inhabitants in 2000, 732 million reside in Europe, while Asia is home to a whopping 3.71 billion people. A majority of Pomona's programs abroad are concentrated not only in a small geographic region, but among a relatively small population. The disparity in number of programs is similar between Europe and culturally diverse Africa, whose population was near-identical to Europe's three years ago and is rapidly increasing. There are, notably, only three programs in Africa, none of which are in the interior or even Egypt.

This empirical data serves as a guideline to examine the occidental slant of the OSA's program choices. While Europe's creature comforts and thoroughly developed education systems are alluring, there has been a push in academia in the last decade or so to move away from consistently Eurocentric cultural discourse. However, most of the program choices, even those in non-European countries, tend to revolve around traditional metanarratives of Western intellectualism. To give an example: the only programs offered in China, the world's most populous country, are located in one of the most Westernized cities in Asia: Beijing. Also, these programs tend to focus solely on language development-rather than cultural or historical exploration.

Pomona's Office of Study Abroad seems to shy away from programs that are culturally or experientially diverse or different from college life in the United States. If the philosophy of the OSA is that "cultural awareness [is] fostered through foreign study," why do most study abroad programs result in Pomona students drinking with other Americans in some European café? There are many well-respected institutions, some of which Pomona uses for certain programs, that offer established, credible programs in countries for which Pomona currently offers no option. Even in countries with a Pomona presence, we could easily diversify our programs beyond the capital or largest city of the country. There is more to Mexico, for example, than Mexico City.

It is understandable that Pomona desires to maintain its formidable academic reputation, but the Study Abroad administration should follow the lead its counterparts elsewhere: allow Pomona students to choose freely what they believe will suit them, and then trust them to choose a reputable program. The most pressing condition for a successful non-Pomona program petition is "that no Pomona Programs meet [the student's] academic needs." When a valid academic concern, like a certain concentration in a major, is brought to the Office of Study Abroad, students are often steered toward an approved program already certified by Pomona. This condition is worsened by the fact that some of the programs in areas not heavily represented by the Office concentrate on language skills only. Taking this problem to the next level is that, of any number of applicants, only nine students will pass the first part of the non-Pomona petition process successfully. These students might then fail the equally extensive Pomona application.

The opportunity to study in another country is vital to the Pomona College community and the world, as well. Our concerns are likely to be exasperated by the announced changes in the Study Abroad program, including a reduction of the Office's capable staff and in the number of programs. This will put additional pressure on an administration that, despite noted shortcomings, does successfully send hundreds of students abroad each year, each of them returning with a relished experience, no matter what or where it may have been.

Putting even more pressure on the Office is pressure from elsewhere in the college to fulfill its other, less glamorous duty: easing Pomona's increasingly tense housing crunch. If more students are unhappy with the process of getting abroad, fewer are likely to go, and more will return feeling unfulfilled. It would be to our detriment to prevent students from gaining the experience and knowledge, and the resulting contributions they bring back to Pomona, of studying abroad.