Achieving a Global Competency
There is widespread agreement in American colleges and universities about the need to place undergraduate education in a global context, so that students have the intellectual resources and the life experience to move imaginatively across cultures and compete effectively in a global marketplace. This view is reflected prominently in the BU Strategic Plan (www.bu.edu/president/strategic-plan) and it was one of the central topics of the One BU Task Force. In addition, global learning is threaded throughout the essential learning outcomes endorsed in the AAC&U’s “Liberal Education and America’s Promise” (LEAP) initiative. At the concrete level, almost 75 percent of business leaders surveyed feel that colleges must pay greater attention to global issues, with almost half of them expressing disappointment that college graduates do not possess the global knowledge necessary for advancement.(16) The challenge for the Committee was to distill this commitment to a global perspective into a series of recommendations to deepen, enrich, and integrate the global dimension of undergraduate education throughout the University.
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16. Kevin Hovland, “Global Learning: What is it? Who is Responsible for it? Peer Review (“Study Abroad and Global Learning”) 11/4 (2009), 4.