Soft power symbiosis: The collaborative public diplomacy roles of EducationUSA and higher education institutions

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday IV)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Mapping international student experiences

Proposal

EducationUSA and higher education institutions (HEIs) engage in a symbiotic relationship in which EducationUSA supports HEIs through advising, recruiting, and funding international students, while HEIs facilitate the academic and sociocultural learning opportunities that constitute the public diplomacy of international exchange.

The exercise of soft power is seen as a divergence from the normalized use of military action and coercion to force other nations to meet one’s will. Soft power applications that familiarize external entities with the culture of the country provide opportunities to build connections that emphasize desirable aspects of a nation’s culture. Public diplomacy is a form of soft power, and occurs through interactions that fall outside the scope of traditional diplomatic relations. International education, which facilitates opportunities for these types of relationships, is an especially salient component of U.S. public diplomacy.

A program of the Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), EducationUSA promotes U.S. higher education globally. EducationUSA does this work through a system of global advising centers that support international students as they pursue higher education in the United States. This system has more than 400 advising centers in more than 170 countries; these centers are often located in various Department of State facilities around the globe.

International educational exchange is an important form of public diplomacy, for example as students and scholars not only the obtain academic credentials but also build ties to both the people and the culture of the host country. The “affective” and “normative” learning about the host country that takes place in the classrooms, in the residences, and in the institutional spaces of the HEIs can constitute the performance of public diplomacy.

This paper considers the significant political science literature on power and public diplomacy as well as scholarship on the public diplomacy roles of educational exchange. From this, I show that an important missing link between these literatures is the implied, but heretofore unstated, symbiotic collaboration between entities such as EducationUSA and HEIs. That is, public diplomacy is happening when students recruited through EducationUSA attend HEIs and through institutional programming and education services build connections and learn about life and culture in the United States. These HEIs are benefited by the extensive, global reach of EducationUSA’s recruitment centers, which are especially advantageous in a competitive market for international students.

Building the connections between these bodies of literature is an important step towards developing a better understanding of the efficacy of the public diplomacy roles played by HEIs, as well as the recruitment value of EducationUSA’s services to HEIs. Additionally, this research is a valuable starting point for further examination of the ways in which national government initiatives in the U.S. and other countries similarly rely on HEIs to meet public diplomacy goals.

Author

• Max Crumley-Effinger, Loyola University Chicago