Do international scholarship programs foster higher civic engagement? A case study of Edmund Muskie Fellowship Program in post-Soviet Georgia

• In Event: Internationalization and student mobility in higher education

Proposal

Introduction
Edmund S. Muskie Fellowship program has nearly 5, 000 alumni, 75 % of which have served at the leadership positions in Eurasian countries (The Edmund S. Muskie Graduate Fellowship Program, 2017). For example, the President of Georgia, the president of the Constitutional Court of Georgia and the Minister of Environmental Protection are all Muskie program alumni. Many developing countries have at least one international scholarship program which fund graduate-level studies in a foreign country (Perna et al, 2014). Do Muskie program alumni illustrate different civic engagement behavior compared to their peers? This is the questions this study attempts to answer.
Edmund S. Muskie Scholarship Program lasted for twenty years, from 1992 to 2012 in fifteen post-Soviet countries, including Georgia. So far, there are two qualitative empirical studies addressing the program in Georgia. One study evaluates Muskie Program alumni’s self-perception of “giving back” to their home countries (Cambpell, 2016), and the second study inquires how studying and living abroad has changed Muskie and UGRAD Programs female alumni’s personalities, beliefs, perceptions and careers (Bitsadze, 2014). However, nothing was investigated about actions related to civic engagement. This study attempts to fill this gap by conducting a quantitative research inquiring about a relationship between participation in the program and civic engagement behavior of Georgian citizens.

Theoretical Framework
The interest of this paper is to study the macro-level impact of an international scholarship program through examining participants of the Muskie program alumni, since they are individual agents, whose human, social and cultural capitals influenced not only their personal lives but also the lives of others. Their individual and collective achievements are viewed as a return to higher education in terms of private and public benefits. When it comes to understanding and measuring education outcomes, the most frequently used conceptual frameworks are those of human, social and cultural capitals, endogenous and capability development theories and institutional growth. This paper aims to understand the relationship between the foreign higher education and civic engagement behaviors of participants at home. This is a macro level social impact analysis, which takes place in a local context. Considering the application constraints of each theoretical framework mentioned above, a social capital theory will be employed in this inquiry.
Social capital implies a wide range of concepts including “encompassing the norms and networks facilitating collective action for mutual benefits” (Woolcock, 1998, p. 155). Within the context of educational research, social capital focuses on individual and collective outcomes. The focus on collective outcomes derived from Coleman’s and Putnam’s tradition focusing on the features of the communities (Coleman, 1988; Putnam, 1995). Collective or communal features of social capital refer to civic activity, participation in grassroots movements, local gatherings,..” and initiation of social actions for the public good in local communities” (Guðmundsson & Mikiewicz, 2012, p. 68).


Research Question
Theis research investigates how the civic engagement behavior of Georgians, who studied abroad at the graduate level differs from their peers. The research question of the study is: is there a difference in civic engagement behavior between alumni of Muskie program and Georgians who earned their degrees in Georgia?


Methods
Civic engagement as a concept is adapted from the social capital measurement tools developed by the OECD statistics department (Scrivens & Smith, 2013. p.19). Civic engagement lies in the heart of the social capital and includes the following characteristics: volunteering, political engagement, community engagement and other types of civic-minded activities, such as peaceful march for women’s rights or decriminalization of specific drugs. These four categories were used as variables to measure each person’s level of civic engagement.

Data Collection
The data was collected through an online survey in Spring 2017. The participants of the study are on one hand Georgian Muskie alumni from different cohorts, gender, fields of study and regions and on the other hand, Georgian citizens with master’s degrees from Georgian universities. The Muskie alumni were recruited through EPAG (U.S. Government Exchange Program Alumni Association of Georgia) Facebook page and EPAG listserv. Non-Muskie participants were recruited through the Facebook page as well. The sampling of non-Muskie participants in Georgia was purposeful. The purpose in mind was to target Facebook friends, who had access to larger groups of Georgians, who have master’s degrees. To minimize the bias on civic engagement behavior, friends were asked to disseminate the questionnaire among people who were not friends with the researcher on Facebook.


Analysis
To understand whether the Muskie and non-Muskie participants in Georgia illustrate different civic engagement behavior the Mann-Whitney U test was used. This test is used to compare differences between two independent groups when the dependent variable is ordinal. Here an independent variable is participation in the Muskie program which is a dichotomous variable and the dependent variable is civic engagement, which consists of four elements: volunteering, community engagement, political engagement, and civic minded activities.


Conclusions
According to Borgonovi and Miyamoto (2010), an American education is “particularly active in promoting democratic values and participation” (pg. 20). This study aims to provide evidence whether American education influences international students from Georgia in terms of civic participation. The evidence can be interpreted as a macro level outcome of the Muskie program in post-Soviet Georgia.

Author

• Nino Dzotsenidze, Lehigh University