New York High School Student Wins Summer in London
By Marie Holmes

Rachel Moran, a student at Pittsford Sutherland High School in Rochester, New York, has won first prize in InternationalEducationWeek.com’s inaugural essay contest. Rachel’s essay, “Sending Postcards Without Stamps,” was chosen from among numerous submissions from high school and college students across the country. In her winning essay, Rachel describes her art history classes as “imaginary field trips” and explains that international education need not require costly trips around the world. “With the right education,” she writes, “students will encounter far off lands from inside their schools.”

Rachel’s prize includes three weeks of summer study at Richmond—The American International University in London, including housing, meals, tuition and airfare, courtesy of the American Institute of Foreign Study (AIFS).

Rachel will soon join thousands of American students who study in the United Kingdom each year. Long the top destination, the U.K. hosted 29,289 American students during the 1999/00 academic year, more than double that of any other nation, according to the Open Doors 2001 report on study abroad. Other popular host countries include Spain, Italy, France, Mexico, Australia, Germany, Israel, Ireland, Costa Rica, China, Japan and Austria, almost all of which experienced an increase in U.S. enrollment over the past year. The number of international students who study in the U.S. also increased by over six percent, to 547,867. The majority of these students receive no U.S. funds to finance their studies, making higher education the country’s fifth largest service sector export.

New York is a national leader in hosting international students, second only to California. New York University boasts the largest foreign student enrollment for the fourth year in a row. Columbia University ranked third, after the University of Southern California. Leading places of origin for international students were China, India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Canada, Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey and Mexico.

This year’s Open Doors report, released November 13 during International Education Week, also included a recent online survey about study abroad in the aftermath of September 11^th. Ninety-seven percent of the 600 educators who responded to the survey reported that study abroad was regarded as more important or equally important on their campuses after September 11^th, and that few to none of the international students on their campuses had decided to return home early in response to concerns about security. The majority (91 percent) of respondents also reported that 90 percent or more of their U.S. students had made no changes in their plans to study abroad.

International Education Week, sponsored by the U.S. Departments of State and Education, was first established by the Clinton Administration in 2000. This year, StudyAbroad.com launched InternationalEducationWeek.com to promote the week’s events. The essay contest was held in celebration of the site’s launch.#

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