Dec 11, 2007 8:00 AM

UCLA staff share insights with colleagues in Japan

A seven-year-old university that’s unique in Japan because 40% of its 5,500 students come from other countries recently got help from UCLA in the hope of improving its student services.

Five UCLA administrators traveled last month to the city of Beppu on the southern island of Kyushu to meet with counterparts at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University (APU) for a rare international exchange.

“We all came back with a more complete understanding of and appreciation for where our own international students and those with families from other countries are coming from,” said Robert Ericksen, director of the Dashew Center for International Students and Scholars and organizer of the visit.

Also sharing their expertise were Kathy Sims, director of the UCLA Career Center; Berky Nelson, director of the Center for Student Programming; and Jack Gibbons, associate director, and Rob Kadota, assistant director, both of the Office of Residential Life.

Created in 2000, APU “could be the shape of things to come in Japan,” according to a report in the New York Times, which noted that universities there are competing for students after years of falling birthrates have left the country with a smaller college-age population. While most Japanese universities serve only local students and offer no campus housing, APU houses more than 1,000 students on campus in the largest residential program in Japan. Its classes are taught in English and Japanese.

The university’s founders based student services on a North American model — but the founders are now gone, and current staff members are working with an operating model they didn’t establish. They have nothing to compare it to, Gibbons said. So, “they were very curious to know what the functions and responsibilities of our housing staff were.”

There were other cultural differences. Without residence hall meal plans, APU students cook their meals in congenial community kitchens. At UCLA, students work alongside staff in many varied roles within student services, but such relationships don’t exist at Japanese universities, which are more hierarchical, Ericksen explained. “But the APU staff want to be more engaged with students. That shows you how international education is being globalized.”

For the staff at UCLA, which is eighth in the latest national ranking for the number of international students it hosted in 2006-07, the opportunity to see how student services are being adapted to cultural norms was valuable.

“Education is becoming more internationalized as more and more students from around the world attend universities in other countries,” said Gibbons, who serves on an internationalization task force within his professional association. In fact, after leaving Japan, he went on to visit five universities in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China, in preparation for an international conference in 2009 in Asia. “We’re all learning from each other,” he said.

APU officials agreed. “On the whole, it proved to be a great opportunity to enhance the expertise of APU operations,” they said in a news report posted online.

APU educators are currently discussing the possibility of hosting UCLA students on their campus through Summer Sessions.

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