Stateside efforts to widen higher education’s global reach are fragmented and conflicting, says Philip Wainwright.

The drive towards internationalisation at US universities has a deeply personal history for me. I first came to the US in the 1960s as the dependent child of one the few international faculty members in Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. I returned to Emory in 1996 as a founding staff member of the Center for International Programs Abroad (CIPA). Globalisation is not just an academic trend for me. It’s been my life.

In the 1990s, when we founded CIPA, few students at Emory studied abroad, and most of the international students at Emory were in graduate and professional programmes. Leadership recognised that we weren’t going far enough and began increasing resources and support. By 1996, Emory’s undergraduate schools were committed to internationalising their student populations through study abroad. Now, in 2016, more than a third of our undergraduates study abroad.