From the Back Cover
In a world becoming every year more interdependent, the ultimate educational value to students of pursuing at least some portion of their undergraduate years living and learning in another country is no longer really debatable. Not only is the global competence and alertness gained by such an experience crucial to American national and international interests, but students who leave college without having had a significant globalizing experience as part of their undergraduate education will increasingly be thought of as not fully prepared for the world they will enter.
This is the first full-length book specifically geared to what parents want and need to know about study abroad. It assumes that while students themselves, working in conjunction with campus advisers, bear the primary responsibility for deciding whether or not to study abroad and for choosing the program which best matches their academic needs, learning styles, and personal interests, informed parental involvement and support are essential before, during, and after the overseas sojourn.
About the Author
Since 1981, William W. Hoffa has been a full-time international educator based in Amherst, Massachusetts. Well known in the field of international education for his years as a leader within NAFSA: Association of International Educators, he has held positions with the Council on International Educational Exchange and Scandinavian Seminar, Inc., and is the author or editor of many essays, interviews, and reports on education abroad, including "The Student Guide to Study Abroad," for studyabroad.com and NAFSA's Guide to Education Abroad for Advisers and Administrators (1997, coedited with John Pearson).
Hoffa holds academic degrees from Michigan, Harvard, and Wisconsin. He has been a professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University and Hamilton College, as well as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland (1974-75) and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the University of New Mexico (1978-79). He now teaches in the Master's in International and Intercultural Management program at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont.
He is the father of two children: a daughter who studied abroad and a son who did not.
