UW–Madison’s Global Higher Education (GHE) Master’s Degree Program is celebrating its 10th anniversary during the current academic year.
The program, housed in the School of Education’s highly ranked Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, focuses on training future generations of professionals and scholars and is known for its family-like, collaborative learning community that utilizes a cohort model. Students follow the course sequence together, which provides a daily platform for exchanging ideas, sharing experiences, and sharing expertise regarding current and critical issues in international higher education.
As they move through the program together, students have opportunities to expand their professional networks, build lifelong friendships, and provide support to each other among cohort fellows. Students who have completed the program describe the cohort experience as one of the most valuable aspects of the GHE program, which features a good mix of students who grew up in the United States learning alongside students who are coming to Madison from abroad.
GHE also centers its efforts on connecting education with career development, including embedded internships, and on individualized mentoring and career coaching from Weijia Li, the GHE program director.
To further help people understand the Global Higher Education Master’s Degree Program, the School of Education’s communications team caught up with some alumni of the program.
Following is one such Q&A conducted with Colleen Larsen, who graduated from the program in 2017. Larsen explained how after graduating, Li and some other faculty members encouraged her to consider a doctoral journey because she enjoyed research. Larsen earned her PhD in May 2022.
What are you doing now? I work in the Wisconsin Technical College System office. My GHE experience really shaped what I wanted to study, which was the experiences of refugee students at two-year colleges in Wisconsin. My job at the WTCS is to advocate for underrepresented or minoritized student populations and communities to have access and success in postsecondary education. One example of this is that I’m a liaison to the Bureau of Refugee Programs where I try to help improve educational pipelines for refugee populations that come to Wisconsin.
Have you always been interested in working with refugees in Wisconsin? I was an ELL (English language learner) teacher before I went into the program. I had worked in Wisconsin and also abroad in South Korea and Turkey. As a teacher I saw the tremendous benefit that education could bring to people with refugee or immigrant status.
Through teaching students and getting involved in their communities, I realized that having access to a clear pathway from an ELL class to a professional program that will lead to gainful employment is really important.
How did you end up joining the GHE program? I had done my undergrad at UW–Madison, in international relations, and then I went abroad for five years.
I started to see some systemic problems in higher education and I didn’t feel like I had the power, understanding, and scope to be able to do much about those barriers and the inequities they perpetuate. The GHE program to me seemed like a good fit — where I could learn more about what’s going on behind the structures of global postsecondary ed, and what I can do to make meaningful changes.
Weijia Li often likes to talk about building a family atmosphere, both while you’re in your cohort going through the school but also trying to stay in touch moving forward. Is that something that resonates with you? Absolutely. I had never really imagined myself as a graduate student; that didn’t feel like my path.
There’s kind of this feeling of like, do I belong here? Which I think a lot of people feel — I’m the first person in my family to have any type of graduate degree. I didn’t know what to expect, so having a cohort where I got to know other students really well through our courses together and social gatherings put on by the program, made me immediately feel like I had a community. And that was really important, I think, to feeling comfortable enough to be authentically me in the grad program and explore the things that I wanted to explore.
We would hear other students say, “Wow, I really wish we had a cohort. You GHE folks are so connected.” And we all definitely realized, “Whoa, this is not a common experience.” It was really helpful to me.
What aspects of the program did you most enjoy or get the most out of? Weijia was wonderful about bringing people from the field into our classes. That provided an amazing bridge because we not only had this theory we were learning about in class, but there were also so many practical elements that we got hands-on experience with. We would go to the international student fair on campus and have assignments that were related to engaging people there. We had people working in the jobs many of us wanted come into our class to speak with us and answer our questions.
We also had to do a big project at the end of our first year, kind of a deep dive on an education system in a country that was not the United States. I chose Iran, which I have personal connections to, but I really did not know much about their education system. It was really enlightening to explore the factors that influence education in different countries, and in the U.S. of course — history, geo-politics, culture, language. This helped us understand what folks who are coming from different countries are used to in education and what policies are governing those norms, and then how different it might be to come to the U.S. It was very helpful to take that deep dive and then to hear from all of my colleagues and all the countries that they had chosen, so that we could come together on a more global understanding of post-secondary education in general, and what we could do to make newcomers to the United States who are pursuing education here more included and have equitable experiences.
Do you feel that the program prepared you for what you wanted to do next? Oh, absolutely. I think it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Even though I never would have imagined myself doing the graduate program, I can’t imagine where I would be now without it. The understanding and comfort I have around the topic of postsecondary education at a global level and the experiences of international students, refugees, and immigrants is really integral to the work I’m doing now in educational equity.