Editor’s note: For clarification, students will still be able to study abroad in non-U.S. territories. This will also not affect international students who attend Emporia State. 

The Office of International Education plans to end the National Student Exchange program following this spring semester. The NSE is an organization that works with universities to send students around the country and surrounding countries. This is the only program currently like this at ESU, according to their website.

“The real reason why we want to do this is because the greatest interest at Emporia State is for students to go abroad,” said Mark Daly, dean of international education. “That’s growing, and we really want to support that and right now the NSE is just one of the extra things that doesn’t quite fit with our mission.”

The mission of the Office of International Education is to further education oversees and has recently started furthering their teaching overseas as well, according to their website.

“We will have faculty that go into other countries to teach,” said Gwen Larson, assistant director of marketing and media relations. “We’ve had music faculty go to China (and)…go to Paraguay and I know we have teacher education programs with both Paraguay and Finland where our students can go over there and do some student teaching.”

This change was first listed in Hornet Announcements sent out Oct. 15. The change comes due to limits on financial and personnel resources, according to Daly. Because of this, they decided to cut the NSE and refocus on studying abroad.

“I didn’t see the draft (of the Hornet Announcement),” Daly said. “It probably could have included more context so people who don’t know what the NSE is, could’ve understood it and maybe not thought it was something that it wasn’t.”

The NSE offers over 150 universities across the U.S., Canada, Gaum, Puerto Rico and the U.S Virgin Islands, according to NSE.org. “Students have always been able to (travel to other universities),” Daly said. “Say they’re an art student and there’s an art institute in Chicago that had the courses of all courses and they wanted to go do that for a semester. There’s not a real barrier that would prevent them from doing that.”

With NSE gone, all of the exchange programs at ESU will only be for students to study abroad. ESU has a well-developed international exchange program that involves many students from our university and from other countries.

However, in the past five or six years there have been only a dozen students or less that participate in the NSE, according to Larson.

Chie Austin, international student mobility and study abroad coordinator, declined to be interviewed.