Seniors graduating this May will have the chance to spend a fifth year in school, traversing Columbia’s network of seven global centers and doing research projects.
Up to 10 students could be accepted to the new Fifth-Year Fellows program, which will emphasize the liberal arts over career specialization. The price tag for the program will be roughly $40,000, although admission is need-blind and there will be financial aid.
Between October and March, participating students will spend time at several of Columbia’s global centers—located in Nairobi, Beijing, Paris, Istanbul, Santiago, Amman, and Mumbai—depending on their research interests. The program, which is open to students in Columbia College, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the School of General Studies, will be bookended by on-campus seminars in September, April, and May.
Vice President for Global Centers Ken Prewitt, who worked on the program with history professor Charles Armstrong, anthropology professor Rosalind Morris, and English professor Gayatri Spivak, said the program is part of the University’s effort to respond to globalization by internationalizing its educational program.
“The global centers themselves are a platform to help facilitate, in effect, a new educational philosophy for the conditions of the 21st century,” Prewitt said.
According to Morris, part of that international philosophy is providing a strong liberal arts education, rather than being too concerned with career competitiveness. Fifth-year fellows will receive a certificate at the end of the program, not a degree.
“We do not think of it as mere job training, and we do not think of education as that which is limited to market value,” Morris said in an email. “For those who are only interested in enhancing their capital for the market, this is probably not a good program.”
Morris added that fifth-year fellows will use the year abroad to evaluate the Core Curriculum, and that their feedback on the Core might impact the way professors teach it to future students.
“[The program] is also intended as a vehicle through which [the Core] curriculum can be re-activated,” Morris said. “It will also help us to reflect on the relevance of the Core, so that we can consider ways of enhancing it.”
Students said the program could be a chance to internationalize and add depth to their Core experiences.
“I think the program’s international travel is interesting because a lot of the Core is Western-based,” Allison Scott, CC ’15, said. “They have Global Core, but it’s not really that much outside the West.”
Kofi Opoku, SEAS ’14, said the ability to study at different global centers would be a welcome addition to the Global Core.
“If they’ll find a way to incorporate [the program] into the Core, I think that a lot of people will take advantage of that,” Opoku said.
Some students, though, are worried that the program would just force them to put off finding a post-graduation job, especially in a time of economic uncertainty. Adwoa Banful, CC ’13, said that she would consider participating in the program, but only if she could also remain focused on her career. Columbia, she added, might help interested students do that.
“Let’s say they could work with CCE [the Center for Career Education] to get people on track to getting a job after they finish so that it’s not neglected—just so people would be a little less concerned about what happens after,” she said.
Administrators have not yet released detailed information about the cost of the program, and some students are questioning whether paying tens of thousands for a fifth year of liberal arts education is worth it. Prewitt, in a Bwog comment that he confirmed he wrote last month, rejected the idea that the program is a Columbia scheme to make money.
“If you actually believe that [the University] paying all expenses for a year overseas … can, at $40k a person, make a profit, we haven’t educated you very well,” Prewitt wrote.
Prewitt also clarified that qualified students will receive financial aid from the University, possibly for plane tickets, food, and housing.
“We don’t want this to be a program only for those with the luxury to afford it,” Armstrong said. “We just haven’t gotten into quite the nitty gritty of where this aid would go.”
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