Critical Language Flagship plus IR plus merit aid----help needed with list

Parents Forum
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Youngest, a current sophomore, is interested in attending a Critical Language Flagship school (or one that has a very strong critical language program) while studying International Relations.

Some details:
–She has been homeschooled since middle school.
–She is studying Arabic at our state flagship.
–Arabic is currently her top choice for language, with Chinese, Hindi-Urdu, Persian, Russian, and Turkish following in no particular order.
–She is applying to NSLI-Y for next summer.
–As a junior next year, she will continue with Arabic and add either Chinese or Russian (the only choices that interest her available locally).
–She is uncertain about an IR focus but knows that it won’t be on the economics/finance/business side, maybe security studies or a Middle East area concentration.
–She does not want a small LAC nor is she interested in a women’s college. She has experienced older siblings’ college searches and thus has definite likes and dislikes.
–We can pay the COA of our state flagship, about $25K this year. Our EFC is high due to current earnings.
–She is a strong candidate for merit aid. As she is still a sophomore, we don’t yet have SAT or ACT scores. Her PSAT as a ninth grader was above the Commended level. With the changes in the PSAT, it’s all a guess if she’ll make NMSF for our state which has had one of the top 10 cutoffs in the past. She has one 5 so far for AP (taking 5 AP courses this year). Her grades in outsourced classes (English, Arabic, some AoPS math) are all As. Classes I teach her have been/will be “validated” with AP and SAT2 scores.
–Extracurriculars include Science Olympiad (medals at state level), MUN, Youth in Government, and lots of ballet.

We came up with a list of Critical Language Flagship schools that may work financially, though I’m not sure what merit aid is available for oos students. (No Russian flagships–Bryn Mawr, Portland State, UCLA, Wisconsin–are listed because they do not meet other criteria.) We are oos for all of these schools.

Arizona (Arabic)
Arizona State (Chinese)
Indiana (Chinese, Swahili, Turkish)
Maryland (Arabic, Persian)
Mississippi (Chinese)
Oklahoma (Arabic)
Texas (Arabic, Hindi-Urdu)

Thoughts? I’ve searched many CC threads and haven’t found much talk about the Flagships, with the exception of Ole Miss. While at Concordia last summer, D met students who attend the Arizona, Oklahoma, and Texas Arabic Flagships.

Are there other schools, without being CL Flagships, that are known for enabling non-majors to reach a very high level of proficiency? The Arabic program at Ole Miss might be an example. ???

On the IR-without-CL-Flagship-side to visit are

American
George Washington
Harvard
Princeton

We’d appreciate other suggestions for schools known for strong and deep critical language departments (those that have more than 6 semesters plus a literature class or two) that would fit both her interest in IR and our financial constraints.

Thanks!

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If you are talking about Arabic, Chinese, or Russian, there are a whole lot of colleges besides the four you listed that have strong IR programs and depth in the language studies for at least one of them, if not all. There will be fewer with Persian, Hindi-Urdu, or Turkish, but those aren’t such obscure languages, either. “Critical Language Flagship” is a nice brand, and a way for a college you wouldn’t necessarily expect to advertise a strength, but Harvard and Yale (for example) have produced generation after generation of people who were well-versed in Chinese and Chinese culture.

Pretty much the whole panoply of brand-name elite universities would meet your daughter’s needs: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Cornell, Chicago, Penn, Michigan, Berkeley, UCLA. Those I am certain about, but I’ll bet if you looked into what was available at Brown, Columbia, Northwestern, etc., it would be more than fine. Tufts is another college with strong IR where there should be strength in at least some of those languages, too. Johns Hopkins.

Those are all super-selective colleges. The trick is finding some non-super-selective colleges that fit the bill. So it definitely makes sense to ask about the CL Flagships. You might also look at places like the University of Toronto or McGill, which are great research universities and still relative bargains for Americans. The British universities, too.

A friend’s son, by the way, was an Arabic major at Kenyon, and spent five or six years after graduation living and working in Egypt and Jordan. (He’s now a journalist for an English-language newspaper in Phnom Penh.) So small LACs shouldn’t necessarily be off the table – although if your daughter is already taking college Arabic as a 10th grader, she might need more Arabic resources than a small college has, even one with a great language program.

But, really, if she goes through three years of college Arabic, and maybe a semester of street Arabic, she is not going to need more Arabic language classes. (And no one is really going to be offering more Arabic language classes.) She will need Arabic literature, history, and culture classes, hopefully in Arabic, and lots of opportunities to speak Arabic and to study in places where Arabic is the primary language. And the same is true for any of the languages. At some point, you shift from learning the language to inhabiting it, and learning the culture.

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Web searches for “fourth year Arabic”, “fourth year Chinese”, and the like may give some additional ideas of colleges that offer those courses. You can then check the catalog for additional course work (e.g. literature/culture) in that language.

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I would definitely recommend Tufts. Very strong in IR and languages. I know you said no LAC’s, but Middlebury would be on my list too.

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The most difficult issue for us has been finding courses outside of the actual instructional language courses taught in the language itself. Most of the “avg” universities seem to teach all of those types of courses in English. Temple is one university that we found that had extensive offerings in Russian, but we have concerns about the location of the university.

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@ucbalumnus I think places that are strong in Arabic or Chinese may offer fourth year courses in those languages, but I doubt many offer four years of Persian, Russian, or Turkish. Frankly, you probably can’t achieve anything close to fluency in Arabic or Chinese even with four years of college language courses; that’s much less true of some other languages.

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Frankly, many of the best universities will teach classes in English even if you’re majoring in the foreign language/literature. So what you want is to makes sure there’s a strong GRADUATE program in Arabic, etc., where your daughter could practice her language skills and even attend grad-level classes.

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Tufts has amazing very rigorous Arabic teachers. My son was an IR major there (and the major requires 8 semesters of foreign language or fluency). He spent the summer after his freshman year, and both semesters junior year in Jordan in three different programs with students from all over the country. The only student who had better Arabic preparation than he did was a kid from somewhere fairly unlikely sounding (maybe Mississippi?) who’d spent considerable time overseas.

He said the kids who took Russian didn’t work nearly as hard as those who took Arabic.

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You could also plan on doing junior year in the country of the language she ends up with, and then the courses will be taught in those languages.

Denver University has advanced languages and a good IR program (two secretaries of State, Rice and Albright, attended). Many students spend at least a year abroad.

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It may or may not be a good program, but it had little to do with their becoming Secretary of State.

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In my opinion, it’s not too realistic to pursue more than one “hard” (or less-commonly-taught) language, especially languages spanning more than one language family, at the HS or even at the college level. One might want to study both Chinese in depth, and Japanese in less depth, in a college E. Asian Studies program. Or one might want to study both Arabic in depth, and Hebrew in less depth, in a Near/Middle Eastern Studies program. Unless (perhaps) one is an aspiring theoretical/applied Linguist, it may not make much sense (academically or in terms of career goals) to pursue combinations like Arabic/Russian or Chinese/Persian. It’s hard enough, even for bright students at strong schools, to build (then maintain) a solid foundation in even one of these languages.

I don’t know whether the language flagship programs are truly competitive (for both quality and net cost) with IR, language, and area studies programs at “elite” private schools. You might want to run the net price calculators, and consider the admission standards, for “top” schools in these fields, which include Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Tufts, Middlebury, Chicago, Stanford, and the Ivies. George Washington, American U, and the University of Denver are somewhat less selective, non-flagship colleges that have strong IR programs; their foreign language programs may or may not meet your needs (depending on the language and goal). Some of the “public Ivies” (like Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, UVa, William & Mary) also have strong IR and foreign language programs. They usually are expensive (and have limited financial aid) for out-of-state students, but do have lower OOS sticker prices than the elite private schools.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_the_Ivory_Tower)

More merit aid would be available (or realistically achievable) from less selective schools. However, not all that many colleges can support very strong programs both in IR/area studies and in these hard/critical languages. Hence in the past even Chinese and Arabic have been referred to as “less commonly taught” languages. The Language Flagship is an effort by the federal government to build out such programs at a broader range of colleges.

If you want high quality at an affordable price for your combination of interests, I’m afraid you cannot expect to find too many other hidden gems beyond the language flagships, public Ivies, and elite private schools. One work-around would be to pursue merit aid from a not-too-selective school that is relatively strong in IR/government (like U Denver) then make up for any deficiencies in its Arabic/other language offerings through summer school or study abroad.

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I honestly wouldn’t recommend University of Denver to a high achieving student interested in IR. Their IR reputation is inflated and overall the school does not attract the most academically ambitious students. Tufts, Georgetown,etc., are far more appropriate choices for OP’s daughter.

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^ Yes, I’d recommend Georgetown or Tufts over UDenver … if she can get in and afford the costs. But if their EFC is much higher than the ~$25K they can afford, they may need to look for merit money. They won’t get that from Georgetown or Tufts.

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Thank you for all the replies and suggestions. I cannot find a quote button while on my ipad so my responses will be all mixed up.

I have run NPCs for all the above suggestions. Only Harvard and Princeton are in the range of what we can pay ± $5K. I really don’t see the point for D to apply to the other Ivy and Ivy-like schools when their NPCs say we should be willing to pay $40-50K and higher.

If D stays with Arabic only, she will need advanced-level classes as a freshman, followed by classes taught in various dialects and culture/literature classes taught in MSA and/or dialects. We have spent much time looking through course catalogs to compare the numbers and types of classes taught in Arabic. She does not like the idea of studying in English culture and literature classes about the Arab world.

The appeal of a Critical Language Flagship school is that she will reach the Superior level of fluency (ILR 3, if you know that scale) in the language, study abroad for two summers and a capstone year (which includes an internship), all while majoring in a discipline other than the language studied.

The Flagship program is a school-within-a-school, kind of like an Honors College at a large state university.

Thanks again.

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If her stats are high enough (test scores, primarily) Arizona or ASU would be relatively low cost, but not in the $5K range. Maybe $10K or so. They might add money for summer study abroad.
(ASU provides a lot of support for students interested in applying for CLI, Boren, Marshall and other competitive programs. I don’t know about Arizona.)

You don’t have to be a matriculated student at a CLI university in order to participate in the CLI programs, AFAIK.

https://melikian.asu.edu/cli

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Ha, no it wasn’t the $5K range—I meant that the NPC amounts were within $5K of what we’re willing to pay!

Arizona and ASU are under consideration.

Thank you!

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here’s a thought- quite a few US Universities have opened up branches in the middle east.
Perhaps she should consider attending one of these?
This list from USNWR runs for 2 pages- start here:

http://www.usnews.com/education/arab-region-universities/branch-campuses?sort=home-country&page=2&sortdir=asc

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Indiana University has the Wells. The OOS deadline is early each academic year (think September or October), but it’s a full-ride at IU, and OOS awardees are not uncommon.

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