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Arabic Students Mean Business
Career opportunities in national security and Mideast financial hubs boost enrollment in college language programs

By Jordan Freisleben, Los Angeles
Age 17

Career and business opportunities for Arabic speakers are fueling surging interest in college-level Arabic programs, putting pressure on universities to add courses and hire more professors.

According to the Modern Language Association, Arabic enrollment at the university level more than doubled from 2004 to 2008, and the number of institutions offering programs grew to 466 from 264 over that period. Those 466 programs enrolled 23,974 students, the MLA survey reported.

Arabic enrollment at the university level more than doubled from 2004 to 2008.

Northwestern University's Arabic program, one of the fastest-growing in the nation, "is approximately three to four times the size from when I took over," says director Lynn Whitcomb, who started her job shortly after 9/11. Northwestern now employs four full-time Arabic professors, up from one when she started.

CAREER CURIOSITY

In the past, Whitcomb says, most students taking Arabic had been doing it solely to enhance their religious studies. Today, it's often the promise of career opportunity that's driving the interest. "For people who are career-focused in their choices of language, Arabic is likely to continue to be a very useful language both for commerce, diplomacy and government kinds of things and non-government organizations," she says.

Jean-François Seznec, a Middle East specialist and professor at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, echoes that, noting the rapid growth of industry in the Middle East.

"There are hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to spend on new building, new cities, etc.," he says. "It has created a tremendous demand on financial information and on financial reporting."

THE 9/11 EFFECT

Although the expanding business market has made Arabic more attractive to students in recent years, Whitcomb says it's the geopolitical climate that triggered much of the initial growth.

"9/11 was a big part of it," she says. "Some students are very career-focused and hope that knowing Arabic will make them more marketable. But there are also students who have a curiosity in the sense, ‘I'm watching current events on the news, and I feel like I don't understand what's going on. I think understanding the culture would better help me understand what's going on.'"

That was the case for recent Northwestern graduate and Fulbright scholar Laura Ashbaugh, who said 9/11 had a big impact on her generation and sparked her interest in Arabic. "That was a seminal event when we were growing up," she says. This year, a record number of Fulbright scholars will study in the Middle East.

At Stanford University, Arabic enrollment has more than quadrupled since 9/11, said Khalil Bartoum, Arabic professor and coordinator of African and Middle Eastern Languages. With about 130 students currently learning the language, Stanford now employs four full-time Arabic professors, up from one and a half who instructed 30 students pre-9/11.

"It's not just a matter of curiosity about the Middle East and the Arab world alone," Bartoum said. "I think that the fact that the significance of Arabic after the tragic event of 9/11 was established without any doubt.”

Since 9/11, the Department of Defense has emphasized the learning of languages that are related to the Islamic world, Bartoum says. "The money is being brought all out in terms of scholarships and grants. Political interests are a major part in influencing the curriculum on college campuses," he says.

NOW HIRING

Whitcomb says a challenge in expanding Arabic programs is recruiting instructors for a language that's almost as tough to teach as it is for monolingual English speakers to learn. The writing system flows from right to left, she notes, and the letters do not connect or conform to Western grammatical expectations.

“The range of sounds is broader,” she says. “Some sounds are easy for English speakers to pronounce, and some others take quite a bit of practice. Arabic also has emphatic consonants that English speakers have a hard time distinguishing.”

In a study analyzing 63 foreign languages, the Foreign Service Institute of the U.S. State Department considered Arabic one of the five most difficult languages for a native English speaker to gain proficiency in speaking and reading. The Defense Department's Language Aptitude Battery, which measures a person's ability to learn a foreign language, places Arabic under Category IV, the highest level of difficulty.

"People who are not very tuned into foreign language teaching assume it's sufficient just to find someone who speaks the language and to put them in the classroom and they'll be able to teach," Whitcomb says.

Stanford's Bartoum said that there are enough Arabic professors available in the U.S. to meet the growing demand but says colleges need the resources to hire them. "The qualified are there," he says, "but I'm not sure that funding and commitment have caught up with them," he says.

In the long term, he figures today's demand for Arabic instructors will become tomorrow's supply. "I think that will be taken care of by the huge number of people taking Arabic these days who will graduate and eventually choose to pursue their careers in either Arabic studies or Muslim studies," he says.