Scandinavian Students on an American Campus

Scandinavian Students on an American Campus was first published in 1961.Forty students from Norway, Denmark, and Sweden who were enrolled at the University of Wisconsin during a two-year period are mirrored in this book. The study is the sixth in a series of monographs resulting from a research program of the Committee on Cross-Cultural Education of the Social Science Research Council. The group studied included twenty-two students from Norway, eight from Sweden, and ten from Denmark, one of the largest concentrations of Scandinavian students on any American campus.The principal data came from a series of intensive personal interviews with each student at intervals during his or her visit. Many excerpts from the interviews, candid and revealing, are included in this book. Additional information about the students was acquired through teachers' and advisors' ratings and comments and through participant observation.The major aims of the study were to obtain information about the academic and social adjustment of the students, to learn something of their impressions of the United States and how these impressions changed during their stay in this country, to examine the relationship of social, economic, and intellectual factors in the students' backgrounds to their attitudes and success in their sojourns, to discover leads for further study, and to make suggestions for the guidance of student exchange. These aims are pursued by both descriptive and quantitative analysis of the vast amount of data collected. A number of practical implications of interest to persons concerned with foreign student exchange and welfare are included.