The National Student Exchange Program and the service-learning program in Teacher Education were both studied as examples of learning-oriented community outreach. Cal Poly Pomona’s National Student Exchange Program (NSEP or NSE is the acronym used nationally and on campus) is part of a national consortium of 150 programs offering students a chance to study at another campus, perhaps out of state, by paying the same fees as their home campus. A pre- or advance petition for course equivalency is worked out by the office of Student Affairs. Both the faculty/staff experience and the programmatic data developed by Cal Poly Pomona’s NSEP program shows that many students go coast to coast; many East coast students want to study in California, for example. The benefits for students include personal growth, academic development and other kinds of exposure; for instance, some students look for a sample of what their graduate school campus may be like. There is close and carefully planned fit between courses taken on another campus and the home campus degree requirements, so that all units taken by our students who may attend up to a year at another campus go toward their Cal Poly Pomona degrees. More students who come here want to stay on than we lose to other campuses. Thus, we receive more regular NSEP students than go out to other campuses. The Cal Poly Pomona campus gets 35-40 students from each annual brokerage conference.

The International option involves NSEP and the International Center helping students find a program that best suits their aims and interests, so that NSEP may send a student to IC and vice versa. There are many exchange agreements between campuses, and international students can come here for a year on our tuition if accepted into an institution that holds such an agreement with Cal Poly Pomona.

Some students experience culture shock or a sense of being overwhelmed by differences, yet the Committee sees strong support for the enrolled students and understands that learning and the aforementioned personal growth can involve uncertainty and discomfort-- what some refer to as "moving out of a comfort zone." As part of their self-assessment, the program asks students to write essays before and after their experiences -- to describe their vision of what they expect, to rate themselves on maturity, etc. The results show that almost all students describe the value of the experience as positive and life enhancing; they often describe one or more experiences of having learned much about themselves by living with others in a residence hall, having broadened their references, or having discovered or deepened an academic talent or interest.

As a thumbnail longitudinal study, the director described the first years of outgoing students as "in the single digits"; it grew to about 15, then in the early ‘90’s "back to single digits" (due to the director’s job duties having changed, overloading her or subtracting from her ability to dedicate as much time as before), but now she has a half-time assistant and has revised the numbers upward to about 20 students. She has set a goal of raising the numbers to 30-40 over the next five years. NSEP encountered the effects of the changing configurations of units and programs at Cal Poly Pomona. Not all changes seem clearly planned; some seem responses to ideas or pressures of a passing moment rather than of a more thought-out, enduring nature. The director has a strong sense of what students need and how to help involve them in a suitable program.