Accredited colleges/universities in the US where the language of instruction is not English?

Factual Questions
1

How many fully accredited colleges/universities (or departments or programs thereof) are there* in the US (including territories)* where the language of instruction is not English?

I am **not talking about colleges with foreign language programs (which would include all or virtually all schools). I am talking about e.g. a university where instead of registering for “Organic Chemistry”, you register for “Química Orgánica” and the textbook and all the lectures are in Spanish, but the subject matter of the lectures (i.e. organic chemistry) is equivalent to what you would receive in an Organic Chemistry class at UCLA or Virginia Tech. Organic chemistry (and virtually all academic subjects except for direct language teaching classes) transcends any specific human language, which is just a medium for instruction, not the subject matter of the class.

I believe that Puerto Rico has several universities that are considered accredited American colleges but the classes are in Spanish.

  1. Is this correct, and

  2. Are there schools elsewhere in the country that award an accredited degree that is not taught in English? For example, can you get a degree at a Navajo speaking school on the Reservation where the only English spoken is spoken in ESL classes (in the same sense that German is used in German classes at UCLA)? Can you get a BA en français at a Louisiana college? Do any of the Mennonite colleges teach entire degree programs in Pennsylvania Dutch?

Whether or not the US Territories (such as Puerto Rico) are really and truly-o “part” of the US or not is irrelevant to the question. They are under US jurisdiction. Treat them as if they are part of the country.

Obviously, schools in other countries (e.g. German universities) don’t count unless the school is somehow under US jurisdiction (e.g. if it is on a US military base or something)

Also, for the purposes of this question, it is fine if the school requires that the student study English as part of the curriculum (e.g. you must take 12 credits of English language classes or prove proficiency by exam) in order to graduate, as long as the rest of the classes, such as History, Mathematics, or Psychology do not presuppose English fluency as a prerequisite and the class itself is taught in another language.

2

This doesn’t answer your question, but Pennsylvania Dutch isn’t a language. The “Pennsylvania Dutch” term is a misnomer for people who spoke German. “Dutch” in this instance is a corruption of the word “Deutsch”.

Puerto Ricans speak Spanish so it would make sense if the language of instruction was Spanish. Any university in the U.S. that doesn’t use English as its language of instruction would put its students and itself at a disadvantage. So I doubt you’ll find schools that fit your criteria in the U.S. Even the Navajo Nation’s schools use English.

3

I’m not so sure I agree with this. What about a student who was a native English speaker but wanted to eventually do a PhD in France (or was hoping to work in France, Belgium, Haiti, Canada, or some other French speaking country) and wanted to brush up their French while at the same time pursuing their MA or MS in the US?

4

I actually did this my freshman year in Bemidji, MN. Concordia College of Moorhead, MN had a one year submersion program in German. We lived at the language villages (that are summer camps for the rest of the year) took regular language classes as well as things like politics and history, all taught in German. It was pretty amazing and a good way to learn the language (and finish a major quickly too). It’s been since discontinued though.

5

Gallaudet University in Washington D.C. specializes in deaf instruction so the major languages used for instruction are sign languages. The written material tends to be in English however.

6

Neat. And did the classes in things like politics and history actually count as regular Political Science or History credits in the sense that taking it in German meant that you didn’t have to also take the “regular” version that was taught in English because you already had the credit or an equivalency?

7

Yup, they counted towards those requirements for graduation. The best class we did was learning Swedish in German so it sort of counted as a double language.

8

Interesting. I was sure the first example was going to be a Spanish-speaking university.

That’s cool.

The Most Interesting Man In The World speaks French… in Russian!

:slight_smile:

9

But a “german-immersion” course doesn’t count, according to the original post.

10

I know people who did this. In each case, they went to France to study for their degree. It’s difficult, but it’s no more difficult to do it in France than in the U.S. There are programs that accommodate such students. At any rate, you asked if there’s any institution that does this institution-wide, or within a non-language department. The need for an entire University to teach in a language other than English doesn’t exist in the U.S. You need to clarify what you mean by “programs”, because I consider that a different question. It’s very difficult to learn a language while being instructed in other things in that language.

11

It’s not exactly what I asked about, but it is in a similar vein and is tangentially related. It isn’t an entire degree program, but it involves a US college permitting students to take courses in a non-English language that are considered equivalent to taking the course in English.

We can extend the question to involve individual courses. E.g. colleges in the US where you could register for the regular MATH 345, MATH 345 (in Swedish), MATH-345 (in Portuguese) or MATH 345 (in Cantonese), and where BIOL 123 is also available as BIOL 123 (in French) and BIOL 123 (in Yiddish).

12

Well then, for that matter, there are lots of high schools doing this. I’m not sure that learning political science in German, while you are learning German is equivalent to taking a class conducted in English. When I was in college I never understood how people could go overseas to “study” for a year, because I grew up with another language, and was capable enough to pass out of the entire two years of college level “learning the language” classes at a very good school. But I would never ever in a million years have been able to compete at college level in essay writing courses in that language in another country. It wasn’t until much after college that I found out that most overseas study programs are for the purposes of learning another language and you aren’t taking classes with native speakers.

13

All of the universities in Puerto Rico, at least in the undergraduate level, have Spanish as the formal language of instruction. Barring, of course, the language classes (ie, French courses in French, Italian in Italian, German in German, etc.).

That said, many, if not most of their textbooks are in English, at least in the math and sciences (again, literature, philosophy, history, and others may have texts in Spanish).

This system (Spanish instruction and examination, English textbooks) is not uncommon for many students in both the public and private school systems, and gets more pronounced at the high school level.

I know for a fact that many of the instructional materials in law school are in Spanish. I also know that most, if not all, of the medical schools in Puerto Rico are fully accredited, and students in those schools take all the phase exams as the counterparts in the US mainland. So, even if their day to day is in Spanish, some of their instructional material is also in English.

I’m not sure if this qualifies, but at UF all students had to take gen-ed courses, including some amount of writing/composition, some history, and some international diversity. Some language courses fit in those categories. For example, some of my Portuguese language, culture, and film courses counted towards those general education requirements. The classes were given, (duh) in Portuguese. I also had a Spanish course count as a composition course.

14

BTW, a reminder: “Accreditation” for universities in the USA is a “peer-review” status within academia, gained from a set number of regional associations of institutions (e.g. Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools), or of professional associations in specific fields (e.g. ABA for law schools). In turn the accrediting entities are recognized (or not) by the state/fed government(s). In the common usage “accredited” means those who were vetted by those established, recognized accrediting bodies, so credentials from a school accredited by Middle States and/or ABA are more equal than those from one accredited by Cecil’s Council on the Fighting of Ignorance, for such things as federal funding and for validating transfer credits or degrees. The latter will be commonly considered not accredited. Licensing to operate an institution of education OTOH is a state-by-state regulatory matter: some are rigorous, some require little more than an address and a fee.

In Puerto Rico most higher-ed programs can be fairly characterized by that description of “the school requires that the student study English as part of the curriculum (e.g. you must take 12 credits of English language classes or prove proficiency by exam) in order to graduate, as long as the rest of the classes, such as History, Mathematics, or Psychology do not presuppose English fluency as a prerequisite and the class itself is taught in another language.” At the same time, much advanced work specially in science, engineering and medical is in English and that’s the language of virtually all the textbooks used in those subjects at our universities. Most of my MDs already write their reports in English and my yearly blood lab tests are all in English.

Even in the social sciences and humanities, at the graduate level often enough if English is the common language between a professor and his teaching/research assistants (UPR gets visiting profs from the whole world), that’s what gets used in class. Some of our private institutions also have full-immersion English programs.

The PR Supreme Court requires graduation from an ABA-accredited (or current-candidate-for-accreditation-in-good-standing) school to admit: there’s three of those in Puerto Rico (UPR, Interamerican U., and Catholic U. of PR) and they provide most of their coursework in Spanish (and the standard curriculum contains more Civil rather than Common Law, but does comply with ABA standards). A graduate from those schools who wished to practice stateside, or in the Federal Court, would have to pass the appropriate Bars in English anyway.

15

My daughters are in French immersion in public school in Massachusetts. Only a couple of towns have it but they start them off as Kindergartners learning to speak French in an immersion environment. It goes all the way through high school. All of their classes except ones like English grammar are in French including subjects like math, history, and art. It isn’t college but it exists and it is an unusual program with about 1/3 of the students in a given public school year signing up for it. Students (well, their parents) sign up for the full 13 years right at the beginning with few exceptions made.

16

ASL is also the language of instruction of the National Technical Institute for the Dead, although that is not an autonomous college. It’s part of the Rochester Institute of Technology.

17

Zombie college - I LOVE IT!

18

You would the professors would be… worried.

19

…it could be a job retraining school for retiring members of a touring band… or their traveling fans.

20

Not to take anything from our oldest Commonwealth (excluding the four states who insist that’s in their names). but consider Kualono College, with instruction in the only non-English official language of an U.S. state.