Page 31 - BusinessWest October 17, 2022

What’s the Word?
International Language Institute Adapts to New Realities
By Joseph Bednar
Aglobal pandemic hit businesses and nonprofits in different ways. For the International Language Institute of Massachusetts (ILI), which relies on a steady flow of international students, the impact was especially great, as global travel slowed and
those connections quickly dried up.
“We went from close to $350,000 a year in
our Intensive English programs to $86,000,” said Caroline Gear, the institute’s executive director since 2015. She noted that the CARES Act and other emergency COVID relief, PPP loans, and an employee-retention tax credit helped ILI over the roughest whitewater, and international students are coming back ... to an extent.
“I don’t think it’s ever going to come back to pre-pandemic times, but I like to say that we’re emerging anew,” Gear said. “I wouldn’t call it a recovery, because I don’t think we’ll ever recover to those numbers.”
The headwinds include a strong U.S. dollar making it expensive to travel to the States for study, as well as more competition from other countries with programs that teach English and other languages. “Canada opened up much quicker than us after the pandemic, so a lot of students went to the Canadian market and not to the United States. With Brexit, the U.K. lost a lot of international students, too.”
Still, Gear said, “I believe the United States academic culture and expertise and prestige is number one, but we have to make sure that we stay that way and continue to be welcoming. When you’re looking at where our stu- dents are coming from, I love the fact that we’re so diverse.”
The numbers bear that out. ILI’s Free English program alone — just one of several major programs at the insti- tute (more on them later) — boasts 120 students from 27 different coun- tries, ranging in age from 17 to 80. In one change from before COVID, five of the six sections are online, though the Intensive English program, because
of its immersive aspect, is delivered in-house.
“When the pandemic hit, we
thought we would be back in a few
months, but we wound up moving all
of our classes online,” Gear said, add-
ing that the Intensive English students
were the first to return to face-to-face instruction, in August 2021. “Other
than that, most of the classes were still
meeting online. Our teachers are amazing; they went from emergency teaching to really creating
Staff Photo
Caroline Gear says the pandemic brought challenges to ILI, but also new ways of connecting with language learners.
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