According to the Open Doors report on international education, international student enrollment has increased every year for the past 60 years. With this trend expected to continue, and international students becoming an increasingly important constituent group, it’s critical for institutions to take a more holistic view at how they’re meeting these students’ needs now and in the future.
To help you learn from some of the most effective approaches to serving international students, Academic Impressions offers this series of resources:
A Whole-Campus Approach
This report offers practical considerations for optimizing the international student lifecycle:
- Does Your Curriculum Serve International Students?
- Recruiting and Admitting International Students: Key Considerations
- The Transition In: Setting International Students Up for Academic Success
- The Transition Out: Moving International Students into the Donor Pipeline
Beyond recruitment efforts, institutions need to think broadly about integration into the campus community and the academic curriculum to ensure international students persist and succeed. They also need to plant seeds for future support and giving as these students graduate and potentially return to their home countries.
HEAR FROM THE EXPERTS
View a free recording of our June 2012 webcast “The Internationalized Campus” to hear from experts Darla Deardorff (AIEA) and Gretchen Dobson (Gretchen Dobson Go Global) about critical opportunities during the undergraduate years to introduce programming that supports international students’ academic success and persistence … and invites them to engage with the institution in the long term, as international alumni.
International Student Success: Pieces You Might Be Missing
Pre-Arrival and Orientation
As international student enrollment grows, creating a seamless arrival-and-welcome process that ensures the success and retention of these students is rapidly becoming a key area of investment for many institutions. At the forefront, the University of Southern California has piloted a process that includes not only an international orientation once students arrive on campus, but also an overseas, summer orientation on-site in Hong Kong to help students from Hong Kong prepare for their arrival in the US. Learn more about USC’s model here.
Improving Your Online Writing Center for International Students
As international student enrollment rises at many institutions, it’s going to be increasingly important to provide academic support for a growing population of students who may have diverse levels of fluency with academic writing in English. While there is a long tradition of providing ESL writing labs and other support for these “second language students” on campus, providing writing support for international students in an online writing center involves unique challenges and requires some specific expertise in the writing center staff in order to be effective. Learn more in this article.
Cultivating Intercultural Competencies
Just adding services and strengthening peer support may not be enough. If your institution is committed to internationalization, have you taken steps to build intercultural competencies among your faculty, staff, and students?
Darla Deardorff, the executive director of the Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA), a research scholar in education at Duke University, and a lead researcher on intercultural competence, suggests that cultivating intercultural competencies among students, faculty, and staff is the key piece to effective integration of international students into campus life and the curriculum.
Learn more in this article, which reviews both some of the myths about intercultural competencies and some practical steps for defining and cultivating these competencies.