International Student Engagement

This book responds to the growing calls among international educators, activists, and students themselves to pay closer attention to the qualitative dimensions of international students’ experiences at U.S. colleges and universities.

This book outlines deep approaches to the academic and social integration of international students at U.S. colleges and universities. It describes concrete examples of strategies to enhance the international student experience across a wide range of institutional types, and explores actions that have enabled colleges and universities to create more inclusive, connected, and purposeful campus environments for international students. It fleshes out the effects of these actions through the first person narratives of international students themselves. It focuses on reinforcing an institution’s existing strengths and capacities to help academic leaders at these institutions to develop comprehensive strategies that will enable the creation of inclusive campus climates for international students.

The book combines evidence derived from the national Global Perspective Inventory dataset, the experiences of institutions at the forefront in developing effective strategies, as well as first-person narrative experiences of international students to illustrate the real-life consequences of institutional policies, practice, and programs.

One of the aims of this book is to take readers on a journey, from community colleges to liberal arts institutions to large public flagship research universities, from rural parts of the U.S.to highly-populated urban areas in order to raise questions about the impact of the surge of international students in these environments and about the corresponding challenges that confront senior administrators seeking to strengthen and deepen connections for the students.

The book explores some of the actions that universities and colleges across the U.S. have taken to create more inclusive, connected, and purposeful campus environments for their international students, placing particular emphasis on the importance of tapping and reinforcing each institution’s existing strengths and capacities in the development of strategies that will enable it to create more inclusive campus climates for current and incoming international students, and engaging in active collaboration with all departments and offices across the campus, with the larger community, and most important, with the international student community itself.