When American community colleges attend student-recruitment fairs abroad, they are often greeted with blank looks.
That’s because “community college” is frequently an unknown concept overseas. Many countries do not recognize associate degrees as valid academic credentials, while in others, community colleges are seen as strictly vocational institutions, places to learn a skill or trade. As a result, two-year institutions in the United States have a difficult time recruiting abroad, despite their growing interest in doing so.
One exception is Green River Community College, outside Seattle, which has built up its foreign enrollments from just 200 in 1993 to more than 1,200 two decades later, 10 percent of the student body. The students come from 40 different countries, including Indonesia, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
Green River has succeeded overseas by positioning itself as a gateway to highly competitive programs in top universities across the United States. Through careful advising, well-tailored course selection, and strong relationships built over time with destination institutions, Green River sends nearly every one of its international students on to a university, in greatly sought-after programs like business and engineering.
It’s a smart strategy, says Zepur Solakian, executive vice president for global communications and public relations at the Center for Global Advancement of Community Colleges, a group that works to help two-year institutions recruit more international students through promoting the community-college transfer option.
“If we look at the community colleges that attract the most international students, we find one thing in common—that they have very good transfer agreements with universities,” she says.
Two-year institutions are not the only beneficiaries of such an approach, Ms. Solakian says. Community-college transfers provide a new and welcome pipeline of international students at a time when universities across the country, like their two-year counterparts, are seeking full-paying foreign students to diversify and to help meet their bottom lines. Today there are more than 68,500 international students enrolled in associate-degree programs at American colleges, and, for the universities they transfer to, they don’t require the expense of an overseas trip to recruit.
For international students who may lack the money, high-school grades, or English-language ability to be directly admitted to an American university, community colleges provide another route to a bachelor’s degree.
“The community college,” says Mitsuko Leonard, director of international admissions at the University of California at Davis, “is a bridge to further education.”
A Feeder College
If Ross Jennings, Green River’s vice president for international programs, encounters uncomprehending stares on his overseas recruitment trips, he has a quick retort. “Where do you want to study?” he queries students, who frequently volunteer a name-brand university. “Can you qualify for that institution now?” he asks. “I can get you there.”
Mr. Jennings’s students have gone on to Purdue University and the Universities of Michigan, Oregon, and Southern California. The University of Indiana at Bloomington, which has a well-ranked business school, is one of the two top destinations for Green River’s international graduates. The college feeds more students to the University of California at Los Angeles than almost any other institution outside the state.
Mr. Jennings has honed his transfer gambit during nearly 20 years at Green River, and while the pitch is straightforward, making it work is not. For one, he does not rely on recruitment fairs, where he might struggle to stand out amid dozens of other institutions. Rather, he has established channels with high schools and universities in countries like China, building close relationships with select programs, such as business or early-childhood education.
These programs often enroll substantial numbers of students who want to go abroad and can handle the academic coursework of top U.S. programs. For many of the students, who have completed their first year at a college overseas, spending a transition year at Green River helps them brush up on English and adapt to American teaching styles. Some students even complete their high-school diplomas while earning college credit at Green River.
He is also an “unashamed” user of commissioned agents, a controversial practice, but is quick to cut ties with paid recruiters if the students they attract fall short in the classroom.
In fact, Mr. Jennings’s students habitually outshine Green River’s domestic undergraduates, with average grades last year of 3.51.
‘Who Are You Guys?’
From their first week on campus, students are closely counseled by advisers in the international office who help them identify a likely major and a half-dozen potential transfer institutions. Then they map out an academic plan for each student’s two years at Green River to ensure all prerequisites will be met and to maximize the number of credits that will transfer.
Thanks to thorough planning, Gabriella Lestari didn’t miss a beat when she went from Green River to the University of California at Berkeley, her first choice. “We figured out what classes would be accepted and which wouldn’t transfer, so I didn’t waste time,” says Ms. Lestari, a 23-year-old chemical-engineering major from Indonesia. She is now completing a master’s degree, on full scholarship, at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, in Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Jennings calls Green River’s advising strategy “reverse-engineering admissions,” deliberately plotting a course, and coursework, to make sure students have the exact preparation they need to succeed at chosen four-year institutions.
Ms. Lestari was one of the first students to go on to Berkeley, but with more common transfer destinations, Mr. Jennings and his advisers do attentive outreach, talking frequently with admissions counselors, professors in popular departments and schools, and even former students to check that graduates have the academic background they need. They keep abreast of any curricular changes or adjustments to the admissions process.
The idea of aligning two- and four-year curricula is nothing new, of course. Community colleges have traditionally had transfer agreements with public universities in their home states, and some may have arrangements with nearby private institutions.
The situation is different for international transfer students, however. Unlike their domestic counterparts, they don’t seek to attend local universities in order to qualify for lower in-state tuition or save dormitory fees by bunking at home (although the University of Washington is one of the top recipients of Green River’s international students). Instead, Mr. Jennings is selling the possibility that students can move on to one of dozens of dream schools, all across the country.
Because the college did not naturally have transfer deals with out-of-state institutions, Mr. Jennings admits that initially much of Green River’s effort was guesswork. Over time, though, international-student advisers began to get a better sense of institutional requirements, particularly at in-demand universities and programs.
Admissions officials at four-year campuses also began to notice the stream of well-prepared foreign transfer students from this previously unknown community college in the Pacific Northwest. A former international-admissions director at Indiana swung by the campus during a visit to Seattle, Mr. Jennings recalls. “He said, ‘Who are you guys?’”
Now Mr. Jennings has close working relationships with administrators at about 50 universities. “I could pick up the phone if I got stuck” and get help for a student, he says.
Of those, he has more-formal agreements with more than a dozen, in which the universities have explicitly said which Green River courses they will accept in certain degree programs. In some cases, the four-year institutions even provide letters of conditional admission that Green River can include in its admissions package, promising transfer to students who meet course and grade-point requirements.
Ms. Leonard, of UC-Davis, sought a closer relationship with Green River after she noticed large numbers of international community-college applicants from the Seattle area. She has a designated a contact in her office to field questions from Green River and other two-year institutions and has flown in both college counselors and admitted students to visit the campus.
Learning How to Succeed
Expanding foreign-student recruitment from community colleges is attractive not just because of tight international-travel budgets but because such students know how to succeed in American classrooms, Ms. Leonard says.
That’s not just a matter of taking the right courses. Celia Chen came to Green River after finishing her first year at Beijing Normal University. She had aspirations to study in the United States, she says with a laugh, “but I really couldn’t say a sentence.”
The college’s small classes allowed her to gain confidence in her English and helped her adjust to American-style education, with its emphasis on critical thinking and classroom discussion. Advisers hekped her select a major, computer science, and taught her that extracurricular activities and volunteering count in college admissions, not just grades and test scores. At Green River, Ms. Chen, who is now finishing her final semester at Indiana, served as a math tutor and president of the international club.
“It helps you be ready for higher education,” she says of her time at the community college. “I knew how to study. I knew what to expect.”
Still, adopting such a strategy can’t happen overnight. Community colleges are increasingly interested in recruiting internationally, both to diversify their campuses and bring in more tuition revenue. Yet the number of international students in associate-degree programs declined in the 2009-10 academic year, the most recent one for which there is data, a drop that probably reflects the global economic crisis.
Families of associate-degree students are often the least able to afford an overseas education, while international-recruiting budgets at community colleges, already small, have been tightened further. Even in good years, foreign students planning to attend community colleges often have a more difficult time getting visas, in part because consular officials worry they might stay in the United States.
Mr. Jennings and others argue that coming to study with the intent to transfer could ease the visa process because it would reassure visa officers that students are serious. Mr. Jennings is fortunate in that he has strong support from Green River administrators, who have long seen the cultural and financial benefits international students can bring. International students pay as much as three times the annual tuition that domestic students do, allowing the college to support an international-office staff of 35, who recruit and advise foreign students and teach intensive English courses.
“We’re really hands-on with our students,” says Mr. Jennings, “because their success is our success.”
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