How Colleges Are Helping International Students Land Jobs After Graduation

U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Career Center

Growing up on the Indonesian island of Java, Madeline Kusnadi always dreamed of someday working and living in the United States. It was a dream born partly from watching American television shows like Hannah Montana and Wizards of Waverly Place.

“I have always idolized America since I was in sixth grade,” Kusnadi said.

Now a senior studying English at the University of Washington at Seattle, she is not sure if she will stay in the United States after graduation. Although securing an internship this term might be a step toward getting a job offer, whether she stays hinges on if she is able to find an employer willing to pay the fees required for her work-visa application. And if she does get the work visa, Kusnadi will be one among thousands of other applicants looking to be approved in an annual lottery. In April the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reached its congressionally mandated 65,000 cap in five days, and had already received 94,213 applications for 2019.

“It’s very stressful,” Kusnadi said about the process.

Many international students who want to be part of the American work force are anxious about what lies after graduation. And the Trump administration’s policies, which make it tougher for them to obtain visas, exacerbate that anxiety. Still, public colleges and universities rely on tuition from international students. So what role should colleges play in meeting their demands after graduation? Two public institutions have leaned on their career centers to support international students.

Despite the high numbers of international students hoping to land jobs after graduation in the United States, President Trump signed an executive order in April that makes it harder for foreign workers to obtain H-1B visas, which allow American employers to temporarily hire foreign workers. A 2017 report by the Institute of International Education showed that new international-student enrollment has dropped for the first time since it started tracking it 12 years ago.

Briana Randall, director of the internship project at the University of Washington’s career center, is trying to field students’ demands without giving them false hopes.

At the University of Washington, 25 percent of students who met with career counselors last year were international students, according to data from the career center. That shows that international students want to land jobs on American soil, Randall said.

Career-center counselors mostly advise students on how to craft strong applications for jobs in the United States. Even with coaching, the perfect résumé, and work experience, there is still the chance that international students won’t get the payoff they want: a company that will sponsor an H-1B visa application to stay and work in the country.

International students at the University of Washington generate approximately $175.9 million in tuition, about 26 percent of the its net operating fee revenue for 2017, said Jackson Holtz, a university spokesman.

The university does not provide any services specific to international students when it comes to finding internships and jobs in the United States, Randall said. Instead, the career center focuses on helping students find employment back home.

“It can be a challenge for our coaching team, because in our hearts we want to be supportive and encouraging,” Randall said. “But we also want to be realistic with them about their chances. And about the fact that it might not work out.”

So her center scheduled four workshops, from November 2017 to May 2018, on how to find work back home. The counselors researched what opportunities were available in countries like China, where a majority of their students come from, Randall said.

Students showed less enthusiasm for employment overseas than on American soil. Although 11 people showed up on the first day, nobody came on the second. On the third day, one person turned up, according to the counseling center’s record of attendance. Career counselors canceled the final session.

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Besides the home-country job-search workshops, the counseling center subscribed to GradConnection, an online job-search portal, to show international students which companies in their home countries are seeking to hire graduates with American degrees. For example, if students from China were to note on the University of Washington’s GradConnection portal that they have Chinese citizenship, they would be met with 101 matches this month.

“These are employers who specifically would want people who are born in China but got an education abroad and are looking for jobs,” Randall said. “They are capitalizing on students who gain experience in other countries and then come back.”

Helping Those Who Stay

Un Yeong Park started working for the career center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011. During his time there, he has seen how international students struggle with cultural differences, like how Americans tend to communicate by emphasizing eye contact, speaking directly, and self-promotion.

“The problem I found, when I started my job here, was that international students didn’t understand how American people were connecting with each other,” Park said. “Most international-student job searches could be more successful if they have better networking skills,” Park said. “We are more focused on increasing their ‘soft’ skills.”

In 2012, Park started offering a free course to teach communication techniques to international students and to increase their job prospects in America after graduation.

He teaches a nine-week course on communications skills at Urbana-Champaign. And he trains international students in writing cover letters, doing interviews, and developing LinkedIn profiles.

The program has grown into a course that also guides foreign students in techniques like introducing themselves concisely and joining group conversations, Park said. The course culminates in elevator-pitch contests, in which students compete over how they introduce themselves and their goals, he said.

Every semester, Park said, he receives more than 100 applications for his course, which he winnows to 70 students. He also hand-picks about a dozen graduates of the program to peer-mentor following classes.

When international students use universities’ career websites, they often find that not being American citizens disqualifies them for most internships — a typically crucial first step for many jobs after graduation.

That’s why Park and the Urbana-Champaign career center developed a list showing international students which companies have previously hired such students from the university. According to an online syllabus, Park’s networking-skills class features a session in which he connects students with former international-student interns who give advice on how to stand out when applying to companies.

Zirou Zhang, a student from China and an Urbana-Champaign senior, has been a peer mentor for two terms. She said that the confidence and relationships she gained from the program helped her get an internship with the “big four” accounting firm Ernst & Young next year. She said the program had given her the courage to seek help from Park a day before the interview last spring.

“Without the program, I wouldn’t have gotten to know him, and if I had not become a facilitator, I wouldn’t have built a closer relationship with him that I can actually ask him a day before the interview to do the practice with me,” she said. “For international students, they don’t usually do things like ask people to do practice interviews with them. But if you get some confidence from the program, you can get the courage to do that.”

Correction (11/13/18, 10:35 a.m.): New-international-student enrollment dropped for the first time in 2017, according to IIE, not international-student enrollment in general. This article has been updated to clarify that.

Follow Andy Tsubasa Field on Twitter at @AndyTsubasaF, or email him at andy.field@chronicle.com.