Leona Wang is now well into her second semester at Syracuse University, yet she sometimes finds herself referring back to an online orientation course she took at home in China, before she even left for college.
The noncredit course, called Catapult, features a series of videos and training modules, designed to help international students understand the classroom environment in the United States — everything from academic policies to why students have to take English and other general-education requirements.
Catapult “got me familiar with the university so I was less nervous when I came,” Wang said. Now it has become a one-stop shop that she can turn to for key resources, like information about tutoring or writing help, “without having to search all over.”
The predeparture course is part of the special programming Syracuse has put in place to improve international-student success. One in five students in the College of Arts and Sciences, Syracuse’s largest, are from overseas. Yet first-year-retention rates for international students have consistently lagged behind those of the student body as a whole, said Steven Schaffling, the college’s assistant dean of student success.
As the number of international students in the United States soared over the past decade and a half — increasing 75 percent, to almost 1.1 million, just before the pandemic — colleges paid growing attention to the academic performance of that population. Now, as institutions seek to recover from the double whammy of Covid-19 and nationalist politics hitting international enrollments, foreign-student retention and satisfaction may be more important than ever — particularly as the number of college-aged Americans declines. And learning how to support them may inform efforts to help other at-risk groups, such as first-generation students, Schaffling said.
Syracuse isn’t alone in doing targeted programming for international students. Rutgers University’s New Brunswick campus started an Office of International Academic Success in 2016. Washington State University offers special sections of popular general-education courses with extra study and writing support for international students. The University of Delaware includes faculty members in predeparture-orientation sessions it holds on the ground in popular sending countries like China and India, so that they can speak directly to students about academic issues and expectations.
You have to build trust. If they don’t know you, they don’t trust you.
Syracuse’s wraparound approach focuses on international students in the months between admission and arrival and throughout their first year. It includes practices that would make sense for any at-risk population and ones that are tailored to international students’ cultural and linguistic needs. (For example, communication with parents is emphasized because they tend to have more influence on their children than typical American parents do.)
Ling Gao LeBeau, Syracuse’s associate director of international-student success, also leads training workshops for the college’s academic advisers and serves as a resource when they want to better understand the cultural backgrounds and learning styles of their students.
LeBeau started in her role just as the Covid outbreak began, complicating her work. But the effort is now showing results: The first-year retention rate for last year’s international freshmen was 91.5 percent, the second highest on record for Syracuse’s arts and sciences college and 2.5 percentage points higher than the rate for that year’s incoming class as a whole. Persistence rates are on track to be even higher for the current academic year, Schaffling said.
International students at Syracuse who take part in student-success programming also earn better grades, report greater satisfaction with their college experience, and have more confidence in their own proficiency. In surveys, academic advisers said they, too, had grown more assured in working with foreign students.
“The one problem we have,” said Elena M. Paolini Williams, who heads up freshmen advising, “is Ling is only one person.”
Providing an ‘Instant Connection’
The focus on international students has its roots in Schaffling’s previous role, as director of university advising at Drexel University, in Philadelphia. Studying the data, he noticed that one group of students consistently “beat predictions” — that is, their academic performance as upperclassmen was much stronger than their retention rates and other academic indicators in their first year would suggest. The group: international students.
“They struggled mightily in their first year, but then they did better,” Schaffling said. “It meant that they were struggling in their transition to a U.S. college.”
When Schaffling came to Syracuse, in 2018, he decided he wanted to create programming to help international students get over that first-year hurdle. In LeBeau, a former international student from China and a veteran international educator, he found an enthusiastic partner, drawn by the unusual opportunity to focus solely on foreign students’ academic needs. “I thought, here I can make a difference,” she said.
It can be scary to come to university, especially in another country.
While the goal is straightforward, LeBeau’s approach is multifaceted. She believes in reaching students early and often, beginning soon after they are admitted to Syracuse. “You have to build trust,” she said. “If they don’t know you, they don’t trust you.”
Every student is assigned a peer mentor, an older international student typically from their home country or region. The mentors, who go through an application process and earn academic credit, first connect informally with the students over the summer by email or Zoom. Once the semester starts, they meet weekly throughout the first term. Although those meetings are not required, about 70 percent of students connect with their peer mentors, LeBeau said.
The mentors go through training and have a syllabus they follow, introducing new students to important campus offices and discussing study strategies like time management. But the mentors also respond to their advisees’ particular needs. In China, for example, students are typically tracked into areas of study based on standardized test scores, so Wang felt overwhelmed and uncertain when trying to pick a major. Conversations with her peer mentor, another Chinese student, helped her translate her interest in science and math into majoring in electrical engineering.
Students find peer mentors accessible and approachable, and they may be more willing to raise questions with them than with their academic advisers or professors, whom they see as authority figures, LeBeau said. Alejandra Garcia Calderon, a 19-year-old freshman from Bogotá, Colombia, said she talked to her mentor about where to go for academic help, but also about clubs and volunteer groups, the best places to eat around town, and even how to find certain buildings on campus. “I would have figured it out on my own,” Calderon said, “but it probably would have taken more time.”
Being able to speak Spanish with her peer mentor, who was from Peru, was critical to her adjustment to college. “It was like an instant connection,” said Calderon, an illustration and international relations double major. “It can be exhausting to be speaking English all day.” Wang said talking in Mandarin helped her ask her mentor specific and sometimes complicated questions, ones that she might have lacked the English vocabulary to articulate.
“It can be so valuable when you see someone who looks like you or has the lived experience that you do,” said Williams, the academic adviser.
Syracuse isn’t the only institution to enlist students in international-student support. Rutgers relies on students, both international and American, to teach an introduction to the American classroom course that most international undergraduates are required to take in their first semester, said Jeff Wang, who started the orientation in 2016 when he was the university’s assistant vice president for global affairs. Working with student instructors, who earn a small stipend and must take a one-credit course on pedagogy, makes the transition course sustainable, said Wang, who is now vice provost for global and immersive studies at American University, in Washington, D.C.
Some Syracuse freshmen are already looking forward to working as mentors. Mariana Zepeda Sandoval, who is from Honduras, plans to apply. While her transition to college was smooth, “that’s not the case for everyone,” she said. “It can be scary to come to university, especially in another country.”
Demystifying the Classroom
The struggle to adjust is not just a matter of homesickness. While some international students studied at high schools that specifically prepare them to go abroad, many face culture shock in the classroom. It may be their first time studying in English, leaving them scrambling to keep up with lengthy lectures or hesitant to speak up during discussions. Academic vocabulary and American idioms can both be trip wires.
Teaching and learning styles can vary widely around the world. In many countries, students learn from lectures, and they can be ill prepared for the American model of classroom discussion — much less for being graded on it. Practices for citation and attribution differ, meaning that international students can run afoul of policies on academic honesty. Small-group projects and collaborative work can be rare.
Without cultural understanding, professors and advisers can mistake international students’ behavior as a sign that they are poor students or even, in the case of plagiarism, ill intentioned. “It takes real cultural competence to work with that population,” Schaffling said.
LeBeau’s charge is to demystify the American classroom. Like other colleges, Syracuse has English-language and writing help for international students, and LeBeau tries to reinforce the availability of such resources, including in a weekly newsletter, filled with tips and deadline reminders, that she sends to international students through the social-media platforms, like WhatsApp and WeChat, that they favor. She also holds regular student-success forums, bringing in speakers to talk about study strategies, academic policies, and planning for careers and graduate school.
As educators focus on international-student success, they have to be careful how they frame the issue, said Ravi Ammigan, the associate provost for international programs at the University of Delaware. It’s not about deficits but difference, he said.
Ammigan, who is also an assistant professor of education, is the author, with Matthew Drexler, a Delaware colleague, of a recently published paper that looks at the relationship between international students’ academic outcomes, as measured by grade-point average, and their satisfaction with different aspects of their student experience.
While the findings don’t prove causation, they suggest certain actions colleges can take to improve student learning. Some of those factors are directly tied to the classroom environment — students who did well were more likely to be satisfied with the quality of teaching and have a clear understanding of assessment and grading. Support services, like workshops on time management and study and writing skills, also matter. Even activities that are meant to further students’ adjustment and sense of belonging, such as cultural programming and international-student orientation, can help them realize greater academic success, Ammigan said.
Ammigan, who first came to the United States from Mauritius as an international student, has put his research into action. In addition to getting faculty members more involved in predeparture programming, his team has made a series of short videos for incoming international students about issues such as plagiarism and where to find resources for academic supports. “We plug them in early,” he said.
Involving Parents, Educating Colleagues
Students are not the only audience for LeBeau’s academic-success programming. In the summer months, she holds weekly online sessions where she fields questions from incoming students and their parents about studying in the United States. During the academic year, she hosts two sessions a month, one in English and one in Mandarin, for parents. (As at many institutions, the largest group of international students at Syracuse is from China.) Typically, several hundred people log on.
The webinars help parents, most of whom have never studied abroad, better understand their children’s experience. “It gives parents the vocabulary to talk to them,” LeBeau said. “They’re the students’ No. 1 supporters, and we don’t want to keep them blind.” She also fills parents in about policies and deadlines through a special WeChat group.
We’re trying to tackle this from all angles.
Williams said LeBeau’s outreach helps manage international parents’ sometimes sky-high expectations. “It can put a lot of pressure on students, which isn’t always helpful,” she said.
Williams and her colleagues are the other focus of LeBeau’s work. Unlike other staff members in the office, LeBeau doesn’t have a set group of advisees. Rather, she conducts intercultural-training sessions for other advisers and compiles materials they can use as resources. On occasion, she troubleshoots specific problems or helps advisers figure out ways to more effectively work with international students.
Williams said having LeBeau on board has helped improve her understanding of her students. She now appreciates that some advisees will treat her more formally because of their cultural background. The student who wants to take all 120 credits in his major? He may have not quite grasped the concept of an American-style liberal-arts education, with its emphasis on studying across the curriculum.
LeBeau has also educated her colleagues on the ins and outs of student-visa regulations, which can play an important, but often overlooked, role in academic counseling. In most cases, international students have to take a full course load and be enrolled in in-person courses. (Rules for the latter were relaxed during the Covid-19 pandemic.) As a result, interventions that advisers might suggest for students who are struggling, such as dropping classes, may not be options.
Visa rules affect how and when foreign students can do internships. And new international students are not allowed to enter the United States until 30 days before their programs begin, so they may be rushing to find housing, set up bank accounts, and take care of other basic tasks related to moving to a foreign country, even as they are signing up for courses. It’s important to understand how pressures specific to international students can affect what happens in the classroom, Williams said. “Academics don’t happen in a bubble.”
Academic-success training specific to international students remains far from common. When Schaffling and LeBeau surveyed a group of 300 academic advisers, only about half had received such training.
Still, some colleges have gained traction with different approaches. At Washington State, representatives from the international-students and advising offices regularly attend the others’ meetings, bringing them up to speed on trends and flagging any developments, said Anna Chow, director of advising for the university’s College of Arts and Sciences.
One result of collaboration is that a required general-education course, Roots of Contemporary Issues, now has special sections for international students, where they can get extra help with writing and study skills and guidance on using library resources. Professors with experience working with international students are available for office hours, Chow said.
At Rutgers, college officials realized some international students struggled to find their academic footing beyond the first semester, so they started a team of peer international-academic coaches who work with small groups of students who need extra help. Last semester, the coaching sections were oversubscribed, said Anu Gupta, the assistant dean of global academic programs. The university also offers monthly workshops for faculty members on topics like integrating international students in the classroom and working with multilingual writers.
Such programming is run by Rutgers Global, the university’s international office, but Gupta said it has institutional support. She and the vice provost for undergraduate education on international-student success chair a monthly working group, bringing together academic deans, the heads of the writing and learning centers, the academic-conduct office, and others. It’s a space to discuss common challenges and brainstorm solutions, she said.
Now, the global and career offices are working together on a career-prep course for international students, and Gupta hopes to start orientation workshops for graduate students. “We’re trying to tackle this from all angles.”
Meanwhile, Leona Wang, the Syracuse student from China, said she’s feeling much more academically confident. And she has the grades to show it, earning a 3.85 GPA last semester.
