Page 121 - Movers, Shapers, and Everything in Between: Influencers of the International Student Experience
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international students, the lower the satisfaction with life. Comments used to interpret the results indicate that interaction and integration were frequently addressed-both of which depend on the density of international students.
University characteristics such as reputation become relevant when considering the student experience from an organizational perspective. A study by Lenton (2015) found that traditional universities in the UK scored higher than modern universities in the National Student Satisfaction (NSS) survey. They believe this is because “traditional universities provide better teaching quality, or alternatively that the reputation of these universities serves, rightly or wrongly, to signal a better quality student to employers, a so-called ‘sheepskin effect’, making the students perceive themselves as more employable in the labour market and hence more satisfied with their university programme quality” (p. 124). A study by Pitan and Muller (2019) develops this idea further, suggesting that graduates of universities with high reputations may have better employment prospects than graduates of universities with low reputations. A university’s reputation may serve as a signaling mechanism in the labor market and/or an indication of a high-quality learning environment; both would likely have a positive impact on student satisfaction.
The results indicate that there is a need to better understand why universities with a higher proportion of international students have lower life satisfaction among international students. Bean’s (1983) model of student turnover helps explain this finding because it assumes that a student’s beliefs are influenced by his or her experiences at the institution, which become his or her attitudes toward the institution, and ultimately shape his or her sense of belonging to the institution. An individual’s sense of belonging, defined as “the experience of personal involvement in a system or environment so that persons feel themselves to be an integral part of that system or environment” (Hagerty et al., 1992, p. 172), is an important component of adjustment for visiting students (Severiens & Wolff, 2008; Rienties et al., 2012). It is possible that students at universities with a high proportion of
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Discussion and Conclusions
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