Page 126 - Movers, Shapers, and Everything in Between: Influencers of the International Student Experience
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Chapter 6
health. Because IBCs often do not provide the same student support services as the home campus (Altbach, 2010; Wilkins et al., 2012), it is critical that IBCs provide resources tailored to the needs of their own students. This may require greater campus investment-one study found that the majority of IBCs outsourced advising, career counseling, and other support areas to part-time specialists, with only a handful of the largest IBCs having full-time staff in these areas (Wilkins, 2020).
In addition, IBC leaders and academic staff must cultivate a sense of community, both in person and virtually, that meets the needs of their own students. IBCs tend to be smaller than home universities, which can be beneficial in fostering a sense of community and identity. The interviews suggest that as learning moves online, IBCs that do not offer a sense of community will not offer many advantages over enrolling in a degree program online.
Viewed through the lens of the Global Integration-Local Responsiveness (I-R) framework, the pandemic has recalibrated the balance between integration and local responsiveness. The leaders interviewed were able to manage the conflicting forces that exist in operating an IBC: the need to be global and local at the same time; to make students 6,000 kilometers away feel part of the campus community; to conduct research that is both locally impactful and valuable to the institution; and to provide an education that is equally valuable across campuses, yet contextualized to the local environment. The mix of determination and sensitivity required to balance these competing forces at IBCs may have helped leaders quickly adapt to and navigate the COVID-19 pandemic.
theoretiCAl And prACtiCAl impliCAtionS of reSeArCh
Theoretical Implications
The findings of this research shed light on Student Involvement Theory, which has been fundamental to the formation of the research in this thesis. Student involvement is defined by Astin (1999) as the “amount of physical and psychological energy that the student devotes to the academic experience” (p. 518). Astin hypothesizes that the more a