Page 35 - Movers, Shapers, and Everything in Between: Influencers of the International Student Experience

Introduction
There is no question that the number of international students worldwide is increasing: there are now 4.6 million globally mobile students (OECD, 2017), more than double the number since 2000. An understanding of student satisfaction is critical to develop policies and practices that effectively support a diverse student population (Altbach & Knight, 2007) and provide global educational experiences (Arkoudis, Dollinger, Baik, & Patience, 2018). Universities have begun to pay close attention to the experience of international students as competition for these students spreads beyond the traditional destination countries to education hubs and major sending countries now emerging as receiving countries (de Wit, Ferencz, & Rumbley, 2012; de Wit, Hunter, & Coelen, 2015).
Ensuring international student satisfaction offers a competitive advantage, with links to increased student loyalty (Thomas, 2011), retention (Schreiner, 2009), and higher word-of-mouth recommendation (Garrett & Merola, 2018). There is evidence that international students differ from domestic students in their adjustment to the university experience (Hechanova-Alampay et al., 2002; Aubrey, 1991). Universities can facilitate interaction between domestic and international students through curriculum design and pedagogic interventions (Leask, 2009; Leask & Carroll, 2011). Going straight to the source, data gathered from students themselves can be a useful tool to create and carry out the policies, practices, and interventions that will influence their experience (Smith & Khawaja, 2011), including internationalization of the curriculum (Knight, 2004). Scholarly research on the experience of international students extends close to a century, however, existing literature points to a key sub-question that merits further analysis: how do academic and social integration influence a student’s level of satisfaction? In this study, satisfaction is viewed as a short-term attitude that can be measured (Athiyaman, 1997) and defined as “a common evaluation based on the result of the product perceived” (Fornell, 1992)—in this case, the ‘product’ is the university experience.
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The Role of Integration
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