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Educational development is increasingly focussed on quality assurance and enhancement. Individual states/countries have their own mechanisms for assuring the student experience, and this has been accompanied by development of tools (including the UK’s National Student Survey) for capturing student opinion of our efforts. Areas where more work is needed include equity and diversity and it is perhaps time for a fresh approach. In other sectors, International Standards ensure safety, reliability and quality of products and services. Such standards also represent a stakeholder-negotiated (and therefore shared) understanding of ‘good quality’, supporting organisations in accessing new markets and permitting a fair global trade, an approach relevant to higher education. Recent publication of ISO (The International Organization for Standardization) Standard 27500 (the International Standard describing the principles and rationales behind becoming a human-centred organization) seems timely. Encouraging educational institutions to adopt this Standard may offer a strategy for addressing several issues, including internationalisation.

This chapter explores the impact of cultural adjustment on international student recruitment and first-year success. The research design consists of a full-year cohort follow-up qualitative methodology study using both undergraduate and graduate students, as well as a two-part interview process and survey of both faculty and service providers, which included 100 research participants. Researchers identified factors associated with international student recruitment and success and how they are being addressed by the research site institution. Recommendations for professional practice are discussed, along with potential areas for further research.

In New Zealand, educational institutions at all levels are being encouraged by the nation's central government to develop international markets, largely to generate revenue and to therefore decrease dependence on state funding. This chapter presents research findings which show that some managers in education are responding to this challenge by establishing and maintaining relationships to respond to international student demand, a core focus of educational marketing work. These relationships seem to allow high schools, particularly resource-constrained ones, to be able to add value to the international student experience. In this case, this includes offering language tuition and access to support people who speak the students’ languages and are familiar with their cultural frameworks as part of the experience. Given the benefits to international students, and to the schools themselves, could this kind of relational approach be considered an example of leadership in international education marketing?

This chapter presents a comparative perspective on international education in Canada and Australia in the light of recent federal proposals for improving international education programs. The study provides an account of the multiple benefits of international education and introduces the concept of public sector entrepreneurship (PSE) as a necessity for creating and administering comprehensive programs, aimed at increasing Canada’s share of the international education market. The chapter compares Canadian and Australian international education policies with a special emphasis on the entrepreneurial approach applied in Australia. Moreover, the chapter discusses potential contributions to Canadian human capital through attractive immigration policies for international graduates. The findings reveal that Canada needs centralized management of international education programs. Following the Australian model, the establishment of a specialized agency to administer programs at federal level and to coordinate activities at provincial level is essential for success. PSE is represented by applying a market approach and revising residency and immigration strategies. Further research is required for a more detailed analysis of the costs and benefits of necessary capital investments and implications of changing the policy framework governing skilled migration.

We explore the validity of Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) scores and grade point averages (GPAs) for predicting comprehensive student performance in an accelerated-cohort masters of accountancy (MA) program from 2002 through 2009. We confirm findings of prior studies that graduate accounting student performance increases in GMAT scores and undergraduate GPAs; however, undergraduate GPA is significant only for U.S. students. International student performance is overwhelmingly explained by language ability, as measured by GMAT verbal and analytical writing scores. When performance is defined as job placement with a public accounting firm after graduation, we find no significant association between performance and either GMAT scores or undergraduate GPA. Additionally, the factors that are significantly associated with obtaining a job in public accounting differ for U.S. and international students. These findings may have implications for admission decisions and curriculum design of U.S. graduate accounting programs.

The international student population is steadily increasing. However, we know little about what happens to their academic motivation as they transit from their home culture into a new host culture. This gap in knowledge needs to be addressed given that motivation is a key driver of academic success. The aim of this chapter is to examine factors that can influence international students' academic motivation during and after transition. Three broad theoretical frameworks drawn from the acculturation literature – culture learning theory, stress and coping theory, and social identification theory – are proffered to help understand the impact of the transition on student motivation. It seems inevitable that student motivation will generally decline during the early phases of the transition. This may be due to the differences in sociocultural norms between the home and host culture, the variety of stressors that international students face, and the potential impact of stereotyping and discrimination. However, the extent and duration of this decline could be moderated by a variety of personal (e.g., language proficiency, personality, acculturation strategies, reasons for going abroad) and contextual (e.g., cultural distance, social support) factors. Examples of intervention programs that can buffer against motivational decline are given. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Cambodian and Laotian students (CLS) are among the largest groups of international students in intra-ASEAN student mobility as well as in Vietnamese higher education institutions (HEIs). However, little has been researched on the factors influencing CLS’s decision to choose Vietnam as destination country. The purpose of this study is to investigate why CLS decide to go overseas and choose Vietnam as their host country among other opportunities as well as their perceptions of the decision.

Using qualitative methods and employing purposive sampling, data were collected by semi-structured interviews from CLS studying in a HEI in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. The data were analysed against the push–pull framework to understand factors influencing the participants’ decision.

The findings show that CLS in the study were “pushed” by the perceived higher value of a foreign qualification and family encouragements. In terms of pull factors, they were attracted to choose Vietnam as the host country most observably due to scholarship opportunities. However other pull factors were also significant, especially the lack of certain skills in home countries and its congruence with Vietnam’s competitive strength in offering courses for those skills. In retrospect, the participants expressed a sense of optimism, though there was also certain reservation.

The small sample restrict the generalisability of the findings.

As an exploratory study, the findings can lay the ground for largerscale studies investigating CLS mobility in Vietnam and be employed for inbound student mobility policymaking reference for HEIs in Vietnam as well as in other developing countries.

This study investigates why Cambodian and Laotian international students decide to go to Vietnam, a developing country in the lesser-known part of international student mobility landscape. This is a topic that remains under-researched in the Asia-bound student mobility literature. Insights from the study can not only contribute to the scholarly gap but also offer implications for HEIs in Vietnam and other Asian countries.

This chapter contributes to the literature on surveillance in education toward the development of a new branch of studies in educational surveillance that foregrounds the intersections of surveillance with international education, internationalization in higher education, and the global competition for international student enrollments. This study examines the literature on the Student Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a web-based data collection system that provides a pervasive surveillance mechanism to track the activities and locations of non-immigrant international students studying in the United States. Through a qualitative content analysis, I identified key themes evident in the literature; the findings serve as a measure of the current (though dated) state of research on SEVIS while also identifying that which is not examined or discussed in this scholarship. Often taken for granted as a background necessity for national security and labor market protection in relation to hosting international students, SEVIS is regrettably under-examined from student-centered, student affairs, and critical surveillance studies perspectives. In presenting the findings of this literature analysis, this chapter provides a research agenda for future empirical study of SEVIS and the surveillance of international students.

Drawing on a theoretical framework of sustainable career ecosystem theory, our paper aims to consider how domestic and international postgraduates can enhance their employability through participation in a landscape of practice.

The study employed an exploratory, longitudinal case study design to capture students' lived experiences on an 18-month Master of Professional Practice course at a higher education institution in New Zealand. The data collection procedure involved field note observations (months 1–4), a focus group (month 13) and narrative frames (months 16–18). The sample was domestic students from New Zealand (n = 2) and international students from Asia (n = 5).

One’s participation in multiple communities of practice represents their landscape of practice and a commitment to lifewide learning. Through participation in various communities of practice, domestic and international students can enhance their employability in three ways: (1) boundary encounters to develop social capital, (2) transcending contexts to enhance cultural capital, and (3) acknowledging the development of psychological capital and career agency.

Our work offers one of the earliest empirical validations of sustainable career ecosystem theory. Expressly, communities of practice represent various contexts whereby employability capital is developed over time. Additionally, the postgraduate students themselves are portrayed as interconnected and interdependent actors, presenting a novel framing of such dependencies at the micro-level of the ecosystem. The practical implications come from informing universities of the value of a landscape of practice to enhance the employability of domestic and international students in preparation for sustainable careers and to promote the sustainability of the career ecosystem.

This paper reports on findings from an ethnographic study of international student adjustment. The paper recommends the use of ethnography as a way to research the experiences of tourists and migrants to build up a body of knowledge on the outcome of cross-cultural contact for these two groups. The aim of my ethnographic study was to capture the adjustment journey of a group of international postgraduate students at a university in the South of England. The ethnographic approach involved regular in-depth individual interviews with 13 students of different nationalities and overt participant observation of the entire postgraduate cohort of 150 students. Research began on the first day of induction in September 2003 and ended upon completion and submission of the Masters dissertation in October 2004. Students' experience of adjustment to academic and socio-cultural life was therefore captured from arrival in the new country to the return home one full year later. This study finds that stress was at its height in the initial stage of the academic sojourn; the struggle to cope with the challenges of foreign language use and an unfamiliar academic and the socio-cultural environment at a time when students were beset with homesickness and loneliness are the causes of this stress. An association was made between the passage of time and a gradual decrease in acculturative stress; however, this was not a generalisable process; there was fluctuation not only in experience across the student body but also in the individual's subjective sense of success across different aspects of life in the new country. This led to the conceptualisation of the adjustment journey as an unpredictable and dynamic process that is experienced differently among sojourners and fluctuates throughout the sojourn as a result of a host of individual, cultural and external factors. The relevance of this study to tourism scholars comes from drawing parallels between the long-stay tourist and the international student who represents an important segment of international travel. However, a gap in the literature exists on the impact of tourism on the tourist that this study helps to fill.