International student services offered at United States community colleges

• In Event: Impact on internationalization for the public good in community colleges and polytechnics

Proposal

Introduction
This paper presents the first national exploration of the range and depth of international student services offered at U.S. community colleges. Over the decades, there has been a common call for colleges that enroll international students to have specific institutional responsibilities to serve the international student population (Breuder, 1972; Hagedorn, 2020). Services include campus-community links (Slantcheva-Durst & Knaggs, 2019) and student advising practices (Hardaye et al., 2018; Zhang, 2017).

Conceptual Frameworks
We use two conceptual frameworks to guide this study. An argument for institutional support for international students is grounded in the community college open access mission to educate all students. A lack of support and funding sustains systemic inequities in which some students get support and others do not. We use Stein and de Andreotti’s (2016) framework of incentives for enrolling international students: a) cash, b) competition, and c) charity. We add to this the incentive to meet the mission of open access. We use Raby and Zhang’s (2020) International Student Social Cartography to categorize theoretical patterns in community college international student service literature.

Literature Review
This study fills a gap in U.S. community college international student services literature. The literature includes: a) advocacy, in which international students are seen as important components of the college mission (Brennen & Dellow, 2013; Zhang & Hagedorn, 2013); b) development of support services as a pre-requisite for having an international student program (Frost, 2002, Lee, 2014); and c) integration of international students as a component to build human capital through higher education (Lau, Garza, & Garcia, 2019; Slantcheva-Durst & Knaggs, 2019). Missing is the understanding of the range and depth of services offered.

Methodology
This study used the Community College International Education Research Initiative (CCIERI) comprehensive inventory of international education at community colleges. This study analyzed summaries of all US community college websites that enrolled international students in 2024-2025 (N=755; 82% of all community colleges). We applied a multi-step data collection and analysis process: 1) comprehensive review of each community college website on the CCIERI dataset (Nyarko et al., 2025) using the site-internal website search function; 2) written summary of international student services at each college; 3) in-vivo data coding of written summaries; and 4) collapsed smaller codes into broader categories The coding is on-going and we will present a deeper analysis of findings within this framework at the CIES conference.
Findings
Preliminary findings help to address gaps in the field: 1) many types of services are offered to international students, 2) most popular services are those of recruiting, housing, and finance. 3) least popular are services such as clubs, tutoring, and mental health.

Conclusion
In this study, we ask about the current state of the field for community college international student programs. We found that 82% of all US community colleges enroll international students. We then asked what specific services are in the college to support international student success. We found that most colleges offer detailed admission policies but lack details about student support.

Authors

• Rosalind Latiner Raby, Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education JCIHE

• Melissa Whatley, William and Mary