Road Map Strategic Priority 6 ’deep dive’

The Strategic Priority 6 team (Internationalization: Support, promote and enhance strategic internationalization efforts through high-impact learning, teaching, research and engagement) presented its deep dive to the Road Map Steering Committee at its July 28 meeting.

Madhusudhan Govindaraju, vice provost for international education and global affairs, reviewed the team’s mission statement and noted the team is working on six goals: 1) being a welcoming campus that’s inclusive to international students, 2) evaluating how well the campus is integrated, 3) determining what it means to be successful, 4) looking at the global footprint of our campus, 5) education abroad, and 6) making us a premier choice for international students.

Patricia Bello, assistant provost for international education and global affairs, spoke about the first goal.

Goal 1: Being a welcoming campus that’s inclusive to international students

“We are focusing on office-hosted events and activities and honing in on the percentage of international students who participate,” Bello said. “Our target is 20%, noting that our current participation rate is about 13% from the events we dove into. We’re looking at events that have been long-standing and also can be advertised and tracked through B-Engaged so can pull the information consistently. We hope to be able to identify majors and other data moving forward and pulling more events in.”

The events the team looked at were Conversation Pairs, International Coffee Hour, the annual Multicultural Extravaganza co-sponsored with the Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, and the Education Abroad Fair.

• Conversation Pairs (measured by number of participants)

Bello explained the Conversation Pairs program, which she said is cherished by the campus, and used the pairing between Madeline Timerman and Sujeeth Selvam as an example. “They get together for him to practice English and he exposes her to language and culture,” she said. “This highlights how students interact. We started looking at the 2020-21 academic year when 204 students participated. In 2021-22, there were 244 participants.”

• International Coffee Hours (tracked by unique attendees)

The coffee hours are held the first Friday of every month, Bello said. “It’s a great program that we shifted to Old Champlain. In 2020-21, we only had 33 attendees, but the next year went up to 211,” she said. “However, in fall 2019 alone, we had over 500 participants when it was held in a more central location in The Union.”

• Education Abroad Fair (tracked by unique attendees

The Education Abroad Fair admittedly had some constraints in 2020-21, Bellow said, “but the interest was still there and we held it on a SUNY platform with 205 students.

“The next year we had 495 students as programs were reopening and relaunching post-pandemic,” she said. “It really does tie to an inclusive environment. Some of our students host tables at the fair and all of our international students here are on an education abroad experience.”

• Multicultural Extravaganza (tracked by total attendees)

“The reason we track attendance in totality for this is because it’s not set up in B-Engaged,” Bello said. “It’s amazingly well-attended and we have the opportunity to work with them so that we can get more granular data. Students report back that it’s one of their favorite events to attend.”

Roughly 13% of our international students are engaging in these events and we’ve set a 20% attendance goal, Bello said. “We’ll look for continued opportunities to work with people proactively to step up B-Engaged use, expand the sources and marketing of events to grow awareness, and look for continued collaboration with departments to expand our reach.”

Goal 2: Evaluating how well the campus is integrated

The Student Association (SA) and Graduate Student Organization (GSO) host events that foster international and domestic student engagement as tracked by B-Engaged, Bello continued.

“There is no shortage of meetings and activities to consider, but we held a lot of focus groups and we landed on SA and GSO events,” she said.

The target is to reach at least 10% of the entire student body participating in one of these programs, Bello said. “The humble pie is that our current percentage is anecdotal because it’s not been tracked consistently,” she said. In addition, social distancing factors during the pandemic affected events. “We’ll keep working with the students with outreach to encourage them to utilize B-Engaged for these events,” she said. “And because the MRC Extravaganza is co-sponsored by the MRC and SA, and it’s one of the events most looked forward to each year, we’re trying to work with them to cultivate the data.”

The GSO fall celebration, also extremely well-attended presents another opportunity to make use of B-Engaged moving forward, she added.

“There will be continued opportunities and we will continue to be proactive, to expand participation and be open to including more tracking, and to encourage collaboration between existing hosts and new partners,” Bello said. “We don’t want to water down data, and there are still a lot of ideas to be ironed out. We’re catching up and excited to do it.”

Goal 3: Determining what it means to be successful

Govindaraju addressed the goal of how to prepare international students for success, noting that 100% of international students should be engaged in a career pathway experience, but the target will remain at 75% for now because it should be tracked data. “We’re trying to figure out a way to consistently collect the data,” he said. “What would it be for us to say the student has a successful career pathway experience?”

The Fleishman Center for Career and Professional Development is using a new tool called Interstride to assist international students in their job searches, Govindaraju said. “It’s a power tool for international student job searches that tell us which companies hire international students, for example. We used Road Map funds to subscribe and we’re pushing it out to all international students so they have a way of searching out the jobs, and they have a lifelong membership in Interstride even after they leave Binghamton.”

Because of Binghamton’s usage and interaction with Interstride, the company listed us on their website as an important university they are connecting with, Govindaraju said. In 2019-20, there were 162 uses of Interstride, and that jumped to 359 in 2020-21, and 608 in 2021-22. “It’s a social media platform as well and we want students to use it for searching and networking.”

Kelli Smith, assistant vice president for student success, addressed career outcomes for international students, compared to those for domestic students.

“Many people are often wanting to know about career outcomes and we have the goal of ensuring that every student we have has as much of an equal outcome as possible,” Smith said. “At first blush, it doesn’t look fabulous because every year in the past three years the international students’ outcomes have not been as high as for our domestic students. I’d like to point out that it’s important to look at it in terms of time and we have started to shrink the gap. It’s important to note that.”

Smith added that, though Interstride is important, it’s also important to know that our students really desire that one-on-one and personal connection. International students who average 3.6 appointments with the Fleishman center placed at a higher level than those who averaged 1.25 appointments.

Looking at a median starting salary comparison of international versus domestic students shows a good trajectory in the last couple of years according to a survey of over 180 students, Smith said.

Looking at high-impact experiences, the group wanted to break out going back to that mind the gap, Smith said. Can we see that the gap has shrunk for both internships as well as research/creative activities and capstone/honors/theses? We still have some work to do and a goal of students doing better, but we are seeing some progress.”

As for total student reach, domestic versus international, this is specific to Fleishman and the number of appointments, Smith said. “We can decide later on if we want to include this, but we want to share that we have not gotten back to the 2020 level — a mostly normal year in terms of engagement — for appointments and attendance at a program or event. We’re hoping that, as we go into this nest year, we are doing better, but we have fewer international students so that has an impact,” Smith said. “Now that we’re getting back to normal, we hope this moves back and we will continue to monitor it and the international student usage of Fleishman. We’re watching in terms of trends and working to getting back on track.”

Bello reviewed a number of achievements for international students, including the Graduate Student Excellence Awards. In the most recent year, five of the 13 awards for excellence in teaching went to international students, as did one of the five service awards, and 10 of the 16 research awards.

The team also looked at employment applications processed for F-1 degree-seeking students, and into curricular practical training (CPT), optional practical training (OPT) and STEM OPT. “It’s worth noting that 727 applications (45% of the University’s international student population) were processed,” Bello said. “That is a decent number even with federal rules and regulations out of our control.”

The traditional measure of our student success is by graduation rate, said Nasrin Fatima, associate provost for assessment and analytics. “But we also looked at the gap,” she said. “However, it is extremely difficult to get retention and graduation rates at the major level, so we’re considering time to degree, but that also has limitations because it doesn’t account for students who leave.

“We thought, what if we could create a student path from entry to exit, when they’re coming, when they’re declaring their major, if they continue it and when they graduate or change it or leave?”she said.

“So we created a dashboard. We can do this with different populations, gender, ethnicity, admissions quality, all sorts of variables,” she said, using fall 2016 Harpur cinema students as an example. Initially, of 1,498 of the Harpur students were undeclared and of them, 148 were international. Of the 148, six became cinema majors, with three declaring at the end of their second semester and three at the end of their third semester. The dashboard showed that all six graduated.

Looking at the fall 2018 computer science cohort, of 154 computer science majors, seven were international. One student left after one semester and came back after three. One changed major after the second semester to math. One student graduated after seven semesters and the other five remained enrolled for 100% still retained at Binghamton, even if they were in a different major.

“This can be looked at in many ways with many variables,” Fatima said.

Goal 4: Looking at the global footprint of our campus

To evaluate the positive impact the University has on the global community, Govindaraju said the team settled on looking at meaningful partnerships, with the goal of 150 new and meaningful partnerships each year.

“Based on our trackers, we have close to 100, so 150 is ambitious,” he said. “They include most schools and universities we are connected with who are sending us students. In Europe, it’s mostly education abroad programs, in Asia it’s mostly MOUs and 3+2 programs. We have the dual diploma program with Turkey and many other partnerships and we have a positive impact on the entire cities where these partners are located.”

There are new opportunities, along with challenges to identify new strategic partners, Govindaraju said. “How can we engage? We want to find new ways to have alumni become part of our pipelines,” he said. “Our branding has to be continuously updated. We understand we are the #1 SUNY and students look at rankings outside of U.S. News, so we’re looking at where they are getting their data and want to make sure we know what those rankings are. We have a story of why we are where we are in those rankings, our ‘Why Binghamton?’ answers. New stories help.”

Govindaraju added that there is a focus on using the Slate CRM to improve the pipeline of applications for graduate admissions, to provide more feedback to departments and to improve student experience of those applying to Binghamton.

Goal 5: Education abroad

“We want to return to 500 students a year and increase that by 10% per year for next three years,” Bello said. “It has been labor-intensive to restart but not without enthusiasm. One hundred sixty-four students have gone abroad or are in the fall pipeline and that doesn’t include the spring.”

The United Kingdom, Italy and Spain are the most popular destinations for our students. “We’re now resuming again and very excited about it,” Bello said.

Continued factors for consideration by students studying abroad are equity and access/opportunity costs, dispelling the myth that studying abroad will delay graduation, health/safety and risk assessment, she added. “But we are working through it. We have looked into virtual opportunities, but the reality is that our students want the experience and not a virtual one. We will continue to look at these and remove some of the barriers, potentially offering major and minor credit for courses offered abroad.”

As far as making education abroad more accessible to students, passports can be an issue, Bello said. “Students need a passport for financial aid and some students don’t have the $140 for a passport,” she said. Removing that barrier could potentially open a door for students. “It’s just an idea, but passport access itself removes barriers.”

Goal 6: Making us a premier choice for international students

There are two ways of looking at making Binghamton University a premier choice for international students, Govindaraju said. “For graduate students, how many are coming to the U.S. to study and our goal is to increase the percentage of students from 32% to 45%. For undergraduates, our goal is to increase by 200 deposits.”

“The international graduate student participant share is a reach, but what are those big ideas we can implement to change students’ opinion so Binghamton is a choice for them?” Govindaraju asked. “We need to change from just looking at numbers to making sure Binghamton is considered by students, so we’re looking at outreach.

We don’t want to lose our existing cohort of students,” he added. “It makes sense to look at countries where students are coming to the U.S. from. We are aware of what it means to the U.S. and what it means to our own pipeline.”

Students will focus on global rankings and we want to change the mindset with new videos and new stories to show what our students are doing, Govindaraju said. “All universities have these same constraints of travel and visa issues. We understand the competitive environment. But there is a perception of lack of safety and we want to be more aggressive in tracking outcomes data, building a stronger alumni network and doing a more deep analysis of international student retention and graduation.”

We will look at English requirements and other things to see what barriers there are and what we can do with helping students to move forward with their applications, Govindaraju said. “And we will use focus groups. We’re working with communications and marketing for an updated social media presence as well.

Wrapping up the presentation, Govindaraju reviewed what the SP6 team had used its funding allocation for.

Marketing, including subscriptions for WeChat and Weibo to reach prospects in China, are gaining Binghamton some traction, he said.

Funding was also used to support graduate admissions and for a collaboration with student records. “We looked at application data for students who are here and performed and graduated,” he said. “Our data goal is to create an admissions support system so when we see a student apply, we can look at similar students and their performances.

“It’s just a start and we want to go to graduate directors now and get data so we can supply them with information. We want to see what a good pipeline is for us and see if there are any interventions needed,” he said. “This will help us answer what kind of predictive modeling we can do and what our approach should be to make predictions about a student prospect and whether the student is expected to be a success on our campus.”