Who Will Advise the Next Generation?

Part I: The International Education Talent Pipeline Is Breaking

by Shaun Morgan, COO The Global Nexus Collective/SIO UMass Boston

In the current climate, there are many issues that are top of mind in International Education: the decline in enrollment, visa delays, internship opportunities, post-graduation support, and creating welcoming environments on campuses when there is a perceived unwelcoming atmosphere at the federal level. These are real problems that impact the field. However, there’s a problem in international education we do not talk about enough.

Universities are having difficulty staffing international student and scholar offices.

Open positions can be vacant for months. Searches produce small applicant pools. Candidates who seem promising may have strong student affairs or higher education experience but little knowledge of immigration regulations, SEVIS, or the daily realities of international student advising, leading to failed searches and time and resources wasted- all just to begin the process again.

And when an experienced professional leaves, replacing that person is often much harder than posting the position and starting a search. The reason is simple. We are losing a lot of institutional knowledge, and we have not done enough to build up the next generation of professionals who can replace it.

This is bigger than a hiring problem.

International student and scholar offices have changed significantly over the last decade. The work has become more complicated, while the consequences of getting something wrong have become more serious.

A professional in an international student office may spend the morning advising a student about maintaining F-1 status, then work on a J-1 scholar issue, respond to a federal policy change, help a student dealing with a visa problem, answer a question from a faculty member, and deal with an urgent situation involving a student who is outside the United States. And we are still dealing with visa revocations and ICE sweeps in neighborhoods that are impacting our international communities, as ISSOs are expected to be “on top of it all.”

The job of an ISSO advisor requires technical knowledge. It also requires the ability to exercise judgment. And that judgment takes time to be fostered and developed.

You cannot learn the nuances of immigration advising from a job description, reading articles, or taking a course alone. You learn them by working through hundreds of cases, talking with colleagues, attending professional development programs, asking questions, making mistakes, and gradually developing a sense of where the risks are.

That is why losing an experienced international student advisor can have a far greater impact than the vacancy on an organizational chart suggests.

You lose institutional memory. You lose someone who knows why a particular process exists. Someone who remembers how the office, and the university, handled the last policy change. Someone who knows which questions need to be escalated, and which ones can be resolved quickly. That expertise is difficult to replace.

We have an experience problem.

There is another issue here that also deserves attention. Many positions in our field require experience that is difficult for new professionals to obtain. An institution may advertise a position and ask for several years of international student advising experience, knowledge of F-1 and J-1 regulations, SEVIS experience, and familiarity with federal reporting requirements. Those are reasonable expectations for many positions, but where is the entry point?

A graduate student interested in international education may have an excellent academic background, international experience, and a genuine interest in working with students. They may have spent years studying higher education, international relations, student affairs, or public policy, but they may not know how to navigate a SEVIS record.

They may not know the difference between a program extension and a reinstatement. They may have never prepared an I-20 or DS-2019. They may not understand the difference between an I-539, an I-765 or an I-983. That does not mean they lack potential; it means nobody has trained them yet.

We have created an experience paradox. We want people with specialized experience, but we have not always created enough intentional pathways for people to

acquire that experience.

We also need to talk about the career itself.

International education is a remarkable profession. I’m not sure we do a good enough job explaining that to people who might enter it, however.

There is a wide variety of work that can be undertaken within the sector.  You can advise students, work with faculty and researchers, develop partnerships, manage compliance, respond to federal policy, support recruitment, lead study abroad programs, work on internationalization strategy, or eventually move into senior university leadership.

You can build a career around one area or develop expertise across several. The work puts you at the intersection of higher education, immigration, diplomacy, public policy, and global affairs.

As a potential career, that is incredibly interesting. No one day is a repeat of another, and there are always changes and challenges. However, I rarely see international education presented to students as a career field in the same way that we talk about academic advising, residence life, admissions, enrollment management, or higher education administration.

As leaders, this is one of our biggest failures. We have not developed a pipeline, and we do not celebrate or advertise our field.  A student who spends four years studying international relations should know that an international student and scholar office is a potential career destination. A graduate student studying higher education should know that international education is an area where they can build deep professional expertise.

Someone who has worked with international students as a student employee should see a path into the profession.

And yet too much of this happens by accident.

Someone has a great experience working with international students. They meet someone at a conference. They take an assistantship. They apply for a position they happen to see. Then they discover a profession they did not know existed.

We can do better than that.

In next month’s blog and newsletter, Shaun Morgan outlines pathways to nurture the International Education pipeline.