Guidelines on international student recruitment

The practice of using college placement services among international students has been contested by many and embraced by others. The new National Association for College Admission Counseling International Student Recruitment Agencies guide is a much needed resource for schools, colleges and universities.

Chinese university's effort to teach value of labor backfires in filth

Nanchang University's president Zhou implemented a policy to require students to clean their own residence halls, bathrooms, trash, and all. The strategy, designed to cultivate willingness to labor among young people who are largely pampered as only children, backfired in mounds of garbage and filth, not to speak of the students who personally hired back the workers who used to do the cleaning in the halls.

Student development 101 tells us that any challenging new learning opportunity requires scaffolding or bridging from a former stage to the next. This example pushes the envelop in terms of how a student affairs educator might work to foster student willingness to work while not collapsing into unpleasant, and likely unhealthy, living conditions.

Higher education and workforce alignment

Saying that graduates of higher education need “soft skills as well as an entrepreneurial mind so that they will always see obstacles as an opportunity” a University World News article reinforced that resilience to a changing world and shifting job opportunities is essential, In another UWN article by Hans DeWit, an additional strategy to enhance employability within EU countries is internships or work abroad. DeWit noted, "in the United States the main driver for study abroad at the undergraduate level is to make students less parochial and more interculturally and globally competent, in Europe academic rationales and – increasingly – the employability rationale are more dominant.." The point of both of these articles was that more attention should be paid in international partnerships to the ultimate outcomes of preparing students for both international work and citizenship.