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Staff of international student and scholar offices (ISSOs) have had a difficult few years. In 2017, Executive Order 13769 (which implemented a 90-day ban on entry of foreign nationals from six countries: Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen) caused panic across college campuses for the approximately 17,000 international students from these banned countries (IIE Fall 2016 International Student enrollment survey). Only a few years later, the COVID-19 pandemic led to the closure of college campuses, inciting chaos for students whose dorms had been closed and who were unable or unwilling to return home unexpectedly. Further confusion ensued as classes moved online and international students and ISSO staff alike were navigating how that would affect students’ visas (international students are required to take a majority of their classes in-person).
Now, a wave of visa denials — 35% of student visa applications were rejected in 2022 — has caused an uptick of frustrated admitted students who are unable to secure the visa to allow them to come study in the U.S. (The Cato Institute). ISSO staff have often been caught in the crossfire of changing international policies, and it shows: the 2023 NAFSA conference included a fifty-minute presentation called “Banish Burnout: Managing Your Well-Being and Supporting Positive Team Morale,” aimed at helping ISSO staff “achieve life and career goals without sacrificing [their] mental health” (2023 Annual NAFSA Conference).
I spoke to three higher education professionals — two who currently work in ISSO offices and one who had worked in an ISSO and has since left (but still works in higher education) – to learn more about the struggles they faced as ISSO staff members, and what their institutions could be doing to better support their office; all of whom chose to remain anonymous.
Heavy Workloads
In all of our conversations, they uniformly underscored just how difficult working in an international student office is. The person who has since left said of their time in an ISSO, “It was a very high workload, made more difficult by the unrealistic timelines that were expected of us,” while one of the staff members working at an ISSO in a public research university in the Midwest said, “The caseload is a lot, and I don’t even have the biggest caseload in my office. It’s too much — we have appointments, then there’s drop-in advising, and then you only have so much time to actually do the paperwork… But then you have to turn to your email where everybody is asking where their paperwork is, and that repetitiveness makes for a lot of really frustrated staff.” Another ISSO staff member, who works for a private research university in the Northeast, spoke to the impact that additional resources can make: “I believe there is much more we could do to improve the quality of support international students are receiving. However, this is not possible with the current workload. To improve the quality of support, we need to be able to have the time to dedicate to one-on-one support for each student but are currently unable to do so with workloads… Last fall, we were able to prioritize rebuilding our student services team with additional resources. Since doing this, we have been able to expand student programming, events, and international student orientation modalities. We were successful in holding several large events and have been able to increase our collaborative events with other departments and student organizations.”
A Lack of Support
All the people I spoke to had also, during their time working in an ISSO, experienced burnout or felt like there were not enough resources available to support them as workers. “In terms of resources that supported us as individuals helping other humans,” the person who has left their position in an ISSO said, “that was a lot harder. We can’t be good advisors if we’re not being taken care of first… [My office] had so few people that it was very difficult for staff to manage that volume in a healthy way, and ultimately students suffered because we just didn’t have the capacity or bandwidth to address some of their needs… The environment of my office was definitely part of why I chose to leave. I was in search of a more supportive work environment that would take care of me, and in turn, enable me to take care of the people that I was providing service to.” Similarly, the staff member working at the public university in the Midwest said, “I think for the majority of my career, it’s been a lot of high pressure. One of my former colleagues at an ISSO used the phrase ‘secondhand trauma,’ because you’re dealing with people who are directly impacted by everything that’s going on in our immigration policies, and we have to hear that and help them through that within the limitations of a visa. And that’s really hard.”
What Institutions Can Do
So how could institutions better support their staff? The individuals I spoke to were happy to share a few ideas. One common complaint the higher education professionals I spoke to faced was feeling underpaid for the scope of the work that they were doing and the need for either more staff or higher compensation (or both). One of the staff members I spoke to who is still working at an ISSO (and, in fact, has worked for three different ISSOs over the course of their career) said, “Why aren’t we getting more money, why aren’t we getting more staff? If we had even another advisor in the office, that would make such a huge impact in our day-to-day work.” The staff member who has since left the ISSO added, “I think, as a whole, this field is underpaid, and people outside of that work don’t realize how much work we do. Aside from needing institutional knowledge, there’s a massive law and regulatory component… and I think that requirement to know regulatory information should bring with it a higher pay grade. The higher education professional who works for a private university in the Northeast responded, “I love my job and enjoy being able to work on projects that improve the international student experience. However, I often find myself frustrated that no matter how much I do, the student experience cannot be greatly impacted without additional resources to adjust the current workload. There are times where I experience burnout and question what I am doing, but there are also times where I am talking with students or attending events where I am reminded of my purpose. I am still able to find balance in my work, but a lesser workload would improve job satisfaction.”
Aside from the need for more staff and higher pay — which are not necessarily uncommon among higher education staff — the higher education professionals I spoke to also addressed the need for more understanding from leadership of the role the ISSO plays in supporting international students: “There were directives from leadership that did not align with what we realistically knew the students needed, because those directives were driven by enrollment deposits and the population. [In my office], we serviced a lot more than newly admitted or enrolled international students. And there’s a lot more to international education than just getting them in the door,” said the higher educational professional no longer working in international education. One of the current ISSO staff members remarked that “priorities are often derailed by one-off situations that lead to delay in helping a group of students, or delay a project that may improve the student experience, etc. It takes a long time to be able to make progress on some of these areas when the workload can shift at any moment.”
Meanwhile, the other ISSO staff member said that their office struggles with getting leadership to “understand that what we’re doing is keeping the institution in compliance with the Federal Government. We’re trying to keep students from getting deported. And I think that lack of understanding, not really understanding the complexity that goes into our day-to-day work, and if you don’t understand that, then you really don’t understand the pressure that is on our offices.”
For ISSOs to retain staff and adequately support their students, institutions need to be intentional about addressing these challenges. Leaders hoping to maintain or grow international student enrollment would be wise to talk with the staff in these offices about what they really need to be successful.
