We’ve spent two months digging and talking to students from across the globe to find an answer.
This year, 6,015 international students attend IU. The education they assumed they would receive from IU’s world-renowned programs outweighed any anxieties they had about a new language, a new culture, a new home.
But IU is shortchanging its international students out of the true Hoosier experience, placing them in overflow housing, improperly assessing their English proficiency and under preparing staffers and resident assistants to make them feel at home.
That’s certainly not the case for all international students at IU, but it is for some.
During the next four days, we’ll bring you eight stories that identify institutional shortcomings and explain cultural stereotypes, because the first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one.
As much as this series is about the University’s shortcomings, it’s also about the reluctance of IU students, foreign and domestic, to try to understand one another. It’s about a college experience shortchanged by hesitation and assumption.
They’re assumptions that former IU President Herman B Wells never intended when he vowed to cultivate a diversity-centric campus, ones that have no place at our school.
In reporting this story, we have learned a lot.
We hope you’ll learn something, too.
