A gap analysis of satisfaction among international students studying in the United States

Authors

Sandy C. Chen, Ohio UniversityFollow

Abstract

International students brought a broad range of benefits to the United States before the COVID-19 pandemic, from billions of dollars of tuition and fees directly paid to host universities to economic impacts on the country’s inbound tourism made by the students’ families. Nevertheless, the choice to study in the United States presented many challenges and problems for them. A survey of the existing literature showed that expectations of and perceptions toward their academic studies and professional development of these students, particularly those from mainland China, has been less explored. This paper was thus designed to fill this void by collecting empirical data among Chinese students in eight large public universities located in the Midwestern US. Statistical analyses revealed many gaps between mainland Chinese students’ expectations and their perceptions as well as identified interesting factors that significantly influenced their overall satisfaction. The findings provided higher education administrators, educators, leaders, marketers, and policy makers with insights on how to interact effectively with the Chinese market in the future if they still want to capitalize on this market in the post-pandemic era.

DOI

https://www.doi.org/10.5038/9781955833042

Recommended Citation

Chen, S. C. (2021). A gap analysis of satisfaction among international students studying in the United States. In W. B. James, C. Cobanoglu, & M. Cavusoglu (Eds.), Advances in global education and research (Vol. 4, pp. 1–14). USF M3 Publishing. https://www.doi.org/10.5038/9781955833042

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License