U.S. International Students Face New Challenges, Rely on New Tech

A severely negative environment for international U.S. college students continues to drive high demand for the market’s only full technology platform, Interstride, tailored to help these students with their educational journey and to help colleges increase their rates of international student enrollment and retention.

Responding to that rising demand, Interstride today unveiled a significantly enhanced 2.0 platform that will provide a new student-facing portal, new mobile apps, a new administration portal, a new “immigration marketplace” feature and a new, separate admissions portal.

Interstride’s roster of university partners continues to grow very rapidly, now well over 130, and including such leading institutions as Harvard, USC, Stanford, Duke, Tufts, University of Georgia, University of Texas at Austin, University of Chicago, University of Miami, University of Tennessee, and Arizona State. Interstride student users have, correspondingly, soared from under 100 in 2016 to 75,000+ today.

Why Leading Universities Are Partnering with Interstride

U.S. international college students, numbering over 1 million, punch well above their weight — contributing $45 billion to the U.S. economy, while 23 percent of U.S. billion-dollar startup companies have been founded or co-founded by international students — but they are now facing what may be an unprecedented array of impediments to a U.S. higher education.

The damaging social and economic effects of the COVID pandemic, increased educational costs but diminished potential job opportunities, and restrictive, erratic immigration policies — these are among the chief things that now seem to be making a U.S. education appear to be as much as a burden as an opportunity for international students, and for the colleges that seek to recruit them.

International university student enrollment in the U.S. has been declining for over three years. And one survey of 615 U.S. international students from 34 colleges found that 94 percent believed that their schools could be doing a better job at supporting international students’ unique career needs.

“Interstride’s fast growth in university partners is not only because our platform’s exceptional benefits can help meet the urgent daily needs of these schools, but also because they value the benefits that international students bring to the broader society,” said Interstride CEO Nitin Agrawal.

“Benjamin Franklin famously stated that ‘investment in knowledge pays the best interest’. Arguably, investing in America’s international college students – who are often among the best and brightest from their home nations — has paid a compound interest for our nation.”