The Academic Progress of International Graduate Students in STEM Master’s Programs in the U.S.

Abstract

This quantitative study aimed to understand the association between five different types of face-to-face support from institutional agents and the academic progress of international students in STEM master’s programs in the U.S. We used one-of-a-kind primary survey data from a National Science Foundation grant that included over 350 master’s students across 12 research institutions in the U.S. Drawing from the concepts of social, cultural, and navigational capital, we proposed that support from all five institutional agents of peers, faculty, mentors, advisors, and staff would be important for reaching academic milestones in their master’s programs. Based on ordinal logistic regression findings, we found that support from peers and faculty played a positive and statistically significant role in academic progress whereas support from staff played a negative and statistical role. In our final models, we did not find any statistical results for the influence of support from mentors or advisors. In the concluding sections, we draw on existing research and programs to explain our mixed findings and, based on our findings, proposed programs and policies to leverage the positive influence of peers and faculty and to offset the negative and non-findings for our other institutional agents.