Foreign student academic performance in U.S. Graduate schools: Insights from American MBA programs

Abstract

Foreign citizens are a rapidly growing, important segment of the graduate student population of the United States. Their academic success in American universities has important consequences for them, for the countries which send them here, and for the departments in which they study. However, past research on graduate student academic performance appears to have (1) generally excluded foreign students, perhaps inadvertantly, (2) included factors which are difficult or impossible to measure for most foreign students, and (3) excluded important factors—mostly English fluency and country of origin—which are invariant for native-born American graduate students, but not for foreign graduate students. These shortcomings do not diminish the applicability of previous findings to nonforeign graduate students, but they do imply that previous empirical results may tell us little about educational performance of foreign graduate students in the United States. Our purpose here is to develop testable hypotheses about factors which affect foreign student academic performance and to use data from MBA programs to test those conjectures. Our efforts focus on the impact of English fluency and country of origin, but also include abilities measured by standardized admission tests, which have dominated results of analyses of academic performance by nonforeign graduate students. Findings suggest that country-of-origin effects persist after holding constant academic ability and English language fluency. Other findings, some surprising, are reported and interpreted.