International Richness

Abstract

I define an institution’s international richness according to the international diversity of the student body and the variety of international faculty it attracts onto its campus. A look at the evidence indicates that the proportion of international students and faculty rarely exceeds 20 % for most institutions around the world. I then argue that the proportion of international students in and of itself is a poor indicator of international richness if a single nationality dominates the student body. I explore the phenomenon of culture dominance and show how it creates ‘assimilation traps ,’ that is, a tendency of foreign students to try to assimilate with the culture of the dominant nationality on campus, a phenomenon that greatly reduces the cultural learning these foreign students could have transmitted to the domestic students.