How do university ‘melting pots’ affect native students?

Rochester is home to many educational institutions such as Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Rochester that enroll a significant number of international students. In fact, just these two institutions together enroll roughly 5,000 international students. Although there is a lot of informal and anecdotal evidence that exposure to international students helps native students in myriad ways, there is very little rigorous evidence that analyzes the impact that this kind of exposure has on native students in the long run.

New research by Stanislav Avdeev sheds valuable light on the long-run impacts of internationalization on domestic students. Avdeev examines whether exposure to international students during university has lasting effects on the social, cultural, migration, and labor-market outcomes of native students. Although universities increasingly recruit international students to generate revenue, diversify campuses, and provide students with international experiences, policymakers in several countries have expressed concerns about the possible crowding out of domestic students, declining educational quality, and adverse labor-market consequences. Avdeev shifts attention from these conventional economic outcomes to the possibility that international students influence the social attitudes and long-run behavior of their domestic peers.

This research uses an exceptionally large administrative dataset from the Netherlands covering approximately 1 million students over three decades. These data are linked to information on education, employment, earnings, entrepreneurship, firms, welfare, migration, cohabitation, marriage, nationality, and demographic characteristics. Avdeev also incorporates two survey sources—the National Student Survey and the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences—to examine attitudes toward internationalization, migration, and other cultures. The analysis focuses on native Dutch students entering bachelor’s programs between 1988 and 2019. International students are defined as students without Dutch nationality who also did not complete secondary education in the Netherlands.

In his thorough econometric analysis, Avdeev assumes that Dutch students do not choose when to enroll in a particular program based on the international composition of that particular cohort. He provides several balancing and placebo tests suggesting that this assumption is reasonable.

The principal findings from this research concern social integration. A 10-percentage-point increase in the share of international students in a first-year cohort increases the probability that a native student will be living with a non-native person 15 years later by 0.6 percentage points, equivalent to a 5.9 percent increase relative to the sample mean. Also, the probability of marrying a non-native person rises by 0.1 percentage points, or approximately 4.2 percent relative to the mean. It is worth emphasizing that these relationships are not confined to relationships formed at the university or even within the student’s original program. This suggests that the effects extend beyond simply providing additional opportunities to meet international peers.

Exposure also affects international orientation and attitudes toward migration. A 10-percentage-point increase in international student exposure increases satisfaction with the internationalization of education and satisfaction with opportunities to learn about other cultures. Long after graduation, exposed students are more supportive of equal social security rights for legally resident foreigners, less likely to believe that neighborhoods are harmed when people of foreign origin move in, and more supportive of further European integration. The study also finds a 4 percent increase in the probability of emigration 15 years after university entry.

A particularly significant result is the absence of adverse long-run labor-market effects. The estimated effects on employment, income, entrepreneurship, and the proportion of foreign-born coworkers are all statistically and economically close to zero. The estimates are sufficiently precise to rule out economically meaningful negative effects of international student exposure. Thus, the evidence does not support the concern that internationalization harms the subsequent economic performance of domestic students.

This research further investigates heterogeneity. It finds that social integration effects are stronger in larger programs and in non-STEM fields, where students may have more opportunities for interaction. They are weaker or absent in highly competitive, male-dominated, and STEM environments. Exposure to students from EEA+ countries (European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland) produces stronger social integration effects, whereas exposure to non-EEA+ students appears particularly important for increasing opportunities to learn about other cultures.

Overall, this research argues that the findings are consistent with a preference shift mechanism, rather than merely a “meeting opportunities” mechanism. International exposure appears to change natives’ underlying attitudes toward cultural diversity and migration, with effects persisting well beyond university. Tests using different time horizons, time trends, program size, individual and peer characteristics, alternative samples and definitions, and multiple hypothesis corrections largely confirm the principal results.

This research therefore concludes that internationalization produces important benefits that conventional measures of educational and economic performance may overlook. Universities may function as “melting pots,” generating lasting social and cultural connections while leaving domestic students’ labor-market outcomes essentially unchanged. The research consequently broadens the evaluation of international higher education from its immediate educational and financial consequences to its potentially substantial long-run effects on social integration, cultural openness, and international mobility.

Amitrajeet A. Batabyal is a Distinguished Professor and the Arthur J. Gosnell professor of economics at the Rochester Institute of Technology. These views are his own.

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