Crossing the Digital Threshold

To prepare for NAFSA’s 70th anniversary last year, I flipped through old paper copies of NAFSA’s newsletter. I remember thinking about how much had changed and how much remains the same over the years. Though the tightly typed sheets gave way to the weekly NAFSA.news email in your inbox, the desire to keep international educators informed about the events, people, and ideas shaping the field has remained. 

In 1990, the year that the first issue of International Educator was published, Nelson Mandela walked free after 27 years in prison, East and West Germany formally reunited, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the Hubble Space Telescope was launched. More than 407,000 international students studied in the United States during the 1990–91 academic year. (By 2017–18, that number had more than doubled to over 1 million students.)

The pages of this magazine have seen the field of international education professionalize, progress, and expand in the 3 decades since then. And IE is about to move into a new era: This is the last print issue, as we are moving to an all-digital publication beginning January 2020.

There are many reasons for this transition. Most importantly, we’ve heard from you that you want a more easily accessible, sharable, and portable version of IE. The bimonthly print issues can no longer keep up with the pace of today’s digital life and our work, and we’re excited to bring you more relevant articles more often with monthly issues that you can read from your laptop, tablet, and