Recruiting with Pathway Programs

Over the past few decades, U.S. colleges and universities have tried to keep pace with the forces of globalization through initiatives designed to enhance students’ cross cultural understanding and willingness to embrace diversity. A common strategy in this effort has been to increase the population of international students on campus to promote the exchange of diverse ideas, perspectives, and cultural influences.

Pathway programs offer additional opportunities and channels to broaden the pool of prospective international students by allowing institutions to conditionally admit students who fall short of meeting English language proficiency standards, but otherwise satisfy academic requirements. 

These programs enable students to enroll in intensive English programs (IEPs) while taking credit-bearing classes designed to help them acclimate to U.S. higher education standards and expectations. Upon successful completion of the pathway program, students are admitted to the institution.

“We don’t want language to be the barrier that keeps academically capable students from the opportunity to study with us and earn a degree,” says Julie Haun, director of the Intensive English Language Program at Portland State University (PSU). “A good pathway program does much more than [just] teach English skills. It also teaches students how to engage within the university academic culture.”

Pathway Program Origins

There are two basic models of pathway programs. In the first, an institution partners with a private third-party company to develop new international student pipelines, leveraging the vendor’s recruitment and marketing expertise. Third-party partnerships first emerged in Australia in the mid-1990s, according to the 2017 NAFSA report,