The Opportunities and Challenges of Changing U.S. Campus Demographics: Implementing Pre-Collegiate Peer Mentoring

Abstract

Since 2008, declining state fiscal investment in higher education has created a parity of sorts with private schools, intensifying competition for out-of-state students. Concomitantly, institutions have begun to reignite the promotion of greater diversity and cross-cultural appreciation across campuses. In what had appeared to be a fortuitous conflation of remedial measures, U.S. schools embarked in an unprecedented quest to recruit the full tuition-paying international student. This has created both new opportunities for institutional growth while posing daunting obstacles to various campus stakeholders. This paper explores various programs U.S. colleges and universities have offered or are offering to deliver on the promise of graduating global citizens and sets forth a potential new solution – Pre-Collegiate Peer-to-Peer Mentoring for College Credit (PCM) – to address both stakeholder friction and the many challenges that a growing international population creates for U.S institutions and their surrounding communities.