ABSTRACT
Despite the prevalence of international students in US community colleges, little is known about how their presence affects this sector. To begin addressing this gap in the literature, we used institutional-level and county-level data on community colleges and panel regression techniques to examine the relationship between international student enrollment and institutional finances. Specifically, using fixed-effects panel regression models, we tested whether variations in public sources of funding are associated with international student enrollment changes as well as whether international student enrollment variations impact tuition revenue generation. Overall, we found that the sector as a whole still retains its local nature. Although international student enrollment in the community college sector has grown over the years, it is still not large enough to move the needle on our institutional finance indicators. Our findings have implications for future research as our conceptual framework and analytic approach can be employed with subsequent years of data.
