Making It Together: How Internationalized Colleges and Universities Contribute as Community Anchors

By Cheryl Matherly

 

At a time when many U.S. campuses are experiencing tensions between internationalization and local engagement efforts, Lehigh University has embraced the vision that these should be complementary and not contradictory goals. Lehigh recently adopted a 10-year strategic plan, Inspiring the Future Makers, that lays out a compelling and innovative three-part road map for how to do that work collaboratively to “Make it New,” “Make a Difference,” and “Make it Together.” That third section, “Make it Together,” sets aspirations for how the institution’s teaching, research, and service can heighten Lehigh’s global and regional impact in service to and partnership with the local community. The strategic plan specifically seeks to grow the university’s engagement with the city of Bethlehem, PA, and the Lehigh Valley in order to strengthen the region and, at the same time, establish the institution as a global partner that will prepare graduates to address real-world problems. In so doing, Lehigh aspires to become a “trusted global partner to local, national and international programs” that are of importance to the region (Lehigh University 2023).

In many ways, this strategy makes sense given the demographics of the region. Seven percent of Pennsylvanians are immigrants, and 9 percent are native-born U.S. citizens with at least one immigrant parent. Lehigh County, where the university is located, is among the top 1 percent of counties in the country for immigration (NorrisMcLaughlin 2023). The county is also home to many global businesses. More than 80 companies—representing 23 countries—are located in the area, and the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation actively promotes the region globally as a desired destination for doing business (LVEDC 2023).

The Inspiring the Future Makers strategic plan embraces Lehigh’s pivotal role in the region. It also presents an opportunity to reexamine and redefine the value of internationalized institutions. Specifically, it allows us to rethink how internationalization contributes to a university’s value as an anchor institution.

Defining “Anchor Institution”

Anchor institutions are organizations that are deeply connected with their community by mission, economy, and local networks. They are major employers and developers, stimulating new businesses, creating workforce pipelines, and enriching the cultural life of their communities (CUMU 2023). In addition to colleges and universities, other types of recognized anchor institutions include hospitals, arts and cultural organizations, utility companies, financial institutions, military bases, and sports stadiums (Warren, n.d.; Garton 2021).

Higher education institutions (HEIs) play a particular role as anchor institutions. Much of the literature has focused on their economic impacts, including business, workforce, and urban development. John Goddard (2018) proposed the term “civic universities,”  which expands the role beyond economic development to one of a regional connector that exists in a network of local, global, social, cultural, and political interactions.

Elspeth Jones, Betty Leask, Uwe Brandenburg, and Hans de Wit (2021) describe this regional connector role as returning to the “third mission” of higher education—contributing to the social, economic, and cultural development of communities—which has often been disconnected from the internationalization agenda. In fact, they argue that the scope of community needs that HEIs are expected to address often intertwine local and global influences. Additionally, the very definition of internationalization assumes that HEIs make community contributions: “The intentional process of integrating an international, intercultural or global dimension into the purpose, functions and delivery of post-secondary education, in order to enhance the quality of education and research for all students and staff, and to make a meaningful contribution to society” (de Wit 2015).

Paul Garton (2021) goes further, identifying four types of investments that universities make in their communities as anchors or “‘connectors”: (1) physical, or the actual campus or built environment; (2) financial, or where the university spends or invests its money; (3) human, or the investments the institutions makes in the quality of life of the community; and (4) intellectual, or knowledge held or produced by students, staff, and faculty. For the purposes of this discussion, I am focused on how internationalized institutions contribute to the financial, human, and intellectual investments in their communities, exploring, in Goddard’s terms, not just what universities are “good for” but what they are “good at” (2018).

Financial Investment

One way in which HEIs serve as anchor institutions is with spending in their communities. Most of us in international education are familiar with NAFSA’s International Student Economic Value Tool, which analyzes what international students pay in tuition, fees, books, supplies, room and board, and miscellaneous living expenses (less any U.S. support), to calculate the number of jobs and economic activity international students support at the national, state, and congressional district levels. In the 2022–23 academic year, international students contributed $40.1 billion to the U.S. economy. For every three international students in the United States, one job is created. International students enrolled at institutions in the Lehigh Valley contributed $79.4 million to the local economy, supporting 783 jobs, with $57.6 million and 673 jobs supported at Lehigh University alone (NAFSA 2023).

These estimates are important, because they provide measurable data for how international students contribute to their local communities. The limitations of these data are also well understood. Enrollment of international students and scholars reflects just one aspect of an institution’s internationalization strategy. Many international students also bristle at these numbers, because they risk reducing their contributions to simply financial, turning them into proverbial “cash cows” for their institutions and the local communities. In the context of thinking about universities as anchor institutions, focusing on economic impact from international students is useful and necessary, but, when used as an exclusive measure, it misses other, very important, ways in which internationalized institutions and their students add value to their regions.

Human Investment

HEIs also act as anchor institutions with the way in which they invest in resources for human needs, which impacts the quality of life in their communities (Garton 2021). Think about institutions sponsoring annual international bazaars that invite community members to share in celebrating the different nationalities and cultures represented on campus. During the pandemic, the Lehigh University Art Galleries (LUAG) received a grant through the Institute of Museum and Library Services American Rescue Plan for a program that combined mini art history lessons with live cooking demonstrations. Each week, LUAG hosted an online program that featured an item from its extensive art collection with a related recipe from a neighborhood restaurant, highlighting the diverse cultures and vibrant businesses that are part of Bethlehem’s Southside immigrant community.

This suggests another way in which internationalized HEIs invest in their local communities: by bridging community outreach with the cultural and intercultural learning that is central to international education. Brandenburg, de Wit, Jones, and Leask (2019) note that international university communities—which include students returning from study abroad, international students and scholars, and international faculty and staff—“help to internationalise and ‘inter-culturalise’ the home campus, but—more importantly—can also engage with the wider public in the city, region and country.”

Internationalized HEIs have a responsibility for “stewardship” of their urban communities, and Gil Latz, Susan Sutton, and Barbara Hill (2015) argue that international programs should reflect the specific international connections of local businesses, agencies, groups, and organizations. Simply put, institutions that link their international programs with their local community can create networks and systems that improve understanding of the cultural, political, and economic context of the issues to which they are both responding. The relationship is not exploitive or extractive but mutually beneficial.

This mindset is very much driving Lehigh’s internationalization strategy. Today, 20 percent of the residents in the Lehigh Valley are Latino or Hispanic, with the population of Allentown—the largest city in the Lehigh Valley—being over 50 percent Hispanic or Latino and 41 percent of residents speaking Spanish at home (NorrisMcLaughlin 2023). Latin America is a priority region for the university’s global engagement. This is particularly important for Lehigh’s new College of Health, which has at its core a commitment to fostering change in the local community by promoting health equity. The College of Health has successfully recruited a core group of faculty with expertise in Latin America, and the Office of International Affairs and the College of Health have two joint appointments with responsibility for developing (co)curricular programs that emphasize the global experience as a lens for understanding the local context. The intent is to better invest in the collective community quality of life by better preparing students, staff, and faculty to understand the local cultural context. Using Latz, Sutton, and Hill’s terminology, we are seeking to be “stewards” of our urban community.

Intellectual Investment

A third way in which internationalized HEIs can contribute as anchor institutions is by preparing a talent pipeline. There is a rich body of literature that examines how international education programs contribute to the employability of graduates by supporting their development of a broad range of cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal skills to a significant degree, including intercultural skills, curiosity, flexibility, adaptability, confidence, self-awareness, communication, problem-solving, language, tolerance for ambiguity, and course or major-related knowledge (Farrugia and Sanger 2017; Wiers-Jenssen, Tillman, and Matherly 2021).

It is also well understood that higher education is key for strong entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems, because HEIs possess robust research bases, industry-university collaborations, entrepreneurship education, talent access and development programs, technology transfer, idea incubators, start-up accelerators, and venture capital resources. This has a particular connection with locally enrolled international students and scholars:  One in five entrepreneurs who start venture-backed companies in the United States are immigrants (Amornsiripanitch et al. 2021). Seventy-nine percent of those entrepreneurs  had come to the United States for college, and 40 percent started their companies in the same state where they attended school. Immigrants comprise more than 40 percent of STEM PhD graduates and 28 percent of the science and engineering faculty in U.S. universities. They also produce 28 percent of the nation’s high-quality patents (Kaushik and Whatney 2021). The United States’ strength in innovation, arguably, is based on the contributions of foreign students and entrepreneurs, who benefit regional economic development.

In mid-October 2023, Lehigh’s Office for International Affairs; Baker Institute for Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship; and the Iacocca Institute hosted a symposium—"Empowering Regional Impact Through Entrepreneurship: The Role for Universities”—that explored Lehigh’s role as part of the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem in the Lehigh Valley and the particular connection with our international strategies. We were joined by representatives from Lehigh’s partner university in Germany, the Technical University Dortmund, which has an industrial economic history similar to that of the Lehigh Valley. The German Ruhr area, formerly a coal-mining region, is now recognized in Europe for its thriving start-up ecosystem, driven in part by robust university-industry-government partnerships. The symposium addressed best practices for universities to advance regional innovation, emphasizing that the research that drove this innovation also required that local HEIs welcome, support, and retain international talent.

Changing the Narrative

As political rhetoric continues to position “global” as somehow in opposition to “local,” rooting an internationalized HEI with its well-established role as an anchor institution is an important change in the narrative. Goddard’s (2018) model for a civic institution suggests what this might look like. A civic (and, I would add, an internationalized) HEI should embrace its anchoring role by cultivating a deep connection to its local area, identity, businesses, students, and institutions. It should consider its impact on the local economy and community life, contribute to creation of new knowledge that responds to local needs, and engage students and scholars with the community. It should also acknowledge that HEIs that “think globally and act locally” are best prepared to contribute to their “third mission” of social responsibility.

This argument for connecting an institution’s global and local ambitions isn’t new, but it is often lost in other rhetoric regarding the purposes of internationalization. This is the time to make the particular role that HEIs are suited to play as anchor institutions in their communities central to the internationalization strategy.

References

Amornsiripanitch, Natee, Paul A. Gompers, George Hu, and Kaushik Vasudevan. 2021. “Getting Schooled: The Role of Universities in Attracting Immigrant Entrepreneurs.” Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. May 1, 2021. https://www.nber.org/papers/w28773.

Brandenburg , Uwe, Hans de Wit, Elspeth Jones, and Betty Leask. 2019. “Internationalisation in Higher Education for Society.” University World News. April 20, 2019. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20190414195843914.

CUMU (Coalition of Metropolitan and Urban Universities) (website). 2023. Accessed December 15, 2023. https://www.cumuonline.org/.

de Wit, Hans, Fiona Hunter, Laura Howard, and Eva Egron-Polak. 2015. "Internationalisation of Higher Education: A Study for the European Parliament." Brussels: European Parliament. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2015/540370/IPOL_STU(2015)540370_EN.pdf.

Farrugia, Christine, and Jodi Sanger. 2017. “Gaining an Employment Edge: The Impact of Study Abroad on 21st Century Skills & Career Prospects in the United States.” New York: Institute of International Education. https://www.iie.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Gaining-an-Employment-Edge-The-Impact-of-Study-Abroad.pdf.

Garton, Paul. 2021. “Types of Anchor Institution Initiatives: An Overview of University Urban Development Literature.” Metropolitan Universities. 33, 2:85–105. https://doi.org/10.18060/25242.

Goddard, John. 2018. "The Civic University and the City." In The Geographies of the University, eds. Peter Meursburger, Michael Heffernan, and Laura Suarsana. Cham, Switzerland: SpringerOpen.

Jones, Elspeth, Betty Leask, Uwe Brandenburg, and Hans de Wit. 2021. “Global Social Responsibility and the Internationalisation of Higher Education for Society.” Journal of Studies in International Education 25, 4:330–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/10283153211031679. 

Kaushik, Divyansh, and Caleb Whatney. 2021. "Attracting (and Keeping) the Best and the Brightest." Issues in Science and Technology, July 12, 2021. https://issues.org/attracting-best-brightest-immigrants-kaushik-watney/.

Latz, Gil, Susan Sutton, and Barbara Hill. 2014. "An Internationalized Stewardship of Urban Places." Metropolitan Universities. 25, 3:83-98.

Lehigh University. 2023. “Inspiring the Future Makers.” Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University. https://www.lehigh.edu/~inis/pdf/plans/LU-Strategic-Plan-2023.pdf.

LVEDC (Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation). 2023. “International Companies.” Lehigh Valley Economic Development (website). https://www.lehighvalley.org/foreign-direct-investment/.

NAFSA: Association of International Educators. 2023. “NAFSA International Student Economic Value Tool.” NAFSA: Association of International Educators (website). https://www.nafsa.org/policy-and-advocacy/policy-resources/nafsa-international-student-economic-value-tool-v2.

NorrisMcLaughlin. 2023. "Lehigh Valley Has the Fastest Growing Young Population in Pennsylvania." Immigration Matters (blog), NorrisMcLaughlin. 2023. https://norrismclaughlin.com/ib/general-immigration/lehigh-valley-fastest-growing-young-population-pennsylvania-ranging-from-18-34-year-olds.

Warren, Emily. n.d. “The Role of Anchor Institutions in Supporting Local Communities." ICIC Blog, Initiative for a Competitive Inner City. https://icic.org/blog/role-anchor-institutions-supporting-local-communities/.

Wiers-Jensen, Janneke, Martin Tillman, and Cheryl Matherly. 2021. "Employability." In Education Abroad: Leveraging International Research and Scholarship to Inform Practice, eds. Anthony Ogden, Bernhard Streitweiser, and Christof Van Mol. Abingdon-on-Thames, UK: Routledge.

 

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Cheryl Matherly, EdD, is vice president/vice provost for international affairs at Lehigh University. Lehigh was recognized in 2021 with NAFSA’s Senator Paul Simon Award for Comprehensive Internationalization in recognition of its international education programs.