Albright's testimony focused on the necessity to meet the president's international affairs budget request to continue American leadership abroad. Albright highlighted a number of planned initiatives that would require increased funding, including a basic education initiative announced at the Santiago Summit, which President Clinton attended in April. In earlier years, it was customary for university and college personnel in the United States to refer to students who came from other countries as foreign students, and to those who specialized in working with those students as foreign student admissions officers and foreign student advisors. In recent years, in many cases the word international has been substituted for the word foreign. There is some logic to this, but also some inaccuracy.
International student is an all-encompassing term.
Insofar as international refers to the entire universe of education, all students are international students, including U.S. citizens who study in the United States. All students need a university education that will prepare them for life in an international context, in an interconnected and interdependent world. Both groups are properly described as international students, but one group brings educational qualifications that are foreign to the educational system and that thereby create complications in the credential evaluation and admissions processes. It is appropriate to refer to this group as foreign students. S. Frey is president of Educational Credential Evaluators, Inc., of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.