Reasons why international students are not performing well

Education and Upbringing – Barriers affecting the Academic Performance of International Students
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August 7, 2018
Introduction
It is almost a commonplace in this country to regard any foreigner as generally bad in academics. While this prejudice, towards people who were not born and raised in the United States, is relatively accurate what most people fail to observe is that the problem lies not only in the students but rather in the system itself. As of today, it is estimated that there are 1,078,822 international students currently enrolled in the United States (Ross, 2017). Being a beacon of hope, most of these people who seek to gain additional credits in the country think that this could lead to better opportunities. While this might be true, what most of them fails to realize is that going down this road would be tough and tedious. On the one hand, this difficulty lies in the students’ failure to fully assimilate towards local culture and their peers, which could hinder their learning. On the other hand, this failure to assimilate could then cause their peers to discriminate or exert a certain prejudice towards them that could adversely affect their capabilities for understanding. In order to fully understand this, the succeeding section of this paper would be dedicated towards the analysis of the cultural barrier that (could) exists between international students and their peers. All in all, the author believes that this lack of dynamic relationship between the system and the student’s coping mechanisms towards a new environment pose as one of the most significant issues that cause poor academic performance for international students.
Academics and Upbringing
Generally, international students who seek to gain credits in the United States are college graduates (or collegiate level) who have performed well academically under the curriculums of their own respective countries. This is true since applying to a foreign school is costly, thereby needing scholarship supports that require their good academic standing. Yet, plenty of these students fail to get good grades as they become accepted in local universities positing that foreign schools are inferior when it comes to their teaching methods and practices. However, what most people fail to consider is that academic performance is not an isolated case. In studies done about International Students, it was found that acculturative stress or the impact of adaptation to a new culture, profoundly affects the students’ ability to cope with his new environment and perform in such conditions (Yeh & Inose, 2003).
Another problem with the student’s ability difficulty to adapt to his new environment is related to breaking the language and contextual barriers that exist between him and his new environment (DeCapua & Wintergerst, 2016). In this regard, language becomes an essential tool for communication and...