Introduction

[00:00:00] Steve MacDonald: Welcome everyone to the Global Engagement Insights Podcast. I'm Steve MacDonald, your host. Today, when I say we have a special guest, I mean it. We have Cheryl Matherly here, who is the SIO at Lehigh University. Now, not only are you a two-time SIO, but you're also a former SIO of the year. You were last year named one of the top 50 voices in North American international education by Time magazine.

[00:00:30] Steve MacDonald: But one of the things that you're most proud of, and that has shaped the way you look at how you operate as an SIO, is some of your early days in career counseling and workforce management. What I'd love to do, before we get into the topic of today, which is how universities are community anchors and how, as SIOs, we can leverage data and relationships, is learn new ways that we use language, address different audiences, and leverage data to be that anchor and establish those partnerships.

[00:01:06] Steve MacDonald: I'd love to turn it over to you for just a couple of minutes and have you give a little bit more of a background before we get started.

[00:01:14] Cheryl Matherly: Great, thank you, Steve. I'm really pleased to be here and looking forward to the discussion today. As we talked about, I got into the field of international education in a rather non-traditional way.

[00:01:27] Cheryl Matherly: I often tell people I stepped sideways into the field because it wasn t how I anticipated my career would head. My first job in higher education was as a career advisor. I worked at Rice University, hired right out of graduate school, and was doing the typical roles and functions you associate with a career center.

[00:01:48] Cheryl Matherly: But it happened to be a really interesting time at Rice. I m going to date myself here, this was the early 90s. It was before Rice had developed its international portfolio. It was still emerging from being both regional to becoming a national and international university, despite its excellent reputation. It was also an early point in international education, so there were a lot of developments happening then. I happened to work for someone very interested in developing international programs for students. One of the first projects I was put on was to help develop a summer international internship program, which I knew very little about, but I learned a lot by trial and error.

[00:02:54] Cheryl Matherly: At the same time, we saw an increase in international students coming to Rice, so I gained experience working with international students on how to present their backgrounds. We also worked with returning study abroad students on making their experience relevant to employers. It was a time of new discussions that not many universities were having.

[00:03:11] Cheryl Matherly: This period was influential. It became a catalyst for many things, including getting a Fulbright grant in the mid-90s for international education administration in Germany. I was the only person in that cohort not in international education, but I was included due to our work in career education focused on international careers. Rice also helped establish the International University of Bremen, where I had the unique opportunity to help set up a career center in a German university.

[00:03:30] Cheryl Matherly: Lastly, I was invited to work on the development of an NSF partnership for international research and education. It focused on creating experiences for globally educated science and engineering students. I helped develop research internships in Japan for early career science and engineering students and spent 10 years designing these experiences for first- and second-year undergraduate students with Japanese researchers.

[00:04:35] Cheryl Matherly: All of those were things that came about because they were coming through that career and workforce side, very much opportunistic. I realize now those were probably some of the most formative experiences I could have had because they re still driving the work we do here at Lehigh in terms of internships, workforce development, and how we advise our international students as part of our recruitment strategies for the university. So, it s something that has come full circle.

[00:05:10] Steve MacDonald: I think also what that all means is that you've learned quite a bit about how to speak with influence and bring together these partnerships. That s a big takeaway for me from what we re going to talk about today. I think you said this best before we turned on the record button, which was that you believe SIOs have a big opportunity. In the way that they see these audiences, interact with them, and target and ask, How can I create value for you? How can I bring you into this fold? Maybe you can explain a bit more about what you mean.

[00:05:55] Cheryl Matherly: Yeah, I think the challenge for a lot of SIOs is we all struggle with where international education fits in terms of a university priority. I think there s a lot of us who are very worried about what we see as the growing marginalization of international education for institutions, and just nationally. There is that concern, and I think part of that is because for many people within an institution and I d argue within communities as well international is something outside of what's needed by a particular place, or it s what you go to do. You go somewhere, or you come here and go back somewhere.

[00:07:05] Cheryl Matherly: How to help link aspects of international work to the core functions of the university that s where the real opportunity lies. I feel very strongly that international is at the core of what a university is about teaching, research, and service, bringing together the best minds from around the world to solve big global challenges. If that s not international, I don t know what is. It s core to that. But I think that oftentimes as SIOs, we tend to retreat into those spaces where we re comfortable talking about the importance of intercultural learning, global diplomacy, or the soft skills needed to work in cross-cultural settings.

[00:07:26] Cheryl Matherly: All of that is true, but other kinds of hard benefits relate to things that may have an impact or relevance to other parts of your community, where maybe they're not thinking about international in that way they're thinking about it in terms of study abroad kind of experiences.

[00:07:46] Cheryl Matherly: All of that is true, but other hard benefits may impact or be relevant to other parts of your community, where maybe they re not thinking about international in that way. They re thinking about it in terms of study abroad experiences. I ll tell you a quick anecdote from my Rice days that illustrates this. As I mentioned, one of the first things I had done there was setting up an international internship program. We were sending students to spend three months each summer working on internships, mostly Europe-based, but in many parts of the globe. We can sit here and think, "Oh, what a great experience, you're off on your own."

[00:08:08] Cheryl Matherly: The kind of learning experience you would get from that and putting together all the aspects of how to find a place to live, navigate the new city, and work in a new cultural setting, plus doing the job. This is great. And I remember when I was still with the Career Center, sitting with an employer who said, I just don't get it. Here are these students who just spent a summer in Germany, probably just backpacking. And it was this very dismissive term. It was one of those first experiences where I had to take the students' experience and reinterpret it for an employer in terms of the skill sets that I knew an employer would be hiring for as they looked at graduates from particular areas. That really stayed with me as just this recognition that just because I understood it was a great experience and I saw it in terms of all those personal developments if I could not make that connection to the hard skills that somebody was going to be hiring for, then it wasn't going to have a lot of meaning for a larger audience. It was always going to be a narrow activity.

[00:09:12] Steve MacDonald: As I always have, I've talked to a lot of SIOs, and there's enough problem articulating internally within the university the value and the impact that we provide, let alone to the outside community and the donor base. What I'm taking away from what you're saying here is we've got to get a lot better at showing the impact of what we do, the importance of internationalized universities, as you put it. So, I think this is a really good segue to say, what is an internationalized university? And what is the importance of that? SIOs need to get better at articulating, using data, using different languages, and understanding their audiences.

[00:09:51] Cheryl Matherly: An internationalized university is an institution in which its international strategies or international objectives are advancing the university's goals across the institution. I always speak about it in terms of the extent to which the university's strategy is driving international work and the extent to which international work is driving the university's strategy. They're very integrated into that. Steve, this is probably a good time to introduce the term anchor institution because it was one that I had to learn in the course of this. A colleague of mine who worked in economic engagement here at Lehigh introduced me to it. An anchor institution is an institution that is deeply connected to its community by its mission, its economy, its programs, and its services. You can think about the kinds of organizations that those are. It includes hospitals, art organizations, and sporting organizations. It's those places that are key to making an institution work. Universities are widely understood as anchor institutions in terms of where they spend money, how they affect the quality of life in the places they are located, and how they contribute to intellectual and talent development in their communities.

[00:11:14] Cheryl Matherly: When you understand that, think about that, and look at it through the lens of what we do as an internationalized institution, it becomes really obvious how to think about all those aspects of what we do as having some kind of benefit back how it is good for the community that you're in; that it's a university that has a vibrant international life, culture, and set of connections. And that's the part that I think a lot of are not comfortable talking about. They haven't thought about it, and they don't make those connections in that way. And I think that's where a lot of the opportunity sits. I will tell you, those who sit around you in these kinds of economic development roles or community engagement roles. They're not thinking about the university in that way. And so, when you make that bridge, that's where some of the really interesting and unexpected connections begin to happen. But that's a language, and it's a kind of terminology to get comfortable with.

[00:12:13] Steve MacDonald: And you've talked about this perception gap that you've got to cross, that chasm. Tell us a little bit more about what you mean and where that gap lies.

[00:12:23] Cheryl Matherly: So, I think the perception gap is simply that the view is that what a university does as its international worker portfolio is completely unconnected to the community that it's part of. So let me pick one that's a really simple example that I think we're all pretty familiar with. We all know about NAFSA's international student economic tool on that. And so, we can speak very specifically about the impact of international students on the communities that we're in.

[00:12:53] Cheryl Matherly: I can talk about things like in 2022 2023 when international students contributed $40 billion to the US economy. I can talk about that in the Lehigh Valley where we are; international students contributed $79.4 million to the economy. I can say that we created 783 jobs, and I can even get down specific and say Lehigh's international students created 673 jobs in the Lehigh Valley.

[00:13:20] Cheryl Matherly: Okay, that's data that has an impact, and it's not what most people think about. Usually, when I give that data, the next question is, How is that determined? which then opens up a discussion about international students, how they spend money, how they're part of your community, the places where they are engaged, often having families, and it opens up this discussion then about how international students exist in the community, which can change that narrative away from being those others who are there on your campus to instead being players who are part of your community. And I know a lot of people get uncomfortable talking about international students in terms of just dollars and cents and jobs.

[00:14:06] Cheryl Matherly: I certainly appreciate that this isn't the only value, and it isn't to suggest that we're devolving students simply in terms of kind of that impact. But if you're talking about things to people in your community, who are your economic developers, and they're interested in why you're concerned about restrictions on immigration or why you're concerned about rules that may make it more difficult to attract certain students to your campus, those numbers matter. That's something that they can begin to understand because it is a language that is connected to how they are making meaning or where they're finding value within the community players there.

[00:14:46] Cheryl Matherly: So, that's just one simple example, and it's data that we all have at our fingertips because of what NASA produces.

[00:14:54] Steve MacDonald: Do you have some examples or stories about how you've worked with different economic development groups to bring them into the fold? And at the same time, how do you give that visibility internally?

[00:15:11] Steve MacDonald: Because we're always advocating internally for what we're doing and how it's creating an impact. These outside partnerships that you're working with have to also then have a role in your strategic plan and what you're doing internally as well.

[00:15:27] Cheryl Matherly: Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate what you're saying about both the internal and the external kind of messaging around that.

[00:15:34] Cheryl Matherly: It's a place where you're bringing together, again, the kind of shared interest around that. Let me give an example through some things that we're doing here. Right now, some projects that we're working on here at Lehigh are in work, so I don't have outcomes yet, but I can at least set them up as ways that we're thinking about this in some places we're working on.

[00:15:53] Cheryl Matherly: So, Lehigh has a new university strategic plan. It was announced last year, and two really important threads for this conversation are part of that. One of them is we have a commitment to triple graduate enrollment at Lehigh over the next 10 years. There's a heavy emphasis on growth in master's programs but also in PhD education.

[00:16:17] Cheryl Matherly: In that, there's a lot of work that's happening around rethinking what master's and PhD education is going to look like. But everyone agrees that whatever happens, and in whatever form it develops, we know that international students will be an important part of that to get to those kinds of goals and targets that we're looking at.

[00:16:35] Cheryl Matherly: So, that's one thread to that. And so we're looking very much at the whole ecosystem of our ability to attract and retain. What's our track record on employability? So when students come and they get a graduate degree, what's our investment in their ability to be able to get a job after graduation? Because we know that is directly connected to our ability to get them to come into our graduate programs. What's the attractiveness of the Lehigh Valley and Bethlehem, where we're located, to those international students?

[00:17:04] Cheryl Matherly: We know that we're close to Philadelphia; we're close to New York. So we have this kind of competing place of these large urban centers. Do we define ourselves as being proximate to those? Or, which is the route we're focused on now, how do we talk about the attractiveness of the Lehigh Valley as a place to come study as a student, but also to begin to think about making a career here because of the vibrant industry and diverse industry? So it's also in our interest to be supporting that work there in the community because it makes the university more attractive for students, and I would also add for faculty and scholars that we're attracting here on that. So that's one thread of things that we're focused on and where all of those issues come back to play on that. The second, then, is this focus on reassessing our relationship to the city of Bethlehem and the Lehigh Valley by extension.

[00:18:01] Cheryl Matherly: In other words, how do we strengthen the collaborative relationship between the university and the community, all in that kind of concept of the anchor institution that I was talking about? And then, like I said, by extension, the Lehigh Valley, which also includes Allentown and Easton and is the third fastest-growing region in the state of Pennsylvania. So a whole lot is going on there.

[00:18:22] Cheryl Matherly: So, now that conversation is taking a turn around how do we support the expansion of venture creation and innovation hubs here in the Lehigh Valley? And so we have a new VP for entrepreneurship who's focused on how the university engages regionally with developing a stronger entrepreneurial ecosystem.

[00:18:46] Cheryl Matherly: As soon as you talk about that entrepreneurial ecosystem, once again, that line connects directly through your international population. We know that many of our students go on to become entrepreneurs. You look at the trend data about immigrant entrepreneurs, and we know that those are very high numbers there.

[00:19:06] Cheryl Matherly: So, how do we then link that piece? And I will say my colleague in entrepreneurship has become one of my closest collaborators because we're talking about sort of the same things: what does a vibrant innovation ecosystem look like? It's ready to take and absorb this kind of new talent.

[00:19:29] Cheryl Matherly: We're bringing ideas to creation on that. Again, there's a very strong kind of correlation there, and so those are places where it's finding those partners. I would say my colleague in entrepreneurship is very supportive, but I wouldn't call her an internationalist because that's not what she does.

[00:19:48] Cheryl Matherly: But she sees me as a necessary and essential partner because of what I bring in on this one. And so it's a place where these two agendas have come together very well. A lot of our conversations now, regionally, we do together because of the more compelling message of what we have.

[00:20:09] Steve MacDonald: There are two big takeaways from what you've been saying here. One is she looks at you as a very important strategic partner. This is not an international education program that's being peripheralized. This is not an international education program that you're worried about is going to be shut down.

[00:20:28] Steve MacDonald: I've talked to a lot of SIOs who have gotten new jobs because the last one just went away. It is rooted in the fact, though, you were saying that the numbers, the data, are there to support that international education is a major contributor to the entrepreneurial community that you serve.

[00:20:46] Steve MacDonald: If the data weren't there, you have proof that, guess what? I can be a really big support to you. This goes back to what we were talking about at the very beginning. We have to be good at selling. You are in a sales position a lot of the time. We talk about advocating and establishing these partnerships.

[00:21:04] Steve MacDonald: You are selling your viability, the importance of what you can contribute. So that was one thing that I took away. The second one was when you talked about how the university wanted to triple its graduates and that international students were going to be a big part of that.

[00:21:21] Steve MacDonald: You have woven in international education now into the very strategic plan that the university has, where all universities are facing the enrollment cliff that is upon us. 2025 is supposed to be like the end of the good years and to be a decline after that. Here's my question to you: How important, at Lehigh, and then your perspective just as a university system in the United States, how important is international education to addressing the enrollment decline, not just in the graduate population but in the undergraduate population as well?

[00:21:57] Cheryl Matherly: That's a complicated question. We hosted an event last April here at Lehigh, and the title of the workshop was something to the effect of "The Role of International Students in Economic Development." It was looking at, in particular, the Pennsylvania context of how our international students and international enrollment were directly related and directly in line with the new state economic development plan that Governor Shapiro had released about four months earlier.

[00:22:29] Cheryl Matherly: We did the workshop in collaboration with I.I.E., the Institute for International Education, and Alan Goodman came out and spoke as part of this. Alan, of course, has really championed the term; he keeps referring to it as our next initiative to increase the number of international students in the United States to 2 million by 2030. He talks about it in terms of a lot of capacity issues.

[00:22:56] Steve MacDonald: That's almost double.

[00:22:57] Cheryl Matherly: That's his challenge, and that's the reason for the moonshot. His point, the argument he makes, is that there's plenty of capacity, and he has very compelling data about what capacity looks like in the UK, Australia, and Canada.

[00:23:13] Cheryl Matherly: This is compared to capacity within U.S. institutions, and we've got plenty of room on that. He talks about the demographic cliff and that this needs to be considered as one of those roles and responsibilities, and then does a compelling job of talking about it in terms of national interest as well.

[00:23:30] Cheryl Matherly: I think that there is a role to play with that. I will tell you, and this is the reason why I say it's complicated on that is that I think that having lived through the Great Recession and institutions that turn to international students as plug enrollment, it does make me a little nervous when I hear that people talk about that as a solution to the demographic cliff.

[00:23:57] Cheryl Matherly: I think it is an approach. I think we have the capacity. But what I caution about in this is that we need to be clear as to the value of why we're bringing those students. I think the lesson learned from 2008 and 2009 was that a lot of institutions saw students that they were bringing over as a short-term solution to get them through a financial crisis.

[00:24:22] Cheryl Matherly: Then, we had all the sort of ensuing issues that kind of came from that. And I hope that there are some lessons learned from that. But I think instead, if you speak about it and this is what I liked about the way the direction that this symposium that we held here went is that to be able to talk about that capacity in terms of being of interest to the university, we have the room and why we do that.

[00:24:45] Cheryl Matherly: But speaking about it in terms of the value out of the university in terms of other kinds of sets of priorities.

[00:24:52] Cheryl Matherly: So, in this case, being able to speak about the sectors that were being prioritized in the state economic plan agriculture, manufacturing, life sciences, robotics, and energy to draw that line through that into universities.

[00:25:07] Cheryl Matherly: Why then do we need to be looking at recruiting international talent, which was already heavily represented in those sectors, and continuing to keep that pipeline open, because it was directly related to what the state was investing in, is a much more compelling argument, I think, than simply trying to just say we need to plug the gaps that are going to come from that demographic cliff.

[00:25:30] Steve MacDonald: You eloquently stated it that this is a part of and nobody says international education is the answer. But what triggered this in that question was that international was an important part of Lehigh's strategic plan to triple. So I think there is a lack of international education as a part of the strategic plans in most universities.

[00:25:57] Cheryl Matherly: I completely agree. And what happens, I'll tell you, when I've worked with institutions that have international plans or have university strategic plans, and it mentions international, very often it shows up as a strategic plan pillar so we do one, two, three, and pillar number four is and will be global on that.

[00:26:20] Cheryl Matherly: As soon as that happens, that's a recipe of it's its own thing we got to do, as opposed to it being integrated across. One of the things that we did here at Lehigh and I take no credit for it other than I got to benefit from this was that as the university's strategic plan was being developed, there was our VP for strategy, who was leading that process, working both vertically and horizontally on the plan.

[00:26:47] Cheryl Matherly: The verticals were these certain pillars that were thematic areas I would say more than pillars, thematic areas that emerged across the plan that had to do with our research. It had to do with new academic programs. It had to do with kind of aspirations about our research productivity and such.

[00:27:06] Cheryl Matherly: Those kinds of verticals to that, but there were across that these horizontals that needed to be present across that. Two big ones: global was one of them. I had a fancy title. I think I was the global through-line champion or something like that.

[00:27:22] Cheryl Matherly: I had a colleague. There were two of us that did that, where our job was to make sure that as we looked across this, we asked the question to make sure that our international work was reflected, or was somehow represented or connected thereto that. Diversity, equity, and inclusion were the other of those through lines of that.

[00:27:39] Cheryl Matherly: So, both of those kind of worked side by side. As a result, neither one of those are areas that exist as their own thing. They are very present in that plan, and there is language that talks about that. You will see when you read our plan, that there is very clear language about us as a global partner and being a trusted global partner, but it's reflected across these particular sets of priorities as they relate because it's just part of how the university sees itself operating.

[00:28:15] Cheryl Matherly: I think that's one of the things that was distinctive here. I've seen other institutions do that well, where it's from the outset, the discussion is around how that international work is advancing all of the university's strategic priorities how being international allows you to do all these other things.

[00:28:40] Cheryl Matherly: As I said, I think a good example in our case, we all understand that if we're not looking at our international student recruitment and the quality of the international student experience in terms of their recruitment, retention, and ultimate success, there is no way that we can achieve the aspirations in this plan around the expansion of the tripling of graduate enrollment.

[00:29:08] Cheryl Matherly: I would even go so far as to say the expansion of our research activity and productivity, which are all very explicit there in the plan. So there's very little daylight, and that helps a lot with keeping these issues and needs centered in the discussions.

[00:29:26] Steve MacDonald: I love how you've painted a very vivid picture. Instead of a pillar that then has to stand on its own, it is an important element that serves as a through line. Whether it's research, whether it's enrollment, whether it's working with the different deans, it is ever present in everything that the university does.

[00:29:45] Steve MacDonald: What I would love to do is ask you, of everything that we've talked about here today, if there was one thing that you wanted the audience to take away. We can't remember so much, but what's the most important thing that you want everyone to take away from this episode?

[00:30:02] Cheryl Matherly: So, I think the most important thing I would want people to walk away with is this: thinking about the terminology that's used by different groups that you engage with and getting comfortable with that terminology. By the same token, helping others get comfortable with our terminology is a two-way street, but understanding that when you're talking with your economic developers, be it on your campus or in your community, understanding the language that's used and how to connect that in a very intentional way to the language that we use or the numbers or the data. Get comfortable with being able to present that, or when you're talking with your entrepreneurs and those who are involved with your innovation hubs and venture creation, get comfortable with that terminology, but also help them, again, get very comfortable with the data that we have as well, which brings and expands what they're doing around that.

[00:31:20] Cheryl Matherly: Working with your various cultural players on your campus, again, the same thing get comfortable with what metrics matter to them and those kinds of priorities. Some of that isn't that hard; it's just a matter of listening, paying attention to what is being produced in those areas, and finding a good ally over there to help educate you on that. Again, I'll go back to my colleagues and entrepreneurship. One of the real "aha" moments we had was when we sat down one day, and she introduced me to the principles of design thinking and ideas of the entrepreneurial mindset, showing me literature and what's discussed there.

[00:31:48] Cheryl Matherly: I took this and showed her some of the literature around what we see as outcomes of students who've had abroad experiences, and using, in this case, it was some of the research reports about what we see as the competencies that students develop as outcomes of study abroad.

[00:32:04] Cheryl Matherly: We sat there and it was really clear how you mapped those, the terms were different, but the concepts were very much the same, that. And as soon as we were drawing those particular lines. It was suddenly like the two worlds suddenly made sense to each other, even though very different backgrounds. I'm not an entrepreneur; it's not what I do, but I understand that in a way, in the same way my colleague understands what I do. So now when we talk about things and she talks about ideating something and our design, we have a way that we can kind of come together and speak to this in terms of impacts.

[00:32:45] Steve MacDonald: I love it. That was a lot for one thing. If people had additional questions and they want to get a hold of you, would it be appropriate if we gave them a link to you on LinkedIn, or is there another way that you would want to have people connect?

[00:32:58] Cheryl Matherly: That would be great. I'm happy to talk to anyone. I am interested in finding more people who are interested in working in this space and thinking about this. I think it's a really important area for our field. I think it's critical as we think about this in terms of keeping the field relevant and engaged on this.

[00:33:21] Cheryl Matherly: I also really don't think this is an issue that is necessarily divided politically. I will say, having lived and worked in some very red states and now in a very purple state, I see that in both places, when you get down to the community level, people understand this in a really practical way.

[00:33:42] Cheryl Matherly: I think it's incumbent on us to do that. So I'm really happy to talk to anyone about that. I would also, Steve, to point to I wrote a piece on this same concept for NAFSA back in the spring on the role of internationalized universities as anchor institutions. So I would encourage people to also just take a look at the trends and insights piece because a lot of these concepts are explored in a little more detail there.

[00:34:06] Steve MacDonald: Fantastic. Cheryl, thank you. Thank you for coming on and expanding, with your perspectives and your insights, the way that we look at internationalized universities, the way we look at our jobs as SIOs and the way we can advocate and make an impact. Appreciate it.

[00:34:22] Cheryl Matherly: Glad to do it!