This paper reports the findings of three studies of the counseling needs of international students at a medium sized University in the Midwestern region of USA. The studies were conducted over a period of five years (1977 83), and provide an historical perspective on the changes in student needs as well as in the programs designed to respond to these needs.
Most major universities and colleges in the United States have sizable populations of foreign students. Foreign students have been coming to the United States in increasingly large numbers since the end of World War II. According to statistics issued by the Institute of International Education, there were 29,813 foreign students attending institutions of higher education in the United States in 1950-51. By 1981-82, the number of foreign students at American universities and colleges had increased more than tenfold to 326,299. Foreign students came from all over the world. The three largest segments were from South and East Asia (32.5%), Middle East (28.8%) and Latin America (17%).
For many of the foreign students the social and cultural environment of the host country is very different from the one that they come from. On arriving in this country, they encounter many problems of adjustment which require a series of complex learnings on their part. The nature of these problems, their antecedents, correlates and consequences have been reported in the literature by a number of investigators (Herbert, 1981;Spaulding and Flack, 1976).
A review of the research literature on foreign students shows that one set of problems that the foreign student encounters clusters around academic work, e.g., understanding the American educational system, planning what courses to take, and difficulties with English (Lee, 1981). Another group of problems stems from the social and personal life of the student, e.g., feeling homesick and lonely, difficulty in making friends, encountering racial or cultural discrimination, lack