Power of SUNY

SUNY Launches Effort to Recruit International Students

In June 2011, SUNY announced a bold new global recruitment initiative intended to bring direct benefit to SUNY by using new international student tuition revenue to fund rapid expansion of scholarships to students, grants to faculty, and more.

SUNY’s recruitment activities are intended to be the economic underpinning of a far more ambitious plan to create thousands of domestic study abroad scholarships and faculty internationalization grants that will be funded through international student tuition fees. 

SUNY intends to utilize its agency recruiting channel to increase international enrollment by 14,000 students over the next five years, to approximately 32,000 across all 64 campuses. If objectives are met, within five years SUNY will be able to offer more than 3,000 study abroad scholarships per year, 125 faculty internationalization grants, and fund many other campus internationalization activities. Initially, 29 campuses are part of the agency recruiting initiative.

The impact of international students at SUNY is profound. Their presence qualitatively improves the academic experience for domestic students at SUNY and improves the research capacities of campuses. Financially, the 18,200 international students at SUNY contribute an estimated $409 million to the state economy, and SUNY estimates the economic impact of international research activities by its campuses to be $42.5 million.