Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper examines how cultural distance between international instructors’ home countries and the United States affects the integration of international faculty into the contemporary postsecondary work environment. I use grading practices to measure faculty behavior as these are a subjective aspect of work, which can be influenced by the grading norms of one’s training in their home countries.

Data

I constructed a unique dataset for my project covering almost 2,800 randomly selected university instructors with information about class-average grades and their nationalities. The grade data are from Indiana University, University of Missouri and Michigan State University, spanning all semesters between 2011 and 2018 inclusively. The nationalities variables are: “international” (a binary variable taking a value of 1 if the instructor is international, and a value of 0 otherwise) and “cultural distance” (a continuous variable adopting the culture dimension measurements developed by Hofstede, Hofstede, & Minkov (2010)). In addition to course grades and nationality, I also collected data on faculty rank, experience, prestige of the degree granting institution, race, and gender.

Method:

My dataset is constructed to facilitate a department-fixed-effects research design, in which I compare international and domestic faculty grading practices within the same academic departments and semesters. This is important because international faculty are non-randomly distributed across fields and different fields may have different grading standards.

Findings

I find that international faculty, on average, assign grades that are 0.14 points lower (p <0.05) than domestic faculty on a 4-point scale (or 32 percent of a standard deviation). When I look within departments the gap shrinks to 0.07 points (p <0.05), which indicates that international faculty are disproportionately teaching in harder-grading fields. Further, as experience increases, international faculty diverge in their grading behaviors from their domestic peers. This divergence is subtle on a semester-by-semester basis, but it becomes more substantial over time. Among faculty with 15 years of experience or more, the grading gap is 0.17 points (p <0.05) within departments. The orientation toward future rewards (long-term orientation index) among international faculty appears to be the cultural measure that best explains the international-domestic grading gap.