By the beginning of the 1980s, the annual census by the Institute of International Education (HE) indicated that there were more than 300,000 foreigners with student visas enrolled in colleges and universities in the United States (and this number may not reflect all the foreigners studying in this country), with the possibility that this number might exceed one million before the end of the century.
In order to encourage and strengthen the policy-formulation process as well as the faculty involvement recommended by the ACE committee, Craufurd Goodwin and Michael Nacht set out to examine, at the grass roots, how U.S. institutions that deal directly with foreign students view the presence of those students today, what problems they perceive, and how they do, in fact, go about forming policy and directing action in this arena. Whereas the Berendzen report may be seen as a statement from the General Staff, this document is a narrative from the trenches.