International Student Mobility Program (ISMP)Analysis of International Students' Challenges in Iran

In the recent decades, Internalization has been one of the most influential events in the higher education systems worldwide. And recruitment of international students, as one of the most effective strategies to achieve the goals of internationalization, has been a common solution to prevail in the competition between countries in the last decade. Therefore, studying these international students’ various experiences and interactions is very important for the destination countries. Purpose of this qualitative study is to investigate the experiences of international students in the Iranian universities. The approach in this research is data collection through semi-structured interviews, collecting the lived-experiences of 28 international students and the research data analysis is based on thematic analysis. Findings are presented in three stages of pre-study challenges, in-study challenges and post-study challenges. The results show that academic challenges, cultural adjustment, language barriers and future job challenges are the most important topics that require more attention from the higher education planners and university administrators to achieve the goals of the International Student Mobility programs.