Challenges and Strategies of Admitting Foreign Students in Iranian Higher Agricultural Education

One of the most important aspects of overseas agriculture is the admitation of foreign students in the agricultural higher education system. Today, the developed countries with the production and development of science in the field of agriculture, attract students from other countries and share their knowledge and experience. Accordingly, given the recent advances in various fields of science and technology in Iran, this issue is now considered an overseas agricultural issue as a necessity, which, of course, has strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats which should be considered by them, began to attract foreign students. The purpose of this study was to identify the challenges to attract foreign students in Iran's agricultural higher education system and presenting the necessary strategies in this regard. This applied descriptive research in terms of research methodology paradigm is a qualitative inquiry, was conducted using a classic Delphi technique in three stages. The research sample whose were chosen by purposive sampling method are faculty members and Ph.D. students with agriculture majors in Iran (n=18). In this way, the most important strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats were known as perceived by respondents and all four rates averages were calculated with SWOT matrix. The results revealed that the resulting point of the SWOT analysis was located in the area of WO (conservative strategy, based on this, the most imprtant strategies were obtained including providing constructive interaction between Iranian colleges of agriculture and other countries, long-term policy making for overseas agriculture, and developing social adaptation for admitting foreign students.