Knowledge Bank

The workplace and colleges increasingly desire the skills of intercultural competence (ICC) but ICC is not part of most notions of college readiness. Behavioral research, employer demands, and many colleges have already identified intercultural competence as a skill that is in high demand; however, to date there is a lack of research that examines whether first-year college students perceive cultural competence as relevant to college and workplace readiness. The purpose of this mixed methods, explanatory, social justice, study was to investigate first-year college students’ perceptions of intercultural competence as a factor for college readiness and to understand the influences they perceived as having contributed to their development of intercultural competence. This study involved 67 first-year college students attending either a community college or a traditional 4-year university in a large, Midwestern U.S. city. For the first part of the study, I used the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI; Hammer, 2012) to assess and then compare college students’ levels of intercultural competence. Subsequently, data from the surveys were used to recruit eight participants for semi-structured interviews to explore students’ perceptions of intercultural competence as a factor relevant to college and workplace readiness.
Significant findings from the quantitative portion of the study are, first, that the mean level of intercultural competence overall (n = 67) was 83.48 which indicates that participants in this study were at the IDI Developmental Orientation of Polarization, or have an “us versus them” perspective where individuals from diverse backgrounds typically feel uncomfortable (Hammer, 2012); second, there was no statistically significant difference in IDI scores between City Community College (CCC; n = 24) and Traditional State University (TSU; n = 43) students; and third, there was a statistically significant difference (n = 67; p = .045) between participants’ perceptions of the level of cultural understanding valued by their high schools and the level of cultural understanding first-year college students perceived will be valued by their future workplaces. Interview data indicates participants perceived intercultural competence was treated as optional across their secondary and post-secondary academic settings. This is problematic because participants also perceived that ICC will be highly valued by their workplace. The findings from this research show first-year college students desire ICC skills, not just for the future workplace but also for their first years on a college campus.