By Andrew Gordon, April 20, 2026

Every spring, the international education conference season offers a chance to step back from the day-to-day operations and take stock of where the field actually stands. This spring was no different, except in all the ways it was.

I attended the Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA) Conference in Washington, D.C. and the Forum on Education Abroad Conference. And then there was the Global Impact 2026 – MENA — which we had to postpone due to the war in Iran and its impact on the region. More on that below.
Three conferences. Two attended. One postponed. All of them clarifying. Here’s what I’m taking away from this season.

Global Impact MENA was scheduled to take place in Abu Dhabi in collaboration with NYU Abu Dhabi. We had planned, had a phenomenal speaker lineup, and were ready. And then the geopolitical situation in the region made it impossible to move forward responsibly. We made the decision to postpone, with a full commitment to return to the MENA region.

What it reminded me — what it reminded all of us — is that international education doesn’t operate in a vacuum. We experienced this with COVID, the Great Financial Crisis, Brexit, … the list goes on. We’re experiencing it now with a global political climate that is anything but stable. No matter how well we plan, there are forces outside our control that will impact this work. Building that reality into how we operate isn’t pessimism. It’s professionalism. And it positions us to be nimble and ready to pivot in a way that allows us to still deliver global learning experiences for our students and colleagues despite geopolitics or other forces that have much greater control of our work than we would like.

I’ve attended AIEA and Forum many times over the years. I usually walk into a room at these conferences and know a significant portion of the room. This year was different. New faces and noticeably fresh perspectives on the work.

It’s genuinely exciting. Newer professionals are forming their views about what international education is, what it should accomplish, and how it should be practiced. The field’s next decade will be shaped in large part by what new professionals learn in these spaces, and by the mentors and organizations who invest in their development. Mentorship and early professional development – for new professionals at all levels – in these spaces are how institutional knowledge gets transferred and how collectively we move the sector forward

Growing emerging professionals into directors, SIOs, and senior decision-makers doesn’t happen organically. It requires intentional investment of time and resources. And when I look at how much more professionally and perspectivally diverse AIEA has become since my first conference there in 2009 — more directors at the table, more diverse voices in senior roles, a broader range of institutional representation — it’s clear that intentional investment works.

Mentorship is central to that story. Not formal mentorship programs alone, but sustained, honest, relationship-driven investment that moves someone from their first NAFSA conference to a senior leadership role. If you’re a senior professional and you’re not actively mentoring, either formally or informally, now is a time to explore how you can leverage your immense experience and insights to ensure our field has the foundation to grow in its impact on students, institutions, and the communities we serve around the world.

Walk into any major international education conference and you easily have four generations in the same room. Professionals who built this field decades ago alongside professionals attending their first conference this spring. That is an enormous knowledge resource, and we as a field largely leave it untapped. 

The same cross-functional collaboration we advocate for on campuses applies to our own professional development spaces. The veteran SIO and the first-year advisor have things to teach each other that no keynote can replicate. Conference organizers and professional associations should be designing for that deliberate exchange, structured intergenerational sessions, mentorship meetups, programming that puts experienced professionals in dialogue rather than parallel tracks.

The dominant conversations at both AIEA and Forum centered on U.S. institutions, US policy, US student populations, and US professional practice. That is understandable, these are US-based organizations serving primarily US-based professionals. But the gap between how we describe our work and the actual geographic scope of our professional learning is real.

Organizations can host events in other regions — we’ve done this with Global Impact and other organizations do this as well — but that’s not the same as large events branded as ‘global’, truly speaking to a global audience.

At DA Global, we think about this actively with Global Impact – North America. Building a conference that genuinely reflects the global nature of our work — not just in attendance but in content, perspective, and framing — is harder than it sounds. It means deliberately decentering the US experience even when most of your attendees are US based. It also means working to diversify the content when the call for proposals process produces proposals that center the U.S. It’s a work in progress. We don’t always get it right, nobody does. But it’s a design standard that the field should continue to work toward.

Conference season has a way of reinforcing this point. International educators gather with international educators. Career services professionals gather with career services professionals. The cross-functional conversations that could shift how global learning is integrated into broader student outcomes frameworks largely aren’t happening, at least not at the scale it should.

This is precisely why Global Impact exists. “Where Global Engagement and Student Success Meet” isn’t just a tagline, it’s a response to a structural gap in how the field learns and collaborates. When global learning operates in its own lane, disconnected from academic advising, career development, and institutional retention strategy, its impact on students is limited, and its case to campus leadership becomes harder to make.

At both AIEA and Forum, technology was a consistent theme throughout the conversation. Artificial intelligence, digital credentialing, virtual global programs, data infrastructure. The field is paying attention. And it’s innovating, new models for international student support, new approaches to scaling study abroad, new ways of credentialing global competencies that connect global competencies to employer language.

But there’s a real divide emerging between practitioners who are leaning into these tools and those who view them with skepticism, worried that technology is displacing the human-centered relationships that have direct student impact and which have drawn so many to our field. Both of these responses make sense. The opportunity is to hold them together, using technology to expand access and scale operations while protecting the advising relationships and experiential depth that define high-impact global learning. One thing is clear: standing still isn’t an option. Whether we like it or not, technology is here to stay and all indicators point to expanded use in higher education.

There is still a significant appetite in the field for learning around inclusive practices. That appetite is appropriate because the students we serve are increasingly diverse across every dimension of identity and professional preparation hasn’t always kept pace with that reality.

What’s shifted is how the conversation is being framed.The language. With the legal and political challenges to traditional DEI frameworks, many professionals are approaching this work through a more pragmatic lens, centering student and professional well-being, access to opportunity, and measurable outcomes rather than the language and structures that have come under fire.

How is the field approaching this changed landscape? In conversations with colleagues at all levels within international education I’ve ascertained the following: on one hand, there are professionals who have dedicated their careers to traditional DEI frameworks in global education and view any deviation from such approaches as capitulation. On the other hand, you have professionals who were never truly comfortable with the DEI framework of the past, but reluctantly supported them, and now feel a bit of relief that past approaches to identity are being phased out. And still, you have the majority who are in the middle, not activists for this work, but value the need for inclusive practices and strategies to support students and colleagues of all backgrounds.

What’s the right approach to inclusive practices? There doesn’t seem to be a consensus and much will depend on which of the three buckets one — or their employer — falls into. What I do know is that in the U.S. hundreds of thousands of students participate in inbound/outbound mobility programs, students increasingly hold various identities that impact their experiences, and despite millions of dollars spent in scholarships, the access gaps haven’t closed. This is true in the U.S. and other parts of the world. So, whatever language or frameworks we use, the work to ensure all students can access and benefit from global learning still needs to be done.

We are operating in a genuinely difficult moment, politically, financially, institutionally. The professionals I found most grounded this season were not the ones with the easiest circumstances. They were the ones who had looked clearly at their institutional situation, budget constraints, political headwinds, shifting enrollment, and made deliberate and pragmatic choices about where to focus and what to let go.

Uncertainty is its own kind of operational paralysis. When teams don’t know where things stand, it’s difficult to move forward. Leaders who communicate clearly — internally and externally with partners and vendors —, about budget realities, about what programs can and can’t deliver, about where the institution is headed, create the conditions for their teams to act with clarity and important relationships are maintained. That directness is a professional skill. However, from my conversations at recent conferences, this is a skill some feel uncomfortable with. As we continue to navigate uncertainty, the better we all become with clear communication, the better positioned our field will be to not just survive, but thrive.

This one surprised me most. Across sessions, hallways, and dinners, I noticed something different in the texture of professional conversation. People are sharing more, not just ideas, but experiences. Grief. Institutional struggle. Personal challenge. The loss of colleagues. The weight of navigating hard seasons professionally and personally.

The lines between professional and personal have always been blurry in a field this small and this relationship-driven. But something feels like it’s shifted. People are willing to show up more fully and more honestly than before.

I don’t think that’s a problem. I think it’s a sign of a field that is, in its own way, growing up. We’re still figuring out what those boundaries look like. But the willingness to be human with each other, especially in a field that asks us to bridge human difference for a living, feels right.

Spring 2026 was a lot. It always is.

This summer I’ll be in Madrid for the International Internship Conference and Boston for a health and safety conference. Fall will bring me to EAIE, Global Impact 2026 North America in Atlanta, and a handful of other spaces. I’ll be back with my pulse on the field from a conference lens at that point — if not before.

In the meantime, I hope to see you at Global Impact 2026 North America this November 4-6 as we tackle how a cross-functional approach to global learning will increase the impact of our work on student success and career readiness.

Andrew Gordon is an award-winning social impact entrepreneur and leading voice in global education, edtech, inclusive student success and workforce development. As founder of DA Global Access Network, an educational consortium and strategic partner advancing access to global opportunities, he has spent nearly two decades helping higher education institutions strengthen academic achievement, career readiness and institutional impact through access to global education.