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The impetus to ensure Australian students, once enrolled, complete their university qualification has become more pressing. Student retention impacts funding in a tight fiscal environment and is used as a benchmark for quality performance. Evidence of increased levels of psychological distress in university students threatens this retention. Risks to student well-being can be compounded for diverse and international students with vulnerabilities that include social isolation, negotiating cultural difference, and marginalization. This article reports on the evaluation of an extracurricular program available to all students in an Australian university that enabled respectful interfaith and cross-cultural dialogue, called Finding Common Ground. The program sought to reduce social isolation, support mature religious expression, counter marginalization, and strengthen graduate attributes. The research highlighted hopeful and surprising cross-cultural encounters, impacted positively on student well-being, enhanced cross-cultural learning, and disrupted the propensity for polarization or “silence” in university (and social) discourse on religious beliefs.

University graduates are required to possess intercultural competence in addition to strong academic skills in today’s globalized world. Although such competence has been defined in various theoretical models by intercultural scholars, it remains unknown how the recipients of higher education (the students) define this concept. A total of 130 undergraduate university students (from Western and non-Western cultures), living on a multicultural campus, provided short qualitative responses to a written question on how they define intercultural competence. According to a qualitative content analysis, the students defined intercultural competence in terms of interaction, communication, and cultural harmony. Unlike intercultural scholars, the students placed more emphasis on the understanding and awareness of other cultures rather than focusing on their own culture. It appears that young university students from multicultural backgrounds consider tolerance and collective harmony as the most important components of intercultural competence in their initial stages of intercultural development.

This study seeks to determine a definition and appropriate assessment methods of inter-cultural competence as agreed on by a panel of internationally known intercultural scholars. This information is validated by a sample of higher education administrators and can be used by administrators in identifying and assessing intercultural competence as a student outcome of internationalization efforts. Conclusions made from this study include identified elements of intercultural competence and assessment methods on which both the intercultural scholars and administrators agreed, resulting in the first study to document consensus on intercultural competence. Both groups agree that it is possible to assess degrees of intercultural competence and in so doing, that it is best to use a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods to assess intercultural competence, including interviews, observation, and judgment by self and others. Two models of inter-cultural competence are presented based on the findings of the study.