International Student Program

In 1918 the University YMCA hired C. D. Hayes, back from YMCA work in China and Japan, to work with the students who came to Illinois from abroad. A student Friendly Relations committee, later the Committee on International Friendship, met them on arrival, found them rooms and jobs, opened American homes to them at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and held an International Dinner every year from the mid-1920s. In 1924 Illinois was one of very few student YMCAs in the country with a full-time foreign-student secretary.

From 1950 to 1968 John W. Price led the Y's International Student Program: International Suppers that drew hundreds on alternate Sundays, welcome weekends for new students, farm visits at Thanksgiving, a Little United Nations, and a spring bus tour of the South that ran for more than twenty years. The program ended in 1968, when Price joined the University's Office of Foreign Student Affairs and part of the work went with him. Its values live on in the Y's International Dinner, held every year since 1984, and in the New American Welcome Center's work of welcome and belonging for people born abroad.