This study examines counseling cases involving international students at a Japanese engineering university to identify degree-specific problem structures and to consider the feasibility of a support model that integrates preventive and educational approaches. The analysis indicates that the primary concerns differ across academic stages—daily life adjustment for undergraduates, research stagnation for master’s students, and supervisory relationship difficulties for doctoral students. At the same time, within the laboratory-centered educational system characteristic of engineering institutions, issues across multiple domains tend to interact, allowing problems to remain latent and subsequently escalate. These structural conditions highlight the limitations of conventional problem-solving approaches. The findings underscore the need for a support framework that combines early, preventive intervention from the point of enrollment with educational approaches designed to cultivate students’ autonomy and self-regulation.