In May last year, Luis Carlos Soldevilla graduated with one of the best grade-point averages in his Mexico City high school. For his senior project, he even tackled Goldbach’s conjecture, a famous number-theory problem. Soldevilla considered attending Boston University and the University of Washington, both of which had accepted him. He also had fond memories of the University of California, Berkeley, where during the summer of 2016 he took a computer science course. However, instead of enrolling at a US university, Soldevilla started this fall at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, where he is pursuing a double major in computer science and mathematics.
Why did he pick the Canadian institute over those big US names?
“A very important factor of my decision was that there was no [US President Donald] Trump,” the 19-year-old said.
Illustration: Yusha
New foreign student enrollment in the US dropped by 6.6 percent in the 2017-2018 academic year, double the previous year’s rate of decline, according to the Institute of International Education (IIE).
While the total number of international students in the US grew slightly, the drop in new enrollees was the biggest since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, said Rachel Banks, public policy director at the Association of International Educators (NAFSA).
The decline seems to be continuing this year, Banks said.
The report attributed the drop to multiple factors, including visa delays and denials, the “social and political” environment and the cost of attending a US university.
The Trump administration’s hard-right immigration policies, such as banning people from Muslim-majority countries and separating children from their parents at the border, make prospective students and their parents feel “that we’re not a welcoming country,” Banks said.
The number of F-1 visas, the kind issued to foreign students going to university full-time in the US, dropped from about 644,000 in fiscal 2015 to about 394,000 in fiscal 2017, according to data from the US Department of State.
Vanessa Andrade, associate director of international partnerships and program development at California State University, Northridge, said that safety is always the biggest concern.
Worries range from gun-fueled massacres to violent white supremacist groups, which have been resurgent since Trump took office, the Southern Poverty Law Center said.
Foreign enrollment at Northridge was down 16 percent in the 2017-2018 academic year, according to IIE data.
The more than 1 million foreign students in the US contributed US$39 billion and supported more than 455,000 jobs during the 2017-2018 academic year, according to an analysis by NAFSA. The largest spending benefits went to California, New York, Massachusetts, Texas and Pennsylvania.
NAFSA said education is one of the US’ biggest services exports.
“Education — particularly higher education — is a major American export,” University of California, Santa Barbara, professor of economics Dick Startz wrote in a Brookings Institution blog post in 2017. “When we provide a service that leads to foreigners sending money into the US, that’s an export with exactly the same economic effects as when we sell soybeans or coal abroad.”
In a small place with a large international student population, the economic impact is seen almost immediately, said Jennifer Ewald, associate vice provost for global strategy at Fairfield University in Connecticut.
“You might not notice in New York City, but you will notice in a town like ours,” she said. “I don’t think people outside of higher-ed understand the threat to local economies.”
As state and federal dollars dried up, schools used tuition from international students to make up the shortfall. With US high-school graduation rates flat or falling, international enrollment helped boost revenue “due to limited tuition discounting,” Moody’s Investor Service wrote in a 2017 report, in which it downgraded its credit outlook for the US’ higher-education sector from “stable” to “negative,” where it remains today.
In December, Moody’s said more stringent immigration policies were playing a role in falling international enrollment.
Immigration lawyer Dana Bucin, a Hartford, Connecticut-based partner at Murtha Cullina, has advised hundreds of foreign students at institutes including the University of Connecticut, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University.
She said that colleges are worried their pipeline of highly talented internationals will shrink.
The students are “being stressed out of their minds, not because they’re planning on breaking law, but precisely because they’re trying to comply with it,” Bucin said. “They feel they’re here to contribute, not to steal anything away.”
And contribute they do. Graduate education in critical areas such as science and engineering, where America is increasingly falling behind other countries, could not function without foreign students, warns a 2017 report by the National Foundation for American Policy.
“At approximately 90 percent of US universities, the majority of full-time graduate students in computer science and electrical engineering are international students,” it said.
Because there are not enough US-born students enrolled in these kinds of programs, international students who are should automatically be given green cards, said Fariborz Ghadar, the director of the Center for Global Business Studies at Penn State University.
The university’s international student body dropped about 5 percent from 9,134 in the 2016-2017 academic year to 8,636 at its largest campus, University Park, in the last academic year.
“If you oppose immigration, you can say: ‘Well, we’ll enroll some more Americans to offset the decline,’ but we’re already letting in all the native-born Americans who are qualified,” Ghadar said.
A handful of universities, including Haverford College and the New School in New York, sued the Trump administration in October last year over an immigration rule change that took effect in August. It altered how a concept known as “unlawful presence” is enforced, making it easier to ban foreign students for three-year or 10-year periods if they are found to have violated the terms of their admission.
Such terms include not working more than 20 hours per week at a campus job, forgetting to notify university officials after moving to another dormitory, or even if an official makes a mistake with the paperwork.
Plaintiffs contend that the change is illegally “designed to impose tens of thousands of re-entry bars” annually, and that it violates federal immigration and administrative procedure laws.
They warn that it will result in the “banishment of untold numbers of international students and exchange visitors acting in good faith.”
Last month, additional plaintiffs including the American Federation of Teachers joined the suit, filed in federal court in Greensboro, North Carolina. More than 60 colleges and universities filed an amicus brief in support of the litigation.
“The US becomes vastly less attractive when coming here risks a 10-year re-entry bar through no fault of your own,” said Mayer Brown partner Paul Hughes, lead counsel for the plaintiffs.
The new policy “injects enormous uncertainty and unpredictability into our immigration laws,” Hughes said. “Now a student can come and try to do everything perfectly legally, but suffer enormous consequences if they make a minuscule mistake.”
The Trump administration has asked the court to dismiss the case, saying the plaintiffs do not have standing to sue.
Michael Bars, a spokesman for the immigration service, said the agency is focused on upholding the law “to the greatest extent possible” and is not purposely targeting foreign students.
US universities “are in this rather uncomfortable and precarious position,” said Ravi Shankar, the director of the international office at Northwestern University, which joined the amicus brief. “On one hand, we have to comply with regulations for national security, which we all take seriously. On the other hand, we’re trying to make sure our messaging to students reiterates that they’re welcome here.”
Like other institutes, Northwestern has increased its outreach, provided free legal advice to foreign students and pushed lawmakers to intervene in individual cases where students are denied visas.
“We want to inform students of what’s really happening,” Shankar said. “We found fear was often based on assumptions.”
So with the US losing out, which countries are winning over those students? Australia’s foreign student growth rate was up 15 percent in the 2016-2017 academic year and Canada’s hit 20 percent, according to NAFSA.
At the University of Toronto, the number of foreign undergraduates such as Soldevilla climbed 14.8 percent, from 4,023 in 2016 to 4,620 last year.
Applications increased about 20 percent for each of the past two years, said Ted Sargent, the school’s vice president of international.
“Many are looking not just for a place to come to school, but potentially to settle in the long run,” Sargent said.
That is a key consideration for Istanbul-born Alara Demirag, an architecture student at the University of Toronto. The 20-year-old was accepted into four US universities, each of which awarded her scholarships. Studying in Canada was appealing, in part because it was easier to stay and work after graduating — and for her parents to join her.
She said that some of her Turkish friends accepted by US universities were denied student visas, including one who got into Berkeley and “was devastated.”
For decades, “the US has had the first pick in choosing the best minds from around the world,” said Angel Cabrera, president of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. “It isn’t widely understood, but it’s a huge economic advantage that would be very dangerous to risk losing.”
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