The number of international students entering US colleges and universities has fallen for the second year in a row, a nonprofit group said yesterday, amid efforts by the administration of US President Donald Trump to tighten restrictions on foreigners studying in the US.
New enrollments for the 2017-2018 school year slumped 6.6 percent compared with the previous year, according to an annual survey released by the Institute of International Education.
That follows a 3.3 percent decline in new international students tallied in the 2016-2017 academic year.
Several factors are driving the decrease.
Visa and immigration policy changes by the Trump administration have deterred some international students from enrolling, college administrators and immigration analysts said.
A strong US dollar has made US college tuition relatively more expensive — Canadian and European universities are competing fiercely for the same students — and headlines about mass shootings also might have deterred some students, institute president Allan Goodman said.
“Everything matters from safety, to cost, to perhaps perceptions of visa policy,” Goodman said. “We’re not hearing that students feel they can’t come here. We’re hearing that they have choices. We’re hearing that there’s competition from other countries.”
International students have become an important funding source for US colleges as traditional revenue sources, such as state funding, come under pressure.
Most undergraduate foreign students do not qualify for need-based financial aid, and must pay close to full tuition and fees to attend US schools.
Similar to previous years, the largest numbers of students came from China, India and South Korea, which together made up 56.1 percent of all international students.
The institute did not track new international student numbers before the 2004-2005 school year, but Goodman said the latest declines in enrollments were comparable to the period after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The annual survey of foreign-student enrollment is funded by the US Department of State.
Some immigration policy experts and college administrators attributed the decline to the Trump administration’s drive to restrict immigration, and an overall sense of a US political climate that is hostile to immigrants and foreigners.
“It is not a welcoming environment,” said Doug Rand, a former White House official working on immigration issues during the administration of former US president Barack Obama.
He said that Trump has moved to restrict the issuance of skilled-worker visas and permanent residency, which many incoming students may apply for in the future.
“It’s an act of willful ignorance to suggest that our immigration policies aren’t having a direct impact on foreign student enrollment,” Rand said.
Caroline Casagrande, a department official, said the “flattening” in international student enrollments began with the 2015-2016 year, prior to the start of the Trump administration.
That year, new enrollments still increased by 2.4 percent compared with the prior year.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS