Last May, 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.But instead of enrolling at a U.S. school, Soldevilla started this fall at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, where he’s pursuing a double major in computer science and mathematics. Why did he pick the Canadian school over those big American names?
“A very important factor of my decision was that there was no Trump,” the 19-year-old said.
New foreign student enrollment in the U.S. dropped by 6.6 percent in the 2017-18 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 U.S. grew slightly, the drop in new enrollees is the biggest since 9/11, said Rachel Banks, public policy director at NAFSA: Association of International Educators. The decline seems to be continuing this year, she 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 U.S. school. The 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 school full-time in the U.S., dropped from about 644,000 in fiscal 2015 to about 394,000 in fiscal 2017, according to data from the U.S. State Department. Vanessa Andrade, associate director of international partnerships and program development at California State University, Northridge, said safety is always the biggest concern.
Worries range from gun-fueled massacres to violent white supremacist groups, which have been resurgent since President Donald Trump took office, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Foreign enrollment at Northridge was down 16 percent in the 2017-18 academic year, according to IIE data.
“An export with exactly the same economic effects as when we sell soybeans.”
The more than 1 million foreign students in the U.S. contributed $39 billion and supported more than 455,000 jobs during the 2017-18 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 country’s biggest services exports.“Education—particularly higher education—is a major American export,” University of California, Santa Barbara economics professor Dick Startz wrote in a Brookings Institution blog post in 2017. “When we provide a service that leads to foreigners sending money into the U.S., 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, you see the economic impact 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 schools including the University of Connecticut, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University. She said 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, couldn’t function without foreign students, warns a 2017 report by the National Foundation for American Policy. “At approximately 90 percent of U.S. universities, the majority of full-time graduate students (master’s and Ph.D.s) in computer science and electrical engineering are international students,” it said.