Key findings of a survey released last week suggest that the United States is in danger of falling behind other major international student destinations in the competition for international students because it lacks a national strategy to coordinate recruitment and help international students navigate the immigration process.
The Survey on a National Strategy for International Education in the US was published by international student placement specialists, the IDP, and was created in consultation with a range of organisations working in the international higher education space, including NAFSA: The Association of International Educators, the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, the US for Success Coalition, and others.
Around 75% of the 400 professionals who responded to the survey work in international education. The majority of these professionals ranked the US dead last – seventh out of seven – in comparison to other leading countries “in terms of having a successful, coordinated effort to support international education”.
Those who work in private sector firms involved in international education as well as English language centres or schools also rated the US last. The 2% of respondents who work in higher education membership policy advising organisations gave the US a rating of four out of seven.
“Relative to other countries,” said Fanta Aw, NASFA’s executive director and chief executive officer, “we have tremendous capacity in terms of our educational system at the higher educational level.
“And we have not even scratched the surface of our ability to attract as many students who wish to come and study in the United States, relative to other countries. Study after study has indicated that when given a choice, students would select the United States among the top two or so destinations.”
According to Aw, a national strategy will ensure that all key government organisations and agencies, as well as associations involved, will be on the same page.
“We need to be able to highlight the breadth and depth of diversity of our higher education system,” she said, “from the community colleges and our flagship, public institutions to private higher education.”
Aversion to national strategy
The absence of a national strategy for international students in the US cannot be explained simply by saying that it is a federation since all but one of the international student ‘destination countries’ to which the US was compared in the survey is a federation.
Both Australia and Canada are federations, in which their state or provinces, respectively, have primary responsibility for higher education, including charting them, yet each has a national strategy.
Likewise, Germany, where each university is chartered by the state (there are 16 states) in which it is located. British universities are chartered by one of the four countries that make up the United Kingdom, and it has a national strategy overseen by the British Council. France is an outlier among ‘destination countries’ in the survey; it is a unitary state, with Paris being responsible for higher education and its international strategy.
Rather, the US lacks a national strategy for intertwined historical and legal reasons. Despite the image of power that radiates from pictures of the US Capitol and the president standing before a podium, from the country’s earliest days, Americans have historically been opposed to national political projects.
The nation’s third president, Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809), fought against the creation of a National Bank. Andrew Jackson, the seventh president (1829-1837), ordered the government to stop using the Second Bank of the United States, effectively killing it and also opposed federal government spending on public works such as canals.
Among the legal hurdles to establishing a national policy is the fact that the states have primary responsibility for higher education both through their power to charter colleges and universities and, in terms of public universities, they are the major funders and set the parameters of tuition fees and, increasingly, what programmes can be taught.
Additionally, southern states like Alabama and Arkansas, and large powerful states like Texas, are as inimical to working closely with the federal government on education as they are on other public policies such as combating climate change.
Many moving parts
The growth of higher education over the last several decades and the recognition that internationalisation is good both for education inside the country and for America’s reputation and influence around the world, has led to what amounts to an ad hoc, inefficient system given the task of fostering internationalisation.
NASFA, a private organisation, based in Washington, DC is one part of this ad hoc system, as is the New York-based World Education Services (also private).
The departments of state, homeland security and commerce all have sections devoted to increasing internationalisation while different states have their own organisations such as the Texas International Education Consortium.
With so many moving parts, it comes as no surprise that the survey encountered a somewhat jaundiced view about whether a strategy could be crafted and implemented. More than three quarters of respondents said they had concerns about achieving consensus in the diverse US higher education landscape.
69% had doubts about the sustainability of a plan while 60% had “concerns about [a] one-size-fits-all strategy”. More than half feared that crafting the strategy would simply take too long, while 22% had other concerns.
The respondents’ selection of Canada as the “most successful country” in attracting international students, a choice likely to be motivated by a “surge in enrolments over the past several years” is stale-dated: as reported in these pages, the surge to 1 million international students has added to the nation’s housing affordability and supply crisis, which, a few weeks ago, prompted the federal government to reduce international student visas by 35%; the government was also concerned that as many as 25% of foreigners in Canada on international student visas are not attending classes and are gaming the system to gain entrance to Canada to find work.
Responding to a question about the Canadian cuts, Aw said: “That being the case, I think we can still learn from Canada and from Australia,” which has also announced it will cut the numbers of international student visas it will issue.
“There are lessons we can learn from those countries. We’ve had our share of ebbs and flows. This is a bump along the way, but I do not underestimate our colleagues and [their] being able to address the situation and recalibrate as needed,” Aw explained.
A varied system
The American higher education system is perhaps the most varied in the world. It includes elite private universities, private research universities, state-funded flagship research universities, state university systems, elite private four-year colleges, public four-year colleges and community colleges, some of which act as feeders into state university systems, some of which grant BA degrees and some of which are more oriented toward the trades.
It is hardly a surprise, therefore, that the largest group of the survey respondents, 29%, wanted enrolment targets determined by type of institution and not one figure for all institutions.
By contrast, 41% of respondents said they wanted enrolment targets to be increased significantly or modestly. 16% supported the idea that enrolment targets should be determined by region. Another 12% were not in favour of any quantitative enrolment targets.
Economic benefits
A century ago, when the number of international students coming to the United States was miniscule and those that came to study did so mainly at Ivy League universities, university officials would, no doubt, have offered ‘diplomacy’ as the reason why international students studying in the country is important. Today, according to the survey, ‘diplomacy’ is the fifth reason, while ‘cultural enrichment’, the staple of talks by innumerable panellists and graduation day speeches, is number two.
Most, by far, of the survey’s respondents pointed to various kinds of economic benefits when asked what an international student strategy can secure for the country.
Among four key economic reasons given, the number one reason cited was ‘global competitiveness’. The third most common answer, ‘innovation and research contributions’, speaks to events on campuses, such as scientific discoveries that have measurable economic benefits or lead to commercial spinoffs.
Answer number four, ‘economic impact’, encompasses the local, regional and national effect of international students spending money for tuition and to live in the United States. The sixth answer was ‘labour market needs’.
Perceptions about the economic benefits are well-founded. In the 2022-23 academic year, the more than one million international students studying in the United States contributed more than US$40.1 billion to the American economy. At individual institutions, where international students pay fees far in excess of their local counterparts, they contribute a welcome addition to the university budget.
As Aw explained, the economic answers given by survey respondents are not mutually exclusive but, rather, are additive and depend to some degree on whether the person answering the question is a university president, senior international officer, or person in the private sector.
“You can look at the global competitiveness of the US and within global competitiveness, global labour market data is one of those elements. A university president has to talk about labour market needs because that’s not only for international students; it is for all of us. Governors have to talk about labour market needs because, politically, that’s a key factor for them,” Aw said.
Dual intent
More than three quarters of respondents said that the strategy must modernise international student work and post-graduation rates, with three quarters pointing specifically at the need to modernise F-1 and J-1 visa policies and procedures. Just over 60% said that an international student strategy must expand F-1 visas to allow for “dual intent”.
According to Sarah Spreitzer, vice-president and chief of staff of government relations for the American Council on Education, one of the partners in the survey, at present, “when you come over on a student visa to the United States, your sole purpose has to be to study. You cannot express an interest in remaining in the United States and finding work after your studies”.
“Dual intent would allow applicants of student visas to express interest in remaining in the United States after they conclude their studies,” Aw told University World News.
The impact of politics and protest
Although the survey did not ask how the present debates about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and the closure of departments considered tainted by political indoctrination by government (for example, in Florida where sociology has been removed as a core class), or raucous campus protests against Israel could impact international student recruitment and enrolment, I asked Aw both questions.
She said the answer to the first question was “complex and nuanced”.
On a day-to-day basis, people around the world do not closely follow US domestic politics, including the debate about DEI, she said. Since most international students are graduate students, they come to the US to study in specific fields and do not see the DEI debate as particularly germane to them.
However, in the longer term, Aw said she is concerned that if the debate continues, it will have an impact on which states international students choose for their study.
“If you choose to study sociology, Florida is not a place to go,” she said.
Addressing the issue of campus, she drew a distinction between what is seen on television and social media, and the reality on the vast majority of America’s 4,000 campuses.
“I think we have to qualify the perception versus the reality of what’s happening,” she said. “We keep seeing that American campuses are on fire and all that. For goodness’ sake, let’s look at the numbers [of campuses] we are talking about.”
No immediate changes
The survey has, likely, been warmly received by both the Biden Administration and by both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives, because, says Spreitzer, there is bipartisan support for international students.
There will, however, almost certainly not be any legislative changes coming this year because in addition to 2024 being a presidential election year, one third of the 100 seats of US Senate are up for election and the entire House of Representatives is up for election.
“During an election year, we are not going to see any kind of substantial immigration legislation that would make changes to student visas or even to work visas,” Spreitzer told University World News. “So, at least for the next year, we’re not going to see Congress take on these issues.”