America Draws Students From Around the World. Its Gun Culture Is Pushing Them Away.

William Pruitt started working at Virginia Tech in 2009, not long after a gunman killed 32 students and professors in the deadliest campus shooting in American history.

As a coordinator of the university’s international-exchange programs, he spent much of his time reassuring partner universities around the world that they could still send their students to rural Blacksburg, Va. Some administrators were so unnerved that they insisted on visiting the campus, and Pruitt would walk them through the safety protocols Virginia Tech had put in place. He and other officials delivered the message that what happened was an awful aberration and that it remained safe to study at Virginia Tech — and in the United States of America.

“Back then, there was a saying on campus that we got struck by lightning,” says Pruitt, who is now the associate director of community engagement and service learning at the University of South Carolina. “You could say it then. You can’t say it now.”

In the decade since Virginia Tech, lightning has struck again and again, as mass shootings have occurred in communities and on campuses across the country: El Paso and Dayton, Las Vegas and Pittsburgh, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. As of mid-November, the Gun Violence Archive had tallied 366 mass shootings in the United States in 2019.

International news networks like CNN broadcast images of these attacks around the world. Local outlets overseas amplify the coverage, particularly when someone from that country has been caught in the crossfire: an Indian graduate student killed in a holdup in Kansas City, a Saudi student wounded in Charlotte, a teenager from Pakistan among seven students and two teachers fatally shot in a Texas high school.

Among those watching are prospective international students and their parents — and the images may be coloring their perceptions of studying in America. On the road, admissions officers are peppered with questions about campus safety. A survey of about 2,000 current international students and recent graduates of American colleges by World Education Services, a nonprofit international-education research company, found that nearly two in five are worried about gun violence. This spring, the Chinese government even warned students and other travelers about the risks of going to the United States.

Though various officials The Chronicle contacted for this article privately acknowledged the fraught nature of the subject, many were reluctant to talk on the record.

“It’s the elephant in the room,” says Paul Schulmann, the associate director of research at WES.

Over the last few years, American educators have been anxious about the “Trump effect,” the idea that the administration’s travel ban, tougher visa policies, and anti-foreigner rhetoric have led to a drop in new international students enrolled at American colleges. But maybe something else is scaring students away from the United States. Maybe it’s guns.

Jay L. Clendenin, Los Angeles Times, Getty Images

Mass shootings — incidents in which four or more victims are injured or killed, not including the shooter — make headlines at home and abroad. But gun-related violence is more commonplace here than in many other developed countries. Homicide rates in the United States are more than double the average of the other industrialized nations that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Three-quarters of murders in this country are committed using a firearm.

Americans have a profoundly different relationship to guns than does much of the world. In the countries that send the most students to American colleges — China, India, and South Korea — it’s rare for the average citizen to own a firearm. In the United States, by contrast, there are more guns than people, an estimated 120.5 civilian-owned weapons per 100 residents. Americans possess 40 percent of the world’s civilian firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey, a project of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, in Geneva.

It’s little surprise, then, that America’s gun culture can come as something of a shock to students from overseas.

The prevalence of guns also sets the United States apart from other countries, like Australia and Britain, that attract large numbers of foreign students. When IDP Connect, a global student-recruitment firm, polled current and prospective international students and their parents about their perceptions of major destination countries, both groups of respondents rated the United States dead last on safety.

World Education Services routinely surveys students about safety and security as part of a broader look at international students’ experience at American colleges. But safety is a squishy word that can mean different things to different people. Some students may fear hostility because of their race or religion. Others may feel uneasy because of the political climate. Female students may worry about sexual assault. So this year the researchers decided to query students specifically about gun violence, Schulmann says. What they found jumped out.

While nine out of 10 students reported generally feeling safe on campus, a quarter said they were concerned about gun violence at their institution. Thirty-seven percent worried about it in their local community.

“Those are big numbers,” Schulmann says.

All international students are not equally anxious about potential shootings. Students from Latin America and the Caribbean report less concern about gun violence, on campus or off. But fears run especially high among students from Asia, where homicide and gun-ownership rates are low and where news about incidents involving students abroad travels quickly.

Joshua Lott for The Chronicle

Ask Blaire Tian about her impression of the United States growing up in Nanjing, a city of eight million in eastern China, and she sums it up in one word: “Dangerous,” she says. “Lots of guns. That’s the stereotype.”

Violent crime in America is a staple of the news programs her father watches and is buzzed about on WeChat, the popular social-media platform her mother follows. Someone is always getting killed in imported American movies, in comic-book blockbusters and high-minded Oscar fare alike. One of the most popular television shows in China today is about a group of Chinese students studying at a college in the United States. The plot line of an early episode centers on one of the students and his father getting caught in, and eventually thwarting, a shooting on campus. Images of America as the wild, wild West are pervasive.

“In China, the food may slowly kill you,” Tian says, mentioning the country’s food-safety problems. “But people don’t shoot people here.”

Still, when it was time for college, Tian’s parents agreed she should go to the United States. The universities were better, and the teaching style more appealing.

But where could they send their only daughter so that she would be safe? When Tian, who is 18, saw a college she liked, the family would go online and pull up crime statistics for the surrounding area. Johns Hopkins was a good university, but Baltimore seemed dangerous, so she didn’t even apply. Ditto for the University of Chicago. In Texas, there are so many guns — she crossed colleges there off her list.

In the end, she decided on Northwestern University, in suburban Evanston, Ill., a top-ranked college in a community with a lower crime rate.

Tian’s approach isn’t unusual. High-school counselors and student-recruitment agents in China and India told The Chronicle that it is common for families to weigh crime statistics when choosing between colleges. And location can affect perceptions of safety — students at colleges in the suburbs were less likely than those in cities or rural areas to fear gun violence, the World Education Services survey found.

Even so, Tian, who is now a freshman at Northwestern, exercises caution. At night, she mostly travels with a companion; if she goes out on her own, she uses an app on her phone that will alert an emergency contact if she doesn’t reach her destination within an allotted amount of time. Every morning — evening back in China — she leaves her parents a voice message. “They like to hear my voice,” she says. “They keep repeating to me, mind your safety, mind your safety.”

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Some international students, though, have very different feelings about firearms than do Tian and her family.

In fact, some international students are intrigued by American gun culture, precisely because they have little exposure to firearms in their home countries. About half of the 90 students who sign up for Purdue University’s rifle and pistol club each year are from overseas, says Michael J. Reckowsky, the group’s adviser.

Some of the students have experience in shooting clubs back home. Others may be from countries, like Israel and South Korea, that require military service and so have had firearms training. But many raise their hand when Reckowsky asks those who are newcomers to shooting to step forward. They’re curious to learn gun safety and marksmanship. Some later go out to local shooting ranges in their free time.

“It’s always either, ‘Yes, I’m experienced,’ or, ‘No, I’ve never held a gun before,’” Reckowsky says. “It’s nothing in the middle.”

For other students, guns don’t rate as much of an issue, or pale in comparison to other concerns. When Kansas State University had to carry out the state’s law that allows adults over 21 to carry a concealed handgun, including on college campuses, there were few questions and little outcry from international students, says Sara Thurston, the director of international student and scholar services.

At the University of Texas at San Antonio, Jessica Guiver, the director of international undergraduate admissions, says she could “probably count on one hand” the number of students or parents who have asked about gun violence in her three years in the role. Moving to Texas after more than a decade in Europe, she found it jarring to have to go through active-shooter training as a staff member. But prospective students primarily ask her about scholarships, academic programs, and housing — not guns.

And while concerns about gun violence may be mounting, many experts think the United States will continue to attract large numbers of students because of the quality of education here. Chinese-based recruitment agents surveyed this year by the Beijing Overseas Study Service Association said safety was a top factor among students seeking to study abroad — equal to academic ranking. But when weighing the two, educational quality won out, says Phoenix Guo, chief of education consultants at Guangdong Overseas Education Services. “Safety is still a secondary concern,” she says.

Likewise, Monica Meng, an adviser at a Chinese high school that sends 50 to 60 students each year to American colleges, says typically only a handful of her students each year choose not to go to the United States, for safety or other reasons.

Even some international students who have been directly affected by gun violence haven’t let the experience deter them from their studies. In her three years in the United States, Mona Mustafa has come close to not one but two shootings. Once, two men outside her apartment exchanged gunfire during an argument. Another time, someone shot into the office in central San Francisco where she was interning. No one was hurt, but bullets lodged in the wall in the photocopier room.

Her family back in Egypt “prays for me,” says Mustafa, who recently earned a master’s degree in project management from Golden Gate University. “They are freaked out.” But while the incidents, along with mass shootings in the news, “have made me more scared, that wouldn’t make me give up my dreams.”

Yue Wu for The Chronicle

Many Americans have grown so accustomed to the idea of guns that their role in depressing international enrollments might not even register.

When Justin Gelzhiser, a doctoral student in international and comparative education at the University of California at Los Angeles, started to think that international students and gun violence might be the subject of his dissertation, some of his classmates pooh-poohed it. They thought that school shootings weren’t a central-enough topic to the international-student experience.

But Gelzhiser had done a yearlong pilot study into the issues that international students cared about the most in their dissertation work. The findings had jumped out at him: Students were overwhelmingly concerned about gun violence and American gun culture. They had talked at length about how their families had hesitated to let them go abroad because of safety fears. The depth of students’ feelings made Gelzhiser confident he was on to something.

The day that Gelzhiser was to present his findings, the subject became more than academic. On the morning of June 1, 2016, he was due to proctor a final exam. Just as he set foot on campus, shortly before 10 a.m., gunfire was reported and UCLA was placed on lockdown.

The classroom door didn’t have a lock, so Gelzhiser and his students barricaded it with desks, took off their belts and wrapped them around door hinges to make them more difficult to open, and armed themselves with fire extinguishers. Sitting on the classroom floor, students typed messages on their phones to friends and family around the globe. Some were anxious and frightened, Gelzhiser says, while others dismissed it as a likely false alarm. Still others whispered, It was just a matter of time before this happened here.

That was a sentiment coming through in Gelzhiser’s research: To international students, colleges like UCLA made themselves vulnerable to shootings. Why, they wondered, were American campuses open to all visitors? Back home, it was often necessary to show identification and be screened by a guard. In the United States, anyone could walk onto a campus — and just about anyone could have a gun.

At the root, the lack of stricter gun-control laws and the ease with which guns could be procured were what the students found most baffling. It seemed to them that there was “such an obvious, simple answer” to the problem of gun violence, Gelzhiser says, and they did not understand why Americans did not enact tighter restrictions on who could own a firearm.

But if they found Americans complacent in the face of a serious problem, they understood that they, too, were tolerating certain risks. “They consider their decision to become international students in America to be an acceptance of a reality in which guns can be bought and used by almost anyone,” Gelzhiser wrote in his dissertation.

In fact, many of the students said they worried less about gun violence now that they lived and studied in the United States. They had developed strategies — they didn’t take buses, they never carried more than $20. “They were able to get more comfortable, to let their guard down,” Gelzhiser says.

After more than three hours, the lockdown was lifted. A former Ph.D. student in engineering had killed his adviser before shooting himself. Classes were canceled for the rest of the day. So, too, was Gelzhiser’s presentation.

His dissertation, on international students’ perceptions of gun violence, was completed last spring. He is now a visiting scientist at Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he will expand his study, surveying students at Boston-area colleges about their views on guns. For Gelzhiser, the events of that day quieted any doubts about the direction of his work. It underlined the “realness of my research,” he says, “and how it can impact anyone anywhere.”

Mahesh Kumar A., AP Images

When international students are the victims of gun violence, it can hit especially close to home for others like them. Daniel Chuang had just finished his junior year at the University of Missouri at Kansas City when he heard the news — a fellow international student named Sharath Koppu had been shot and killed. Koppu had come from India to study for a master’s degree in engineering and was working as a cashier at a takeout restaurant when he was shot during a July 2018 attempted robbery. (Except when it relates directly to their studies, students on visas are not supposed to work off campus, but family and friends said Koppu needed the money during the summer, when on-campus jobs are scarce, to make ends meet.)

Chuang, a journalism major from Taiwan, already took precautions to keep safe. Koppu’s death shook him, though. “To have someone who was a student like me shot was really scary,” he says. “If someone crazy owns a gun, it may endanger any of us, regardless of gender, race, nationality.”

Chuang also is disturbed by the concealed-gun law in neighboring Kansas. Not long ago, a man overheard Chuang and a few friends speaking Chinese. He heckled them, cursing and telling them to go back to China. Chuang feared the man could have a gun, so he hesitated to confront him.

Chuang earned his degree this spring and works as a project administrator at a Kansas City design firm through Optional Practical Training, the postgraduate work program for international students. Asked if Koppu’s death gave him second thoughts about studying in the United States, Chuang says no. But if he had to do it again, Chuang says, he might have picked a college in a city that seemed safer.

When international students are the victims of gun violence, colleges often must convey a complicated set of messages. Jiang Yue, an Arizona State University sophomore from China, was driving home from a shopping trip with her boyfriend when their car was rear-ended. The other driver then shot Jiang dead.

The January 2016 road-rage incident shook the entire Arizona State campus, but the shock was especially deep among the university’s large Chinese population, recalls Mark Rentz, the longtime executive director of ASU’s English-language center. Administrators reached out to Chinese students, holding meetings to respond to their grief and fear.

The university also had to reassure another constituency an entire continent away. Jiang’s death rocked China, where social-media reactions were split between outrage at American gun violence and sorrow at the loss of a family’s only child. Administrators knew they needed to communicate with parents of current students and to prospective students who were just then applying to Arizona State, says Rentz, who is now the associate vice provost for international education at the University at Albany.

They worked to craft a message in Chinese that would “calm perceptions,” Rentz says. “But we also knew that we couldn’t oversell safety.”

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Even campuses that haven’t experienced gun violence firsthand may find themselves responding to concerns. When a student was shot at a Delaware State University residence hall in 2014, Scott Stevens, the director of the English Language Institute at the University of Delaware, 45 miles away, was inundated with phone calls from anxious parents around the globe.

When he travels abroad to recruit students, Stevens increasingly fields questions about safety — more than at any point in his nearly four decades in international education, he says, even though overall rates of violent crime have fallen over that time. Only the cost of education is brought up with equal frequency. Stevens blames social media and the impact of high-profile mass shootings.

“I think it’s really beginning to snowball,” he says.

Signs indicate he’s right. Each fall, the Institute of International Education surveys colleges about enrollment trends, asking them to list the major reasons behind declines or gains in international-student enrollment. In 2016, just 12 percent of respondents cited physical safety — defined by IIE as gun violence or civil unrest — as a factor in falling enrollments. Last fall, 44 percent did. Only the social and political environment in the United States grew faster as a concern.

John Wilkerson, the executive director of international admissions for Indiana University, says it would be an “irregular” international-recruiting trip for him or his admissions officers if they were not asked about safety and gun culture. “It’s often the first question asked in parents’ sessions.”

In fact, when IDP, the student-recruitment firm, surveyed students and parents about their biggest concerns about studying internationally, students were most worried about their prospects for work after graduation. For parents, far and away the greatest source of anxiety was their children’s safety.

Pushpinder Bhatia is the chief executive of PAC Asia Study Abroad, an Indian recruitment agency that helps students apply for colleges in countries including Britain, Canada, and the United States. Safety, he says, is a concern only when students are going to America. “With other countries, safety isn’t a question, it isn’t a topic,” he says.

Before students from Monica Meng’s high school leave for abroad, she puts on workshops for students and parents about safety and gun culture in the United States. She offers advice and tries to allay families’ fears about gun violence. “I tell them that the rate of getting shot in the U.S. is less than getting hit by a motorbike in China,” she says.

Her efforts don’t always work — one set of parents, she says, were so nervous about their daughter’s safety in the United States that they pushed her to graduate in just three years.

Astrid Galvan, AP Images

Fears about safety have affected international enrollments before. In 2009, there was a spate of attacks on Indian students in Australia. One student was stabbed during a robbery. Another was beaten on a commuter train.

In the wake of the assaults and the government’s tightening of visa eligibility, Indian enrollments at Australian universities plummeted. Australian government officials went on a public-relations tour of India to try to stanch the declines. They flew members of the Indian media, which had given heavy coverage to the attacks, to Australia to prove it was a safe place for students. It took several years, though, for Australia to regain its footing in India.

In the United States, where there has been little consensus about gun control, educators have largely developed strategies on an institutional basis. International-admissions officers say they have become far more familiar with Clery Act statistics and local crime data. Colleges may even want to include such information in recruitment materials, because families don’t always know where to look for accurate figures, says Pruitt, the former Virginia Tech official. And universities that work with third-party recruiters, he says, should also share statistics with them, as agents are often the frontline for these questions.

Rentz, of the University at Albany, says colleges need to be careful about how they talk about gun violence and other safety concerns. “There’s a fine line between giving students more information and scaring them,” he says. At the same time, he worries that colleges can overpromise on safety — after all, low current crime statistics are not a guarantee against future incidents.

Increasingly, international-student offices are inviting the campus police to speak at orientations or workshops throughout the year. Security officers can provide practical advice about local laws and reporting procedures. In addition, their presence can send an important message to students from cultural backgrounds where they may not be comfortable approaching the police.

Chiko Nakamura, a student from Japan, met the campus police during her first days as a San Francisco State University student. Without that initial introduction, she probably wouldn’t have gone to officers when a classmate began to stalk her. “It would have felt too intimidating,” Nakamura says. “But instead, it felt personal, like I knew them.”

But even as they seek to allay students’ anxiety, overseas recruiters and international-student advisers need to keep track of how frequently such concerns come up and share this information with their bosses and other administrators, Pruitt says. “We need to make more of a case,” he says, “that a multibillion-dollar industry is at risk.”