The U.S. Department of State announced that student-visa holders from Brazil, China, Iran, and South Africa will be exempt from Covid-related bans on travelers from those countries to the United States, lifting a significant obstacle to the return of international students this fall.
The inclusion of China in the so-called national-interest exemption, which applies to programs of study that begin after August 1, is significant — China accounts for one in every three international students studying in the United States. Some academics and researchers from those countries will also be able to travel here.
It’s the second piece of good international-enrollment news this week: On Monday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it would extend pandemic guidance to give international students flexibility to study online for the 2021-22 academic year. Prior to Covid-19, foreign students were required to take almost all of their classes in person.
Still, hurdles remain. Worldwide, only about 40 percent of U.S. consulates are routinely scheduling appointments for visa interviews. In China and India, the two top-sending countries, consular services are closed or operating only on an emergency basis. And as visa processing resumes, there will be enormous backlogs of applicants, including two classes of international students as well as other travelers.
Even as they cheer the latest developments, college administrators are making contingency plans, in case some international students are unable to make it to campus for yet another academic year.
“A needed relief,” Jeet Joshee, associate vice president for international education and global engagement at California State University at Long Beach, said of the announcements. But, he added, “given the continuing uncertainties around Covid and visa-processing hurdles, I think contingency planning is a must for the entire academic year 2021-22.”
The pandemic has been a disruptive force in international enrollments. Although many current students remained in the United States throughout the Covid outbreak or chose to study remotely from their home countries, the number of new international students fell more sharply than any other demographic group during the current academic year. New student-visa holders declined by 72 percent in 2020, according to Homeland Security data.
For colleges that have come to rely on international students both for the diversity they bring to campus and the tuition revenue they contribute to the bottom line, another year of low enrollments would have been damaging.
The lifting of the restrictions means that students will be able to travel directly to the United States from their home countries, rather than first having to go to a third country and quarantine for several weeks. Students from Britain, Ireland, and Europe were already eligible for exemptions to entry bans.
Former President Donald Trump first barred travelers from China, including students, in late January 2020, as Covid spread there.
Higher-ed groups had been lobbying the Biden administration to lift the travel bans and to continue the online-learning policy. But government officials will need to do more to ensure that students are able to get to the United States in time for fall semester, including prioritizing student visas and waiving in-person interview requirements.
As students accept college offers and begin submitting visa applications, this is a critical time, said Elizabeth Gross, a lawyer who specializes in higher-education visas.
“There are a couple of hundred thousand students who need visa appointments — logistically, you can’t just start that in July,” she said. “Right now is the season.”
A State Department official acknowledged that health and safety concerns had reduced visa-processing capacity at consulates around the globe. While the department was working to safely return to pre-pandemic workloads, it could not provide a specific date for when that would happen at each post, the official said.
In India, U.S. consulates recently reopened, only to shut back down as coronavirus cases spiked to dangerous levels across the country. The U.S. embassy there announced it was canceling visa services until mid-May.
Marcy Newman Murli, a college counselor in Karnataka, said the Covid resurgence had thrown her students’ college plans into a state of uncertainty. “People have said yes to their schools, but it’s the logistics that may hold things up,” she said. “We’re reeling from Covid here right now.”
Elsewhere, lengthy backlogs could hamper students’ ability to get to the United States. In Kenya, Imran Vaghoo, a counselor, said the earliest his students can currently schedule visa appointments is March 2022. He is beginning to talk with families about the possibility of starting their studies online this fall.
Students, Vaghoo said, are more willing to do online study this year than last year, when many opted to defer. After finishing high school remotely, they are more accustomed and open to virtual learning. “I think they are more accepting of it,” he said.
Colleges are preparing for that possibility. New York University, for one, is already planning to once again offer its “go local” option for the next academic year at its campus in Shanghai.
This year, NYU accommodated more than 3,500 students unable to make it to New York at its campuses and study-abroad sites around the globe, including Accra, London, Florence, and Tel Aviv. In Shanghai, where the university operates a full campus, nearly 3,000 stranded students studied, so many that NYU had to rent extra space to meet the demand. Students there took a mix of in-person and online courses and had the benefit of being part of a campus community, said Josh Taylor, associate vice chancellor for global programs and mobility services.
For the fall, university officials are prepared to take in students who can’t get to New York at sites throughout its global network on a case-by-case basis, but China is where they fear significant roadblocks to students’ return.
Nearly half of the university’s more than 21,000 international students are from China, where U.S. consular offices have been especially slow to reopen. Unless visa processing resumes soon, and at a high volume, there could be two classes of students — current first-year students as well as next fall’s incoming class — without the proper paperwork to come to the United States. “China’s the biggest unknown right now,” Taylor said. “And that’s before we even start to ponder if there will be enough seats on planes to accommodate student demand.”
Not every college, of course, has overseas campuses that can host stranded students. Wake Forest University worked with a study-abroad provider to set up two remote sites in Beijing and Shanghai this year for about 100 students, or two-thirds of its first-year Chinese students.
In addition to a specifically designed academic program, the college was able to host activities that mirror those back in North Carolina, such as Lovefeast, a Moravian Christmastime celebration and one of the university’s oldest traditions. “We wanted to infuse as much of the Wake Forest experience as we could,” said Kline Harrison, vice provost for global affairs.
The university is in talks with its partner in China about whether to continue the program, while also monitoring the student-visa situation, Harrison said on Tuesday. They plan to make a “go or no-go” decision by late spring.
Even as colleges move toward plans for an in-person fall semester, administrators are ready for the possibility that international students might be the one significant group of students still studying online.
At West Virginia University, L. Amber Brugnoli, associate vice president for international affairs, has been working with the deans of the two programs most popular with international students, business and engineering, to make sure there are online sections of all required courses and the most commonly taken electives.
That work was fairly straightforward this year, when most of those stuck abroad were in their first year, but it will become considerably more difficult if students remain overseas for a second year, Brugnoli said. As students move further along in their studies, they need more specialized and advanced courses. With more instruction in person, the international office will need to make sure foreign students have priority for a smaller number of online classes, to find alternatives if virtual sections aren’t available, and to get waivers for students in highly structured majors to take courses out of sequence.
It’s hard to tell how much of an appetite students have for online education, Brugnoli acknowledged. Last year, a large share of West Virginia’s international students deferred admission rather than studying remotely.
And while WVU, which has about 1,300 international students, has the benefit of scale in its contingency planning, at Appalachian State University, where there are just 60 degree-seeking students from abroad, making accommodations is a “one-by-one effort,” said Jesse Lutabingwa, associate vice chancellor for international education and development.
Lutabingwa is at once trying to figure out potential workarounds for students who can’t get to the United States, while preparing for those who do come. As of now, international students will be expected to quarantine when they arrive — a requirement complicated by the fact that Appalachian State is a two-hour drive from the nearest international airport, in Charlotte.
“You have to realize you don’t work alone,” he said, referring to the campus offices that have been his partners. “A lesson of the crisis is you can’t work in silos.”
At Long Beach, vaccines are yet another wrinkle. California State University and the University of California last week said they planned to require that all students and employees be vaccinated this fall, pending federal-government approval of the vaccines, among the latest institutions to announce vaccine mandates.
For international students, the requirement means extra complexity — many have no access to vaccines in their home countries, while others, particularly students from China, are likely to receive inoculations not authorized by American authorities. Joshee, the associate vice president for international education at Long Beach, said administrators were looking to local and federal health officials for direction.
Still, he welcomed clarity in another area, on international students and remote courses. Even though Long Beach plans to resume in-person instruction, many courses will remain online, and had the Department of Homeland Security reverted to its stringent pre-Covid restrictions on online learning, international students’ options could have been limited.
Under the policy, colleges will have to make sure “initial” students — those who were not studying at an American institution at the start of the pandemic — take at least one in-person or hybrid course. But after events last summer — when the Trump administration abruptly put in place a policy requiring in-person courses only to rescind it in the face of college protests and lawsuits — Joshee and other educators said they were pleased to have early guidance for the coming academic year.
Now, visa processing will be the biggest wild card. “These days there’s always a Plan B,” Joshee said, “or even a Plan C.”
