Betting on Africa

On a recent fall afternoon, the Place du Souvenir, a large open-air space on Dakar’s corniche, was humming. The plaza’s name means “place of remembrance,” and it is dedicated to the African diaspora, but ice cream and ocean breezes were the main attraction this day, offering strolling families relief from unseasonably hot weather. Skateboarders clattered down a set of stairs, attempting tricks, while TikTokers used a large sculptural map of Africa as backdrop for their video shoots.

On the plaza’s southern end, a crowd was beginning to form outside a low-slung building. Inside, a group of American college representatives bustled about, hanging banners, fanning out admissions viewbooks, and arranging mounds of university-branded swag on folding tables. An American-style college fair had come to Senegal.

The fair capped a weeklong trip to the West African countries of Senegal and Ghana by eight college flagships from the American South. Unlike a typical college-recruitment trip, the reps were not admissions staff members but senior international officers, the top administrators at their institutions responsible for global strategy.

That administrators at their level would interrupt their schedules to fly thousands of miles on a recruiting trip underscores the importance of foreign students to American colleges. These students contribute to campus diversity and provide vital international exposure to their American peers. And as domestic enrollments contract, tuition dollars from abroad are ever-more critical. Last academic year, international students contributed nearly $34 billion to the American economy, according to NAFSA: Association of International Educators.

Whether they will continue to be a vigorous engine of enrollment growth is an open question, however. Over the past decade and a half, much of the increase has been driven by a single country, China, which accounts for one in three of the nearly one-million international students in the United States.

Recently, though, the number of Chinese students on American campuses has cratered. A Chronicle analysis found that 45 percent fewer U.S. visas were issued to Chinese students for the fall of 2022 than during the same period before the pandemic. That could be a big hit to colleges.

While some educators hope for a rebound as Covid’s effects recede, news that China’s population has begun to contract after six steady decades of growth suggests that this retreat could be permanent. China’s decline has been a sobering and urgent reminder that American colleges must cast their global-recruitment nets more widely.

But where? India has been the perennial No. 2 to China. Some colleges are looking to Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, cementing ties in their backyards. Then there’s Africa, home to more young people than anywhere else in the world. Of the continent’s 1.25 billion people, 60 percent are under 25.

“The African continent has cornered the market on 18- to 23-year-olds for the next 25 years,” said Lydiah Kemunto Bosire, a former international-development consultant and founder of 8B Education Investments, an educational-technology platform focused on African-student admissions overseas.

As high-school graduation rates have improved, African universities have struggled to make room for all, or even most, of these students. In sub-Saharan Africa, less than 10 percent of college-age students are enrolled in postsecondary education, according to the World Bank. Could studying overseas be a solution?

In the fall of 2021, more than 42,500 international students from sub-Saharan Africa enrolled in American colleges, according to the Institute of International Education, a 9-percent increase over the year before. Only Europe saw a bigger percentage jump. Globally, sub-Saharan African students are the most likely to cross a border to earn a degree, Campus France reports.

It’s far from guaranteed that the United States will see a surge of students from the continent: While the middle class in sub-Saharan countries like Senegal and Ghana is growing, many families still don’t have the means to send their children abroad. American colleges often lack the networks to recruit in a part of the world where connections matter deeply, and university leaders may balk at the investment required to build up the admissions pipeline. U.S. Embassy officials say visa fraud in the region is a problem, and student-visa denial rates are high. And there’s the uncomfortable question of whether African students will feel safe coming to study in a country whose racial reckoning has been messy and painful.

Still, some colleges are gambling that Africa, if not the next big thing, will be a next big thing in international admissions. For the colleges gathered on the Place du Souvenir, the fair was a step toward invigorating their outreach to students from Africa. They threw open the doors to the sun-drenched plaza, and students streamed in.

At the doors that day was Samba Dieng, Louisiana State University’s senior international officer, who organized the fair. At first, Dieng tried to get those entering to stop to register using a QR code, but as the crowd swelled into the hundreds — many students came with their entire families, including younger siblings, in tow — that became difficult.

Students massed around the tables, sometimes five or six deep, and the college reps grew hoarse trying to project their sales pitches above the cacophony of the crowd. Fliers and booklets quickly dwindled. One official, Susan M. Roberts, associate provost for internationalization at the University of Kentucky, took to jotting the email address for undergraduate admissions on the backs of Wildcats stickers and stray scraps of paper.

Amid the commotion, Illona Massol, a slight teenager with close-cropped hair, found a spot on a raised platform in the room’s far end, where she intently studied a brochure from the University of Florida, tuning out everything around her. Massol is the oldest in her family and the only daughter; winning admission to an American college could open new paths, not just for her but for her siblings, she said. She hopes to study law.

“I feel rather excited, stressed, and scared — to be honest, a mix of emotions,” she said. “But being able to apply to the U.S. is an opportunity I will not like to waste.”

Many of the fair’s attendees made their way back to Dieng. Even in a sea of people, he stood out, with a basketball player’s stature and a steady gaze that conveyed that whatever conversation he was having — whether about scholarships or majors or campus security or intramural sports — was the one that really mattered. He was a gravitational force, pulling the crowd into his orbit.

They came, too, because they saw themselves, or their children, in Dieng. “They believe in my story,” Dieng said. “They believe that my story could be their story.”

Two decades ago, he was the kid with ambitions to study abroad. His parents sold a small parcel of land to make it happen.

Back then, the few Senegalese students who went abroad studied in France — Senegal is a former French colony, and public-school classes are typically taught in French. But Dieng wanted to go his own way, to America. Flipping through college guidebooks at a U.S. Department of State-run cultural center one day, he spotted a photo of a group of students studying on a patch of the greenest grass he had ever seen. “Oh, this is the dream,” he thought and decided to apply to the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

Dieng arrived in the United States for the first time in May 2001 and started classes that fall. He knew no one. His one disappointment: His small Midwestern college town lacked New York City-style high rises.

Much has changed since Dieng left for America. Educational attainment has steadily climbed in sub-Saharan Africa: In 2000, about a quarter of the continent’s teenagers completed secondary school, but as of 2020, almost 45 percent did, the World Bank reports. Both Senegal and Ghana score well on the United Nations’ gender-parity index, meaning boys and girls attend school in largely equal numbers. Youth literacy rates are 75 percent in Senegal and above 90 percent in Ghana.

But as the pool of eligible students has ballooned and the demand for high-skilled workers has increased, African universities have struggled to keep up. They can neither train nor retain enough professors. Ibrahim Gueye, who was at the college fair with his son, Mohamed, said Mohamed must get up early and stay late in order to get in the computer-science courses he needs at a crowded local polytechnical university. “It is not easy to study when you are so tired,” said Gueye.

Kiné Fatou Diallo, another university student who would like to go abroad, said demand for popular majors, like medicine, means that often only students with the highest exam scores can study in those fields. Student strikes have also disrupted classes, said Diallo, a pharmacy student. “It’s not really cool that we’re not going to school,” she said.

More students may be in the position to study overseas than when Dieng applied, thanks to increased political stability and economic growth (although the latter has been somewhat dented by global economic slowdowns stemming from the pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine). “This is not the Africa of 25 years ago,” Dieng said.

One afternoon, he and the other college reps visited Tema International School, in a suburb of Accra, Ghana. The private boarding school calls itself the “home of the fast and furious” because of the dedication and determination with which students throw themselves into academics and extracurriculars alike. Students run their own YouTube channel, organize free community-health screenings, and staged a full musical production this past fall; a Tema senior is the current 18-and-under Ghanaian national chess champion. One hallway displays science projects on DNA sequencing and renal function.

College-placement rates are 100 percent, school officials said, with Tema alumni at top universities around the globe, including Harvard, MIT, Oxford, and France’s Sciences Po. Standing in a multipurpose room where college flags hung as thick as garlands, Tema’s principal, Ken Darvall, spoke to the visiting college representatives as a group of students, serious-faced and dressed in olive-drab uniforms, looked on. “They’re ready to make a mark on your universities,” he pledged, “and they’ll do it from Day 1.”

Tema is among a number of elite high schools in and around Africa’s largest cities whose goal is to send students to college abroad. Many offer the International Baccalaureate, recognized by universities around the globe; others teach the French or British national curricula or even Advanced Placement courses.

These top-flight schools cater to wealthy local families, as well as to children whose parents work for multinational corporations, foreign governments, or global-development agencies. For American and other western institutions, they can form a natural recruiting network, with students who are prepared to make the transition to an American college classroom and who have academic, and perhaps even personal, ties to the United States. For the visiting American universities, all part of the Southeastern Conference, such schools were the backbone of their weeklong trip.

Seeking students there may be a pragmatic choice, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a comfortable one for educators, who must balance the bottom-line imperatives that drive international recruitment with a desire to expand access. “Is it truly keeping with our mission?” said Sandra J. Kelly, vice provost, dean of undergraduate studies, and director of Global Carolina at the University of South Carolina. The president of South Carolina’s graduate-student association is from Senegal and has encouraged Kelly to go outside the major cities, she said.

International schools dot the globe. But the asymmetries of access may be particularly pronounced in sub-Saharan Africa, where local schools can be short-staffed and may struggle to afford textbooks and equipment.

That means many talented students are being overlooked, said Bosire, the educational entrepreneur. She attended national schools in her native Kenya before winning a scholarship to a prestigious international high school in Wales, and then another to Cornell University, where she earned a bachelor’s in government and a master’s in public administration, in just four years.

People often act as if she is exceptional, but Bosire, who also has a doctorate from Oxford, said she was simply lucky: She applied for the scholarship only because an older classmate had won it a year earlier. Many of her fellow students would have been equally adept at doing the work but never got the chance, she said. “There’s a lot of brilliance in Africa, but we have underinvested in it.”

Christina McDade is the college counselor at Lincoln Community School, in Accra. Although Lincoln is one of Ghana’s most exclusive private schools, in late October, the SEC delegation was the first group of American colleges to come to campus that semester. In Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, where she worked for a decade, she would have been flooded with colleges’ requests to visit, McDade said.

McDade, who grew up in Gary, Ind., and traces her family roots to West Africa, views working in the region as a calling. But she worries that high schools in Africa as a whole aren’t on the map for American college recruiters in the same way schools in the deep-pocketed Persian Gulf are, and she hopes to build up a network of fellow college counselors to share resources and, hopefully, attract greater interest.

“If only we could get more people to come,” McDade said. “I want people to see our kids.”

After earning a master’s degree, Dieng, the LSU international officer, decided he wanted to return to his roots and work with foreign students, inspired, in part, by the way Nebraska’s sole international-student adviser managed to embrace and support him and the college’s many overseas students. “I wanted to be in international ed to be in the lives of these students,” he said. A decade ago, he made his first recruitment trip to Africa and, except for a pause during the pandemic, has been returning several times a year.

“This is the third time I’ve been in one of your selfies,” one student at the West African College of the Atlantic, a Dakar high school, said with a good-natured laugh, as she crowded in for a group shot.

If Dieng is a frequent flier, the other SEC college representatives were making their first foray into undergraduate recruitment in sub-Saharan Africa. The work can be complex. Even if colleges home in on a relatively narrow slice of internationally focused schools, the circuit is still vast, and travel between African countries can be cumbersome and expensive. The joint trip was an effort to iron out logistical kinks and smooth entree for an entire group of colleges into local high schools; Dieng, who sees his role as promoting both Louisiana State and study in America, was a willing organizer.

Despite the upfront investment, a single visit will not be enough. College admissions, internationally and within the United States, runs on familiarity: Admissions officers get to know a school’s students, their preparation, and their capabilities, while colleges establish a track record among teachers and guidance counselors. Recruiting in Africa will require patience, not merely turning on a spigot — but that may take some adjustment for university leaders who are used to equating international recruitment with the enormous, and at times seemingly inexhaustible, flow of students from China.

Of course, colleges had years to build networks and burnish their reputations in China. Until recently, American higher education was unusually dominant there, attracting more than half of all Chinese students who study overseas.

American colleges are not likely to enjoy the same advantages in Africa, where linguistic, cultural, and economic ties are deeper and more longstanding with European countries like France and Britain. Students may also go elsewhere within the continent for their studies, with South Africa as the primary magnet. And China has sought to make inroads as a destination, offering scholarships to students from Africa and from developing countries elsewhere.

Building trust may be especially important in communally minded countries like Ghana and Senegal, where students routinely call older adults “aunty” and “uncle” as a sign of respect.

Adja Ngom, a junior at the West African College of the Atlantic, had been thinking of studying close by family friends in Atlanta or Montreal, but said she liked the presentation from Blair McElroy, senior international officer at the University of Mississippi, who had been emphasizing her institution’s size, at 28,000 students, the smallest of those on the trip. “We’re the Hospitality State,” McElroy told Ngom and other students. “We say hello. If you ask for directions, somebody’s probably going to walk you to where you need to go.”

Rapport and reassurance may be especially important for African parents, who play a more decisive role in the college-application process than their American counterparts typically do. At school visits in the days leading up to the college fair, Dieng repeatedly encouraged students to bring their parents to the event, knowing that they would be pivotal in whether their children studied abroad and where.

“At the end of the day, every parent here just wants to be sure that their kid is safe,” said McDade, the counselor from Accra. She praised colleges that went the extra mile, such as connecting applicants’ parents with parents of current students from the same region. “They want to know that you’re going to take care of them.”

Discussions of safety are complicated by another issue, race. It can be a double-edged sword: The opportunity to open their campuses to a diverse set of students is powerful motivation for many educators. Yet those well-intentioned desires are clouded by the United States’ troubled history with race and racism.

The 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests were broadcast around the globe and have thrown the race issue into particular relief.

Floyd’s death has fed perceptions around the globe that the United States is an unfriendly, even hostile, place for people of color to study. America’s standing abroad had already taken a beating during the Trump administration, when he abruptly banned visitors, including students, from a half-dozen largely Muslim countries and later derided African nations as “shithole countries.” That reputational damage lingers.

“Does it complicate our efforts? It does,” Dieng said of Floyd’s death. “A human being, being killed on live TV — I couldn’t explain that.”

On the trip, the issue of race was thrust into public view at the Dakar Academy, where the group was asked to speak in front of most of the high-school students. At first the presentations were routine — mentions of scholarships, faculty-student ratios, and award-winning academic programs — but during the question-and-answer session, one student raised his hand: What does diversity look like on each of their campuses? he asked.

The moment felt immediately awkward. Except for Dieng, the college representatives were white. Several fumbled for the percentages of Black students at their institutions, while others tackled the issue of diversity more broadly, talking about sexual identity and first-generation students. Afterward, the student, Aziz Kane, said he wasn’t satisfied with the answers. “I wanted them to speak to me about what it would be like to be a young Black man on their campuses,” he said.

Over the next few days, a number of the American administrators proactively raised the issue of race during school visits. Mississippi’s McElroy, whose institution is 74-percent white, told students that every office and department on campus has a diversity plan. “We’re serious about it,” she pledged.

Non-Black admissions officers can talk effectively about race, Dieng said, by highlighting their colleges’ antiracism activities or how they prioritize public safety. He acknowledged, though, that his personal perspective carried weight with African students. He told them that he had never felt unsafe as a Black man and that Americans are friendly. “That is not what the U.S. is like,” he said of the images broadcast of Floyd’s murder.

But Kane’s question was also an emotional one for Dieng, taking him back to his student days and the loneliness and vulnerability he felt as the only Black student in his classes. “I was 18 years old again,” he said.

Recruiting in Africa will require American colleges to be especially sensitive about race. What’s more, it’s not clear if saying the right thing will be enough to assuage students and families.

Valerie Mainoo, who has been principal of the Roman Ridge School, in Accra, for 15 years, said she has seen a recent upswing in students choosing countries like Canada over the United States. “It’s a safety issue,” she said. And of the more than 50 students interviewed by The Chronicle during a week in Ghana and Senegal, most said they had concerns about the racial climate in the United States.

Raby Pouye, who is from Dakar and wants to study criminal justice, was among those who asked whether she would be safe in the United States. “We see the news, and we worry,” she said. She pinched the skin on her forearm. “Because of the color of my skin. Because I am Black.”

Still, such sentiments were not universal. Kiné Fatou Diallo, the pharmacy student, said that as an observant Muslim, she would feel more uneasy studying in France, where public officials have placed restrictions on the wearing of veils and other religious head coverings, than in the United States. “I know that America is welcoming of many people,” she said. “That is one of the great characteristics of America, that it is diverse, that it has so many cultures.”

For Diallo, America’s embrace of difference makes it an attractive destination to study. “Here there can be judgment, but in America you can do what you want to do,” said Diallo, who says her voluble, outgoing personality sometimes gets her labeled as weird by more-reserved classmates. “I think there I could be more myself.”

Diallo’s younger sister Adja was less set on studying abroad, but after stopping by the college fair for her sibling, her interest was piqued by the freedom to choose among a wide range of majors. Paging through admissions materials, Adja, who is interested in both architecture and computer science, noted that many of the academic programs listed don’t exist in Senegal.

Both sisters said their ability to go overseas hinged on a key factor: scholarships. “They’re a necessity,” Adja said.

Indeed, no issue was raised as consistently by Ghanaian and Senegalese students as funding: They asked about financial aid, about whether they would be allowed to work, about athletic scholarships. “You’ll have to talk to your coach about the best way to get on the radar for colleges,” Gretchen Neisler, whose University of Tennessee Volunteers were last year’s SEC champions, diplomatically told a height-challenged basketball hopeful at one stop.

Among the visiting colleges, the availability of need-based aid for African or other international students was often limited. One, the University of Florida, offers no universitywide scholarships for foreign students unless they are from Latin America, a region of institutional focus. At others the pot was small, and international applicants would be competing with Americans from other states; if the students hoped to get financial aid, they should apply early, the college reps advised.

Dieng said the frequency of such questions should not be seen purely as a reflection of financial need. Some families view a scholarship offer as a mark of prestige, proof that an American college wants their son or daughter so much that they’re willing to pay.

Certainly, that could be the case for some, who are already spending thousands of dollars annually on private-school tuition. But college counselors said that while many middle-class African families could afford to pay part of the costs of an American education, few could afford to foot the entire bill.

The currency crisis, which has hit sub-Saharan African countries especially hard, could push a foreign degree further out of reach — the Ghanaian cedi lost 55 percent of its value against a strong U.S. dollar last year.

Gueye, the fairgoer who hopes to send his son to the United States, said inflation has eaten into the nest egg he had set aside for tuition; he was considering selling some land or one of the family’s cars to raise more funds. “Gathering the money is most hard,” he said. “We have been saving, but it is not enough.”

If a primary impulse driving American colleges’ recruitment efforts is to backfill as the wave of Chinese enrollments recedes, from a financial perspective, Africa is not China. Even before the current economic slowdown, average incomes in China were about three times higher than in Ghana and more than four times higher than in Senegal.

The Pew Research Center estimates that more than half of the Chinese population, nearly 707 million people, is now middle class. Even though Africa’s middle class has been growing, its share of the population remains relatively low. In Ghana, only about 20 percent of the population qualifies, and in Senegal, a little more than 5 percent does. And thanks to their government’s now-abandoned one-child policy, Chinese families often have generational wealth to invest in their only children, with parents, and grandparents, too, contributing to college costs. China’s generation of singletons could afford to pay the full, out-of-pocket costs of an American degree.

Even among Africa’s middle class, savings are likely to have to stretch further, to cover the tuition expenses of multiple children: In Senegal, the average woman gives birth to 4.5 children, according to the World Bank; in Ghana, the fertility rate is 3.6.

From a purely dollars-and-cents perspective, it could be difficult — and in the near term, impossible — for students from Africa to offset revenue, of up to $10.5 billion, that could be lost by plunging Chinese enrollments.

For many educators, a focus on the balance sheets will seem uncomfortably mercenary, a myopia that ignores the cultural and academic value of enrolling students from around the world. “That’s the question I would raise, is it just to get money?” said Jamil Salmi, an educational consultant and former World Bank official from Morocco.

If American colleges expect recruiting in Africa can fully offset the Chinese enrollment losses, disappointment seems inevitable. But experts say there are alternative models.

Bosire thinks platforms like hers can act as matchmakers, helping western universities reach beyond a narrow handful of private schools to a broader group of African students, both online and through an on-the-ground presence. For students, the social-impact company will provide better access to admissions information and to scholarships and income-contingent loans, seeking backers who see connecting young Africans with global education as a long-term investment in students and the continent’s economic prospects.

Salmi said American colleges could consider forming joint-degree partnerships with universities in sub-Saharan Africa. Institutions like BEM Management School, a business school in Dakar, have agreements with European and American universities that allow students to begin their studies in Africa and then spend time and earn a credential abroad. Since 2019, 47 BEM students have transferred to American colleges, such as Fort Hays State University, in Kansas, and another 24 students are applying to go abroad this fall. “It may not be as lucrative” as four years of tuition, Salmi said, “but it is dependable. That way you can secure regular flows of students.”

Such partnerships can also help improve the capacity of African universities, he added.

For the SEC colleges that traveled to Ghana and Senegal, the wheels for the next steps are already in motion. The group hopes to travel together next year to East Africa, forging relationships in another part of the continent.

In South Carolina, Kelly wants to build more programs to bring more West Africans to study at the state’s flagship university and thinks she may be able to win legislative support. After all, South Carolina has a long, and painful, past with the region: Slave ships that departed from West African ports frequently docked in Charleston, a primary entry point for the slave trade, and many Black South Carolinians trace their roots to Ghana and Senegal.

Out of that awful symmetry, maybe some good can come, Kelly said. “We can’t undo the past,” she said. “But can we come full circle and support students from Senegal and Ghana?”