White House efforts to limit immigration have college officials worried that they could be deprived of the overseas faculty they have come to rely on. That concern spreads from large doctoral universities to small colleges in isolated areas that have trouble filling faculty positions domestically.
Most of the college employees hired from abroad come on H-1B visas, which allow “nonresident aliens” to enter the United States and later pursue permanent-resident (“green card”) status.
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Because H-1Bs allow the hiring of foreign workers for jobs requiring specialized knowledge, such employees are often assumed to be clustered in science, technology, engineering, and math. But at Texas Tech University, which had more than 200 nonresident aliens on the full-time instructional faculty in 2015 (see table), and many more former H-1B holders who had progressed to or beyond green cards, “we go literally from ‘A’ to ‘Z,’ " says Tibor P. Nagy Jr., vice provost for international affairs. “We have people in architecture, athletics, biology, chemical engineering, chemistry, civil engineering, climate science, computer science, economics, educational psychology, English, geoscience, human development. … " And on he goes.
Some foreign instructors come to the institution, in Lubbock, on J-1 visas, intended for cultural and educational exchanges. But most come on the recently contentious H-1Bs. Along with trying to bar visitors from several Muslim-majority countries, President Trump has called for toughening the regulation of all guest-worker programs and has said that H-1Bs should be limited to “only the most skilled and highest-paid applicants.”
Many officials fear that colleges’ favorable deal on those visas could be disrupted. While industry H-1B visas are capped at 65,000 per year, plus 20,000 for those with advanced American degrees, higher education has no cap, thanks to a clause in the American Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century Act of 2000.
College and university officials commonly say they apply and pay (about $1,000) for H-1B visas only for foreign job candidates who are the best long-term fits for departments’ faculties. Most of those scholars will have demonstrated their capability during Ph.D. studies in the United States. The website MyVisaJobs.com reports that 95,000 H-1B holders were working in American colleges and universities in 2015, and that the institutions filed 27,641 new or renewing applications in 2016. H-1B visas are for three years, renewable usually only once.
On some campuses, critics have denounced higher education’s use of H-1Bs as an abuse of its exemption from industry’s stringent H-1B quotas. They argue that the United States suffers no shortage of qualified American candidates for STEM and other positions, and that colleges exploit a vulnerable labor force if they pay H-1B holders less than the going American academic salaries.
Undoubtedly, university salaries are considerably lower than those in many areas of industry, with average pay of just under $75,000 at colleges for 2017. But Mr. Nagy, a former career diplomat, says any notion that there is widespread exploitative underpayment in academe is far-fetched, because the Citizenship and Immigration Services and the Department of Labor ensure that salaries are appropriate: “There are very strict rules on that.”
According to Department of Education figures, four-year public institutions that hire H-1B holders, like Texas Tech, move most of them along the tenure track. So do four-year private nonprofit institutions, although to a lesser extent.
Richard Porter, director of International Student and Scholar Services at Texas Tech, says salary setting is not a precise science — the Department of Labor depends on job titles and salaries that often do not track closely among institutions or within disciplines. In reality, he says, hiring people on H-1Bs ends up being more expensive than hiring domestically.
In addition, supporters of the program note, it’s individual departments, not colleges, that select and appoint international faculty members, increasingly through the use of global job postings. But while the hiring of nonresidents of the United States isn’t part of concerted institutional plans, many officials say they are pleased when the best candidates for positions increase ethnic, racial, or geographic diversity on the campus.
What makes an international job candidate the best applicant varies. Dennis Patterson, chair of the political-science department at Texas Tech, specializes in the statistical analysis of political phenomena, an approach in which Korean scholars are particularly strong. Now, four of the department’s five current or former H-1B visa holders are Korean.
In the small eastern-Texas city of Marshall, Wiley College has little choice but to shore up its ranks with international hires, says the provost, Gloria Pryor James. “We get very highly qualified applicants from the United States and abroad, but when they find out what we can pay, they don’t come,” she says. Wiley has four new faculty members starting this fall on H-1B visas, and last year, three of its five hires were international.
Ms. James says that her historically black institution, with almost 1,200 students, has sometimes struggled to adequately prepare H-1B holders for their teaching role, and that it plans to beef up its faculty-development efforts this year. While “it’s great to have the diversity,” she says, “there are some language barriers.”
Wiley is glad if candidates have family ties or other reasons to stick around Marshall, Ms. James says, but she is aware that some candidates specifically seek out less-competitive institutions like hers, which may be more willing to sponsor their visas.
Any disruptions to American institutions’ supply of highly qualified foreign candidates do harm, says Stephen Freedman, provost at Fordham University and a member of the Administrative Board of the International Association of Universities.
It’s a pipeline issue, he says. Once on H-1Bs, holders can remain in the U.S. beyond the six-year limit if they have begun the green-card process. But the international pipeline of faculty members really begins at the undergraduate level, because families in China, India, and other countries who send their children to the United States budget for a several-year process culminating in faculty or industry jobs, and H-1B visas are a key element of that progression, he says.
The White House position on immigration has created “a fog in the international academic community as to what the next few years will be like,” Mr. Freedman says. “Elite institutions will still produce an appropriate quantity” of faculty members who start out as nonresident aliens, but the pipeline needs the institutions ranked below the top 20, too, and there “I think we will see diminishment.”
That would harm the national interest if, for example, the supply of faculty members thins in such emerging key areas as cryptology. It probably will, he says, as well as in fields where the Trump administration has signaled that funds will most likely be reduced — environmental science, for one. Families overseas are alert to such developments, he says, and other countries, including Canada and Australia, are poised to attract overseas students to their shores.
Without a U.S. connection through their studies, Mr. Freedman says, they may be less inclined to develop their faculty careers at American colleges.
Peter Monaghan is a national correspondent for The Chronicle. Email him at pmonaghan3@mac.com.
