Private nonprofit colleges with larger shares of international students were more likely to shift their fall reopening plans to offer in-person instruction, according to a new working paper based on data collected by the College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College.
While earlier research has looked at other factors, such as state politics, that may have played a role in reopening decisions, the paper is the first to examine how the presence of international students — and the tuition dollars they bring — may have influenced college leaders.
The researchers found that, in July 2020, increases in the percentage of nonresident enrollments — Ipeds’s category for international students and other non-U.S. residents — were “significantly and positively related” to a shift toward a reopening plan that incorporated more in-person instruction. For example, a shift from 6 percent to 7 percent nonresident enrollment was related to a roughly 20 percent increase in the likelihood that the institution would change reopening plans.
The researchers did not find a similar relationship between international enrollments and face-to-face instruction at public colleges.
July 2020 was a pivotal moment for college reopening decisions as the fall semester loomed. But it was also a critical time for international students. Just after the July 4 holiday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security abruptly announced a change to its pandemic policies for international students: While student-visa holders had been permitted to take all their courses online during the coronavirus-interrupted spring semester, beginning in the fall, they would be required to have at least some in-person instruction or they would have to leave the country, the government said.
The rule change presented colleges with a challenge because a large share of the more than one million international students on American campuses had remained in the United States during the initial Covid-19 outbreak — as many as nine in 10 stayed last spring, according to the Institute of International Education.
Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sued to challenge the visa policy, and a little more than a week later, the U.S. government reversed course and rescinded the measure.
Still, the short-lived policy may have affected colleges’ decision making, the researchers write. Indeed, that may have been the intent — in a July television interview, Ken Cuccinelli, then the acting deputy secretary of homeland security, acknowledged that an objective of the rule change was to “encourage schools to reopen.”
In the paper, the researchers note that the relationship between international enrollments and in-person instruction cannot be proved as causal. But they hypothesize that private colleges’ heavy dependence on tuition revenues, and the financial precarity many such institutions faced even prior to the pandemic, could have made them more sensitive to retaining international enrollments.
On average, private colleges enroll a higher share of international students than do public institutions, 6 percent compared with 4 percent. In the College Crisis Initiative data, 130 private colleges shifted their plans to more in-person instruction in July.
Earlier research, however, has suggested that public doctoral and research universities experienced gains in tuition revenue from enrolling international undergraduates, while bachelor’s- and master’s-level institutions did not see the same financial benefits.
In a statement, Barbara K. Mistick, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said, “Since the onset of the pandemic, the senior leadership at each private, nonprofit college and university has used its own set of metrics to determine how and when to safely open their campus. Guidance from national, state, and local health professionals has been a major factor in decision making.”
In the statement, the group reiterated its support for international students and said private-college leaders were committed to the safety and security of all students during the pandemic.
Melissa Whatley, a postdoctoral research scholar at North Carolina State University, who co-wrote the paper with Santiago Castiello-Gutiérrez, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Arizona, said the findings underscore that college leaders may have been “stuck between bad decisions.”
“It was a decision between what was best for public health and the local community,” Whatley said, “or what keeps the lights on.”
