As colleges navigate an uncertain route to the fall semester, one of the biggest question marks is international students.
Although a recent survey by the Institute of International Education found that most international students in the United States this spring stayed here when the coronavirus shuttered campuses, new international students — and those who did return home — face very real hurdles to making it to their colleges: Border restrictions have halted most international travel, and students face lengthy quarantines upon entry. With most American consulates around the globe closed, time is running out for them to get visas in time for an August or September start.
“International students are our biggest concern in the fall,” said Peter Kilpatrick, provost of the Illinois Institute of Technology, where about half of the graduate students are from abroad.
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The possibility that many international students could fail to make it to American campuses has injected a complicated new variable into colleges’ contingency planning. Retaining foreign students is crucial. Not only do they compose a significant share of enrollments in science and engineering programs, like those offered by IIT, but their tuition dollars have become an essential source of revenue for many colleges. In their grim financial outlook for American higher education, credit-rating agencies have singled out weak international enrollments.
So colleges are getting creative to keep their overseas students, even if from a great distance. They are repurposing study-abroad programs, setting up online courses with an international audience in mind, and enlisting alumni to help foster a sense of community.
Such efforts have the potential to reshape how colleges think about international enrollments long after the pandemic has subsided.
Studying ‘Abroad’ at Home
Some institutions have sought to find overseas partners where their students could enroll, on a temporary basis. The University of Mary Washington is in talks about enrolling its stranded freshmen with the American College of the Mediterranean, which offers an American-style education on campuses in France and Spain. “It’s better to have them for three years versus none at all,” said Jose Sainz, director of the Virginia college’s Center for International Education. “We need to keep those students we can. We don’t want to have to start from scratch.”
New York University is offering eligible international students the option to “go local” and study on one of its overseas campuses, in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi, or at one its dozen academic centers around the globe, including Berlin, Buenos Aires, and Sydney.
Lehigh University, in Bethlehem, Pa., doesn’t have its own campuses abroad, but it is making arrangements with international partners to serve as “Lehigh in Residence” sites for newly admitted international students who may not be able to make it to campus. Under the plan, students would take pre-approved courses at the partner institutions, said Cheryl Matherly, vice president for international affairs.
The university had a head start in its planning because it had expected to begin a first-year study-abroad program this fall. Through that work, it had already developed strategies to encourage those freshmen to identify themselves as Lehigh students, such as assigning on-campus students as “virtual buddies.”
Matherly said Lehigh — where the number of international undergraduates who have accepted admissions offers is close to pre-pandemic targets — is still in “scenario-planning mode” but expects to begin to give students detailed options for study as soon as early June. Students from 35 countries are in the freshman class, and Lehigh has found “academic homes” for students in 22 of them, Matherly said. As with study-abroad programs, students will pay tuition to Lehigh, and the university will then reimburse its overseas partners.
We’ve gotten to the point where students are constantly worried.
Those partners include institutions like Ashoka University, a private liberal-arts university in India. The two institutions have exchanged students and professors, and “they share an ethos with us,” Matherly said.
The “in residence” program will be tailored to freshmen. Current international undergraduates who returned home will have the option of taking courses remotely or enrolling for the semester with one of Lehigh’s study-abroad partners. It’s a different matter at the graduate level, where individual programs set their own policies and students are on campus for a shorter time. Most new graduate students have chosen to defer, to January or the fall of 2021.
The ability to take their freshman year “abroad” at home could appeal to students like Marina Meijer’s advisees. Meijer, an independent college counselor who works in Belgium and the Netherlands, said her clients want to go to the United States for a full college experience, not just to earn a degree. “Our students don’t want to enroll online,” she said. “It won’t work for them.”
If colleges don’t want to set up their own partnerships, they could temporarily allow the transfer of credits from students’ home-country universities, Meijer said. “American universities have to give students the confidence they want to work with them.”
A desire to give students greater certainty about fall plans helped spur Franklin & Marshall College to set up a semester in Shanghai for freshmen from China, the largest group of international students at the Pennsylvania institution. “We’ve gotten to the point where students are constantly worried,” said Sue Mennicke, associate dean for international programs. “We wanted to give them a real, concrete plan.”
The Institute for Study Abroad, a study-abroad provider, will run the program on the ground. But Franklin & Marshall professors will remotely teach the courses, which will be drawn from those typically taken by first-year students. “We don’t want it to feel like less-than in any way,” Mennicke said.
Despite the 12-hour time difference, faculty members have supported the program, which could serve about 65 students. They also have raised “productive questions” about such issues as how to ensure academic freedom in a China-based program, which will make the final product stronger, Mennicke said.
With many Americans who would have studied abroad planning to stick close to home next semester, study-abroad providers are using their excess capacity to accommodate international students. The Council of International Education Exchange, which has 32 sites in 22 countries, is in talks with several colleges about developing such programs. The nonprofit provider, which laid off 600 employees worldwide as the pandemic spread, offers more than 3,000 courses, accredited through Tulane University, and has experience running freshman study-abroad programs, said Seamus Harreys, vice president for global enrollment. It can also deliver individual colleges’ curricula.
Clark University, in Worcester, Mass., could turn to the council or another study-abroad provider to host its pathways program for Chinese students, which combines academic courses and language classes for students who fell just short of Clark’s English-proficiency requirements. The university previously ran the pathway on its campus, but holding it in China would maintain the pipeline of students, said John LaBrie, dean and associate provost for professional education.
Better Online Experiences
Some colleges are focusing on how to make online course delivery work better for overseas students, if they are forced to go that route.
The University of California at Davis has been reviewing student feedback from the spring semester to shape its approach to the fall. As a result, it has adjusted its “summer start,” a program that helps new international and multilingual students acclimate to American classroom culture, to reflect the challenges nonnative English speakers may face in the online environment. Without such immersion, students may feel nervous about speaking up in class, but strategies such as using a chat feature could help them build confidence, said Dawn Takaoglu, Davis’s director of international and academic English.
With students potentially scattered around the globe, courses are being designed with synchronous and asynchronous elements. Davis faculty members who teach popular introductory courses, like one focused on research skills, have agreed to offer some sections in the evenings in California — when it’s morning in Asia.
The Illinois Institute of Technology is building on its online experience overseas. It has offered online degrees in India since 2014 and started a program in China last year, Kilpatrick, the provost, said. The university has learned lessons from that work. For one, most of its international online students rely on mobile devices, so videos, chat rooms, and other interfaces must be designed with cellphones, not desktop computers, in mind. Putting course materials in the cloud is not reliable for students in China, whose access to online materials can be blocked by government censors. IIT has its own server in China, Kilpatrick said.
The university is also working to develop a sense of community, such as organizing alumni groups for networking and support, for students who may need to spend the fall semester overseas. In addition, it is designing special accelerated programs to keep students on track to graduate, Kilpatrick said.
The University of Arizona is pursuing a hybrid model that uses its extensive online offerings. That head start could make it difficult for other colleges to imitate its approach. As part of its “global campus” program, students who can’t make it to Tucson this fall will be able to begin their coursework online, while studying and living at one of dozens of locations around the world. Arizona’s partners include foreign universities, study-abroad programs, and private providers of student housing.
“A lot of students are dying to get back on campus, and this strikes a balance,” said Brent White, the university’s vice provost for global affairs.
A lot of students are dying to get back on campus, and this strikes a balance.
The partners offer an in-person experience, including housing, student clubs, libraries, tutoring, and other support services. Perhaps most critically in many parts of the world, they provide reliable internet access, White said. The cost of attending a global campus will vary regionally.
Administrators are also working on a plan to give students a taste of the “Arizona experience” abroad, such as access to major lectures, theater performances, and sports matches on the main campus. That is, if such events happen this fall.
Arizona is betting students will accept remote learning for a semester or more. When travel and visa restrictions lift, they will be able to move to Tucson — or continue in their home country toward an online degree, if they prefer. Students who plan to study elsewhere in the United States could also spend their initial semester on a global campus and transfer their Arizona credits.
Shahla al-Sayyar was accepted by Arizona to study finance. While she has some concerns about studying online — Saudi Arabia, where she’s from, doesn’t accredit online degrees — she sees the university’s hybrid model as a good fallback. “It’s relieving that I can take classes and go to Tucson when the coronavirus ends,” she said. “I still look forward to going to the U.S. It’s my dream.”
The global-campus approach was, in fact, being planned before the outbreak, but the coronavirus sharply sped it up. Within a week of the Tucson campus’s closure this spring, White had approval to seek out new partners, lots of them. He reassigned study-abroad staff members to advise global-campus students.
White believes that the coronavirus could reshape how colleges think about international students. For decades, the focus has been on bringing students from around the globe to colleges and universities in the United States and a handful of other destination countries, mostly in the West.
But only a small share of students can study abroad because of cost, work and family obligations, and visa issues. The pandemic, White argues, further underscores the vulnerability of the traditional model. In the future, the focus could shift to bringing higher education to the students, rather than the other way around. “We can provide greater access,” he said, “if we think outside a mobility framework.”
