Trump Rolled Up the Welcome Mat. This Admissions Officer Is Trying to Get Students to Come Anyway.

Ruhani Kaur for The Chronicle

Jonathan D. Weller is going to miss his flight, that much seems clear. He is caught in one of the traffic jams that seem to perpetually snarl this city of 22 million. Around him, their vehicles immobile, drivers are exercising their horns, the rumbling bass of delivery trucks competing with auto rickshaws’ high bleat and motorbikes’ constant braying.

If this is a metaphor for the week ahead of him, it isn’t an auspicious one. Weller, director of international admissions at the University of Cincinnati, is here in India on what is known to enrollment managers as a yield trip, a last-minute push to persuade newly admitted students to attend his institution before the May 1 college-decision deadline.

Weller makes the April trip annually, and this year the stakes are especially high. He has spent the day huddled with Charlie Schwartz, his associate director, and the university’s two Mumbai-based staff members, going over the recruitment picture in India. For Cincinnati, and for American colleges over all, India is the second-largest source of international students, and the portrait the numbers paint isn’t a rosy one: Cincinnati’s undergraduate applications are down by about 15 percent. For the university’s popular engineering master’s program, applications have plummeted, with interest down by a third from the year before.

It isn’t just Cincinnati, and it isn’t just India. In 2016, for the first time in more than a decade, the number of new international students at American colleges declined slightly, by 3 percent. A spot survey conducted this fall reported even greater drops.

The reversal is a sobering check after years in which foreign enrollments soared ever higher. The growth helped cement a consensus among higher-education leaders about the importance of international students to the broader goal of globalizing their campuses. Perhaps just as critically, overseas tuition has become a crucial source of revenue for many institutions, a bedrock of otherwise shaky budgets.

Then came the election of Donald J. Trump, the nationalist and nativist president who emphatically rolled up America’s welcome mat just one week into his term, barring travelers, including students, from a half-dozen majority-Muslim countries. The travel ban’s message reverberated worldwide.

Few in admissions, Weller included, think the recent drop-off can be pinned solely on President Trump. Among other complications, they note rising tuition and falling currency, improving educational options at home and increased competition from abroad, demographics and employment trends and, yes, the wild card of whatever’s in the week’s news.

Now it’s on Jon Weller, hometown guy, Midwestern nice, to get students to set aside their concerns, to come. For the families he meets, he’ll be a representative of the University of Cincinnati, an ambassador for U.S. higher education, and — although he wouldn’t put it this way — an emissary from Trump’s America.

And he is starting this trip — an eight-day sprint through five cities — quite literally behind. Finally, like a stream finding an open channel, his car breaks free from the bottleneck. He and Kushala Mahadeshwar, the India country coordinator, rush through the airport with minutes to spare.

At the gate, their flight, naturally, is delayed.

Bangalore

It might seem counterintuitive that Donald Trump’s election should loom large here. India wasn’t included in the travel ban — indeed, the countries named account for a tiny fraction of the 1.1 million overseas students studying in America. Just 15 percent of the population in this Hindu-majority country is Muslim.

Still, few other nations seem to so acutely feel the Trump effect. Day in and day out, the papers carry headlines — always alarmist and often inaccurate — about a new visa “crackdown” or a pending “policy change” that is sure to make it tougher for Indians to study or work in the United States. For many families, the opportunity to gain work experience is as important as the degree. “We try to tell them, Trump’s not going to affect your education,” Mihika Roy, Cincinnati’s other Indian staff member, says. “But it’s in their heads.”

When The Chronicle surveyed colleges last summer about international recruiting in the era of Trump, the market they said they most worried about was India, the source of nearly one in five international students, more than any other country except China.

It’s no surprise, then, that India is on the itinerary this spring for many American admissions officers. Bangalore’s EducationUSA advising center, affiliated with the U.S. State Department, lists a slate of visiting colleges: Cincinnati today, a group of liberal-arts institutions the following week. In his second stop, in Hyderabad, Weller crossed paths with people from a half-dozen colleges — mostly new to recruiting or without the on-the-ground infrastructure of a Cincinnati — traveling together as part of a college tour.

When Weller was a newcomer to international admissions nearly a dozen years ago, his first trip was to this leafy city, center of both India’s high-tech sector and its brewing industry. The destination was largely accidental — a one-man band, he’d gotten a small grant for overseas travel and had met the head of Bangalore’s EducationUSA office at a conference. If you’re ever in India, she said, and so he came to Bangalore. When he was done with his work, he took a side trip to the Taj Mahal, thinking he might never visit India again.

Instead, Weller’s been back at least twice a year, and has recruited throughout Africa and Europe and the Middle East, too. The international-admissions staff has grown to 11 in Cincinnati, with offices in China, India, and Vietnam. Each year they handle about 1,000 applications and enroll some 250 international undergraduates, and with the recent downturn, they’ve been asked to play a larger role in graduate recruitment. When Weller travels, there’s no time for sightseeing.

This trip, too, is a blur of hotel lobbies and early-morning flights, an itinerary that bisects the country from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal. Still, he finds himself meeting with markedly fewer families than on past yield trips; it is difficult not to wonder whom he isn’t seeing, who never applied.

Ruhani Kaur for The Chronicle

And, a few days in, he’s noticing an unexpected trend: Americans among the applicants, born when their Indian parents were working or going to school in the United States, and then raised in India. Suddenly he has to reach back to his domestic-admissions days to talk about the Fafsa; one kid wants to know about ROTC. Could it be that the students from India now interested in coming to study in America are those who have already lived there?

With his schedule merely crowded, not crammed, Weller has more time to spend with students like Kushal Dev Suresh, a lively 18-year-old who shows up with his parents, a younger sister, and boundless questions: When does the semester start? How do I get books? Is class selection competitive? If I get good grades, can I earn more scholarships? What’s the dress code? I love to play golf — how do I try out?

Kushal has been to the United States, to attend a NASA summer camp; he wants to be an astronaut. Government regulations prohibit some non-Americans from working on sensitive research, and even without the changes in H-1B work visas that many Indians fear President Trump could impose, the odds are stacked against foreign students like Kushal staying in the United States long-term. But he is undaunted.

“I’m hoping that by the time I complete my course, there’ll be a new president, so that none of this will affect me,” he says. “You have to make bold decisions. You have to go for your dreams.”

Chennai

If Kushal doesn’t end up on the Cincinnati campus this fall, playing golf and studying astrophysics, it won’t be because of Donald Trump. Even with the clock ticking down to the decision deadline, he is dragging his heels, hoping for a last-minute offer from his top choice, Arizona State University.

And that’s the thing — in many ways, students’ concerns are what they have always been. Fundamentally, much of Weller’s task is still the same: to persuade students who want to go to Arizona State to consider Cincinnati, to preach the homey benefits of Ohio to students beguiled by the bright lights of New York or LA or Boston. When Kushal makes the 11th-hour decision to attend a third institution, Iowa State University, it’s so he can study his preferred major, aerospace engineering.

Weller fields far more queries about vegetarian dining options and cooperative education and the weather — “It does get cold, but we haven’t had any frozen Indians yet” is an oft-used line — than about politics.

What isn’t altogether clear is whether the families he is meeting harbor those sorts of doubts and just aren’t raising them. Since the election, student surveys have found that international applicants are paying closer attention to voter registration and election results in America, to red states and blue states, in choosing where they want to study.

Mahadeshwar, Weller’s Indian colleague, notes that one mother had written “Trump” on a sheet she had brought to their meeting, then never mentioned the president. “I think she hesitated to bring it up because you’re American,” she suggests to Weller.

Weller has another idea — maybe it’s the reporter tagging along. In the past, he says, students had shown no reluctance to discuss touchy subjects, like a group of Tanzanian schoolgirls who once grilled him about Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer found guilty of sexual assault, and campus rape culture.

If the families don’t bring up the president, it isn’t in Weller’s nature to. “I keep my views to myself,” he says. “When I’m coming here to meet people, it’s not to give a pitch. It’s to answer whatever questions they have.”

When it came down to it, it isn’t that people don’t care about politics, Weller figures, but that they just care more about matters like who their roommate is going to be.

Ruhani Kaur for The Chronicle

It’s the end of a long day that had begun with an early flight from Bangalore. Weller had been up late the night before, answering the humdrum emails (someone had broken the microwave back in Cincinnati) that don’t stop just because you’re out of the office. He’d also had “homework” to do from earlier sessions: looking into a change of major for one student, investigating whether another might be able to take a math placement test that could qualify him for extra financial aid, tracking down the golf coach’s email for Kushal.

It was a running joke that Coke ought to be a trip sponsor, given how many sodas Weller consumed daily, but all the caffeine in the world can’t keep him awake now. Returning from a presentation at a local counseling center, he falls asleep upright in the back of the car, oblivious to the rush-hour racket.

Back at the hotel, the usually fresh-faced Weller settles blearily into a couch in a corner of the lobby to hold his final student meetings of the day. He’s talked so much he can only rasp.

The woman who rounds the corner is older, in her 20s. Akshatha Arumugam’s sister had come to plead her case. Their family isn’t wealthy, and although Cincinnati had offered a $12,000 scholarship, nearly half the cost of tuition, it isn’t enough. Akshatha is special, couldn’t he find some way to help?

It is 45 minutes before Akshatha arrives, flustered but unharmed after a minor fender bender.

Admissions is, in many ways, a sales job. But Weller — who taught English in Nepal and leads a class at Cincinnati called “How to Change the World,” whose outlook was shaped by his mother, once a Franciscan nun, and his father, a former seminarian — sees in the work something of a mission. He sits with the two women, trying to brainstorm solutions, and promises to ask about more scholarship money, though he knows there isn’t any.

When Akshatha and her sister say goodbye, it is hard to tell who is more dispirited.

Delhi

He doesn’t jump out of a cake or anything. But Jon Weller is, in effect, Arunesh Mishra’s birthday present.

Applying to college in America has consumed the past several of Arunesh’s 19 years. He got the idea watching National Geographic documentaries, enthralled by the stories of researchers and their work. A tinkerer — he’s applied for a patent on a water gauge he invented — he became convinced that American universities, with their embrace of creativity and invention, were the right fit for him.

Growing up in a small town near the Nepalese border, Arunesh didn’t know anyone who had studied abroad. Nightly, in sessions stretching toward dawn, he’d go online to do research on colleges. To take the SAT, he’d made a six-hour train journey to the state capital, missing two days of school.

So it defies the odds that on his birthday, Arunesh is here in Delhi to meet the man who is offering the golden ticket he’d been striving for: admission to an American college. The thing is, he isn’t sure he can grab it.

If there was an article about studying in America, Arunesh had read it. So when he saw all the post-election headlines, he’d panicked. To hedge his bets, he’d applied to colleges in Canada and had been admitted to two of them, the Universities of Ottawa and Victoria. His heart is with Cincinnati, but his parents, they want him to study in nice, friendly, safe Canada.

“My parents watch a lot of news,” he says. They see stories of geopolitical tensions, of crime, of the mood in America — insular, hostile to outsiders — and they wonder, how can they send their only son to study there?

“Every day my mother calls me with one more reason why I should not go,” Arunesh says.

His parents aren’t the only ones with doubts. Weller has just learned that a top student he’d courted is instead going to the University of Toronto. In the past year, the number of international students at Canadian universities has surged by 20 percent.

Ruhani Kaur for The Chronicle

“As parents, we had many concerns,” says Lakshmi Srinivasan, the student’s mother, a few days later. There was that shooting at a Florida high school. The terrified survivors, the innocent-eyed dead, were the age of her son, Gananaswarup. Cincinnati was offering a sizable scholarship; Toronto was not. No matter, Gananaswarup was not going to the United States.

When Weller hears these worries, he understands. Every year he leads a study-abroad trip to Peru and fields phone calls from anxious parents. If American parents fret about their kids on a 10-day chaperoned trip, shouldn’t Indian parents lose sleep about sending their children halfway around the world all alone for four or five years?

Weller himself is a father of three, ages 14, 11, and 8. His middle daughter still gets nervous every time he travels, even though he has been going abroad for her entire life — he applied for the international-admissions job after coming home from the hospital the day she was born.

In India, concerns about safety and risk have become particularly visceral and especially personal in the 18 months since the American elections. Last February, two Indian engineers were shot, one killed, in Kansas, targeted by a man who apparently believed they were from Iran, one of the countries included in the president’s travel ban.

The father of the dead man, who had first come to America to study, issued a plea: “I appeal to all the parents in India not to send their children to the United States.” Indian mothers and fathers called their sons at Cincinnati, begging them to shave their beards so they wouldn’t be mistaken for Muslims.

But for Arunesh, the rewards of an American degree outweigh the risks. A few mornings later, he comes by Weller’s hotel and tells him the news: His parents may not be fully convinced, but they acquiesced. He will come to Cincinnati. “I think,” he says, “when I’m on the flight, my mother will still be giving me one more argument why I shouldn’t go.”

Delhi

Weller wakes up at 3 a.m., with a sudden queasiness every traveler to India dreads.

He cancels his morning meetings and stays in bed. But he drags himself up at midday to go see Rajesh Arya, president of the Council for American Education, a recruitment agency that specializes in sending students to American colleges.

There remains a great divide in international admissions about paid agents. Their use is illegal domestically, forbidden by federal financial-aid law. Many admissions officers regard paying commissions, no matter the country, as unethical.

Cincinnati, though, was among the first American institutions to use agents — a practice more common among British and Australian universities — and has a network of 25 in India. Weller regards them as valuable partners, Arya especially, with a keen understanding of the local market.

Agents aren’t his only source of intel. A day earlier he’d sat down with officials from the U.S. Embassy. They were working hard to counter misperceptions about studying in the United States: going on popular TV networks, hosting Facebook Live discussions. In a few weeks, they planned a telethon, opening phone lines to student-visa questions. “What we say is what we know,” a State Department official told Weller. When it comes to government policy, “there is no change.”

The resident of the White House might be tweeting about plugging porous borders, but on the ground in Delhi, the embassy’s message is: America’s campuses remain welcoming.

The Council for American Education’s offices, a few miles distant from the diplomatic district, look like the Fourth of July exploded. The front desk is emblazoned with an illustration of intertwined Indian and American flags; photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge, Mount Rushmore, and Seattle’s Space Needle hang on a wall in the lobby. The agency’s logo features the Statue of Liberty against a stars-and-stripes backdrop.

Arya’s assessment is blunt: “Over all, the pie is shrinking. And there is aggressiveness in competing for that pie.”

Other colleges are increasing their financial aid, relaxing their admissions deadlines, offering in-state tuition to foreign applicants. One of Arya’s students, a girl with middling SAT scores, not only had been admitted to her reach school, a major Midwestern research university, but also had been awarded a $20,000 scholarship. “You are facing a lot of competition,” he tells Weller, “from universities that are higher-ranked than you that are offering more money.”

Weller is just as frank. Half of all Cincinnati’s international students get scholarships; the average award covers about a quarter of the $27,000 tuition. But the amount is unlikely to increase.

[[relatedpackage align="right” item_limit="4"]] In his early days recruiting abroad, Weller persuaded administrators to create two full-paid scholarships for international students. He traveled throughout India, giving television interviews and conducting a sort of nationwide talent search, before settling on two recipients, one so poor she copied from her classmates’ textbooks because she couldn’t afford her own.

The scholarship helped put Cincinnati on the map in India, but it had unintended consequences. For more than a year, Weller was bombarded with calls and emails from Indian students wanting to know how they, too, could get a free ride. But the university had agreed to only the two awards. All Weller could do was say no.

When the first students graduated, there was no media blitz for new candidates, just a quiet search with help from the EducationUSA office in Nepal.

If you overpromise, you risk underdelivering. Cincinnati isn’t going to change its standards or its practices to get ahead in a heated market, Weller says. “We can’t get into games where one year you lower the bar, the next year you raise it. We’re going to hold the line.”

Indeed, just after he returns from India, news starts circulating that another institution, the University of Texas at Tyler, had offered full scholarships to dozens of Nepali students, only to rescind the offer to 61 of them. Tyler, which hoped to compete for top international students, had miscalculated, a spokesman said.

For many colleges, a drop in international enrollments has the potential to be financially catastrophic. As state support has atrophied and domestic enrollments have shrunk, international tuition has become a lifeline, a critical source of income baked into budget projections.

At Cincinnati, tuition revenue from international undergraduates amounts to about $20 million. But their primary value, Weller says, is measured in other ways. Students from abroad, who account for about 8 percent of the total student body, add diversity to an institution that otherwise draws largely from Ohio and neighboring states.

They also improve the college’s academic profile. International students have better first-year retention rates, grade-point averages, and graduation rates than any other group of students at Cincinnati. Indian students, in particular, are academically outstanding — a quarter of undergraduates from here are honors students, a distinction given to the top 7 percent of each class.

“International students help craft our class, they don’t make our class,” Weller says. “If we’re down a few international students, we can still pay the electric bill.”

The past few years had been boom ones abroad for American colleges, with enough students for all comers. In a way, the tightening market might just be revealing weaknesses that were there all along but obscured by growth. And now colleges that have come to rely too heavily on foreign students may be panicking, cutting corners and upping aid in a desperate attempt to reverse trends.

For Weller, the best antidote to the Trump effect is to double down on fundamentals, to make good on promises. To do a good job by them, by his university, as an ambassador for American higher education.

Cincinnati

Professionally, Weller is a globe-trotter. But his life is anchored back in Cincinnati, where he grew up on the city’s close-knit West Side, just blocks from where he now lives. His sister’s place is two doors down; the whole family helps out when he’s abroad. Not long after he gets off the 15-hour flight from Delhi, he is on the sidelines of his daughter’s soccer game.

OK if I call you from practice? he texts a couple of weeks later when asked for an update on enrollment figures.

International-student trends, he says when he gets on the phone, looked “reassuringly well.” Taken as a whole, the number of international freshmen confirmed for the fall — University of Cincinnati-speak for students who have accepted the admissions offer and paid a $100 deposit — just about matched the previous year’s totals. Academically, the students looked even better, with an average SAT score about 60 points higher. China had held steady, and Vietnam crept up; there was a jump in the number of international students recruited from American high schools. Even at the master’s-degree level, where applications had cratered, acceptances had come in strong, almost closing the gap.

As for India, undergraduate confirmations had suddenly caught up, thanks to a last-minute surge right at the admissions deadline. Against the odds, the incoming class was, at 72 strong, 20 students larger than the prior year’s. The round-the-world travel, the 18-hour days had paid off.

Even though the students had committed to Cincinnati, these numbers were, in a way, still preliminary. Indian students have one of the highest melt rates at the university — one-third of those who put down deposits never show up for the first day of classes. There are many reasons for this: Other colleges counter with bigger scholarships; the most prestigious Indian universities don’t make admissions offers until summer; students get cold feet. Whatever the cause, Indian acceptances have always been a little squishy.

But these students felt solid to Weller. The university had been working with many of them for nearly a year, answering question after question, holding their hands through the process. Now they were connecting with one another in a WhatsApp group chat, exchanging residence-hall preferences and travel tips and visa-interview advice.

Of course, you could never know for sure, Weller says. “You just hold your breath until August.”

He couldn’t do that, though. Already, it was time to begin recruiting another new class, to plunge into a new cycle of uncertainty. Who knew what might happen between now and next August, what headlines might appear, what incidents might occur, what challenges there might be in selling international students on studying in Trump’s America.