First Thought

Insights drawn weekly from Karin Fischer’s global-education newsletter, latitude(s). Subscribe here.

In late June, President Trump released an executive order suspending the issuance of temporary work visas, such as H1-Bs, saying that the action was necessary to preserve jobs for Americans.

If the U.S. is off-limits, talented workers could decide to go elsewhere.
Some already have — since 2017, the number of successful applications from American residents to Canada’s main skilled-immigration program have increased by 75 percent, according to an analysis by Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

The sense that the nation’s doors are shut could also cause leaks earlier in the talent pipeline. Will international students still want to invest time in an American education or will they choose to study in a place where they can make connections and gain experience that could lead to a lasting career? Karin reads the signs in this week’s latitude(s).

The Reading List


  • The U.S. government has revoked the visas of 1,000 Chinese students on national-security grounds.
  • Thousands of Hungarians have rallied in Budapest to protest the takeover of a top arts university by allies of the country’s president.
  • Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is pushing for “graded autonomy” for the country’s universities, rewarding those institutions that perform better.

Featured on Chronicle.com


“You can bring in diverse faculty, staff, and students, but without serving them, all you’ve done is bring them into an apartheid situation.”

—Robin Means Coleman, vice president and associate provost for diversity at Texas A&M University at College Station, says that the work of creating broadly inclusive institutions goes much farther than compositional diversity.

Read the full Chronicle Review conversation with Coleman and Robert M. Sellers, vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor: Slouching Toward Equity