First Thought

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

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that the NCAA could not block certain education-related payments to college athletes. And on Thursday, laws will take effect in a half-dozen states that will allow college athletes to earn money from endorsement deals, autographs, and appearances.

What does this have to do with international education? In the shift toward compensating college athletes — many experts think the Supreme Court may have signaled in its unanimous decision that it was open to a head-on challenge to the NCAA’s ban on paying students for their participation in sports — one group could be left behind: international students.

That’s because visa rules prevent international students from making significant income while studying in the United States and restrict them to working on campus. (There is a narrow exception if the work is related to their academic study.) In fact, they must promise in their visa applications that they are only coming to the United States for an education, not for employment.

As a result, international students can work in the dining hall or campus bookstore — but wouldn’t be permitted to profit from their “name, image, and likeness” by appearing at a soccer clinic or autograph signing, as the new laws allow.

Read more from Karin in this week’s latitude(s).

The Reading List

• A state budget bill would limit the number of international and out-of-state students at the University of California’s campuses in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San Diego to make way for more state residents.
• A juror in the case of Anming Hu, accused by prosecutors of hiding his ties to China, was so upset at the government’s treatment of the former University of Tennessee scientist that she donated to a GoFundMe to help pay his legal fees. His case ended in a mistrial.
• Younger Indian students are more bullish on the U.S., while their older counterparts may consider multiple international-study destinations, according to new research from Intead.
  

Featured on Chronicle.com

“The last bastion of universal cooperation is learning, but there’s been a rise of a kind of exclusionary nationalism, and not just here in America. There are great concerns about ‘foreign influence.’ There’s a sort of an anticosmopolitan sensibility.”

—Leon Botstein, the longtime president of Bard College, on the college’s designation as an “undesirable” organization by the Russian government, which prevents all activity and operations by Bard in the country.

Read the interview with Botstein in The Chronicle: “Bard President Is ‘Heartbroken’ About Russian Blacklisting.”