Latitudes

Why the strong dollar could weaken demand for education in the U.S.

A lot of attention is paid to how politics and the pandemic affect international student mobility. But a surging dollar could make an American degree increasingly unaffordable to students around the world.

The value of the American dollar is the strongest it has been in 20 years, gaining in recent months amid inflation, interest-rate increases, and worries about global economic growth stalling out. The dollar’s rise has had the affect of devaluing other currencies, which can spell trouble for international students who suddenly find that their college savings won’t go nearly as far.

Three quarters of foreign students rely on personal or family funds or their own employment as the primary source to pay for their studies, according to the Institute of International Education.

The Chinese renminbi has lost more than 5 percent of its value against the dollar since the beginning of 2022. Last week the Indian rupee hit its lowest exchange level ever. China and India are, of course, the two largest sources of international students in the United States, accounting for more than half the overseas students on American campuses.

Currency fluctuations have affected international enrollments in the past. Monetary devaluations and an economic crisis in the late 1990s led to a fall-off in students from South Korea, Thailand, and other Asian countries. A decade ago, a weakened rupee contributed to several years of enrollment declines among students from India. More recently, political and economic turmoil in Brazil have caused the value of its currency, the real, to plummet against the dollar.

Andrew S. Horsfall, assistant dean of international programs at Syracuse University’s College of Law, has been tracking international-exchange rates biannually since 2014. In the last couple of years, he has increased scholarship aid for both current and prospective students from Brazil to help mitigate some of the currency-driven cost increases. Taking action may have helped retain students; this year, nearly a third of the students in Syracuse’s master’s and doctoral law programs are Brazilian.

What’s different in the current environment is that currency fluctuations aren’t limited to a single country or region. When Horsfall ran his most recent study, in March, he found that students from 19 of the 23 countries he tracks would spend more in their home currency to pay their tuition costs than six months earlier.

Horsfall shared some strategies and interventions colleges can take to help reduce the impact of currency devaluations of foreign students. Some, like awarding supplemental scholarships, he has put in place, while others he noted will take institutional buy-in. Among the approaches colleges could take:

• Re-evaluate international-recruitment strategy to focus on countries or regions where currency fluctuations haven’t been as great.
• Freeze tuition when currencies drop significantly or consider tuition reductions.
• Lock in tuition rates for students paying in foreign currencies when they first enroll so that they are not affected by fluctuations.
• Permit students to extend their payments over a longer period of time when it looks like a currency might stabilize in a few months.
• Encourage students to pay in full early when declines in a currency’s value are expected to continue,
• Relax discount rates over all or for a select group of countries.

“For the better part of a year there was a sense that we were starting to rebound from pandemic disruptions and see international-student mobility tick back up,” Horsfall said, “but the lingering economic uncertainty has muted some of that initial excitement.”

Native language speakers won’t be penalized in applying for top fellowship

The U.S. Department of Education won’t penalize applicants to the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship who are native speakers of a foreign language on an assessment of language proficiency that is part of the evaluation for the prestigious scholarship.

The department will allow applicants who propose to conduct research in their native language to potentially receive full points on the language assessment. But the change, made in response to a lawsuit brought by graduate students who said they were disadvantaged because they grew up speaking another language, will only apply to 2022 applicants. The Department of Education has not agreed to alter the underlying policy, which has been in place since 1998.

In a court filing, the department agreed to permit Samar Ahmad, a Georgetown University doctoral student born in Kuwait, to reapply this year for the Fulbright-Hays award. The lawsuit, brought by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a conservative civil-rights organization, said that Ahmad’s application was docked because she was a heritage speaker of Arabic, knocking her out of the running for the fellowship despite near-perfect scores on the rest of her application.

The alliance argues that the native-language rule is unconstitutional because it penalizes applicants like Ahmad, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, because it treats their “national origin as a decisive factor in access to federal education assistance and significantly disadvantages immigrants from non-English-speaking countries and children of such immigrants.” Despite the agreement to temporarily remove the penalty, the group said it plans to continue with the lawsuit.

Dating violence and international students

International students may be unfamiliar with navigating the American system for handling domestic violence, but Zhifan Dong’s roommate helped her file reports detailing threats made by an abusive ex-boyfriend. Still, the 19-year-old freshman from China was found dead in a Salt Lake City hotel room in February, and her ex-boyfriend, a fellow University of Utah student, has been charged with murdering her.

Dong’s parents told The Salt Lake Tribune that they had trusted the university with their daughter’s safety, “and they betrayed that trust.” My colleague Katie Mangan has Dong’s story, which mirrors the domestic-violence-related death of another Utah student.

I want to tackle this tough subject in more detail. I’d be interested in hearing from readers who work to inform and support international students on issues of intimate-partner violence and sexual assault: Are there specific challenges you face when students come from different cultural contexts? Are there specific programs or strategies you see as promising or effective? Email me at karin.fischer@chronicle.com.

Around the globe

Legislation nearing Senate approval to counter competition from China contains several national-security provisions affecting higher education, including new foreign-funds disclosure requirements, a ban on participation in “malign” foreign-talent-recruitment programs, and a prohibition on Confucius Institutes on American campuses unless colleges meet certain requirements.

Northeastern University has received permission from British regulators to call its London campus a university.

Students at Tsinghua University in China were issued warnings for distributing LGBTQ rainbow flags.

Britain and India agreed to recognize each other’s degrees and academic credentials.

Scholars in India who publicly criticize the government of Prime Minister Nahendra Modi may face harassment and intimidation, including reprimands from their own universities.

The Middle East Studies Association said in a letter to Egyptian leaders it was alarmed by detentions and prosecutions of academics in Egypt.

Undocumented students who have had to leave the United States said they have had trouble continuing their studies in Mexico. Mexico had previously said it streamlined its university admissions process with the intent of making it easier to admit so-called Dreamers.

A Republican congressman has introduced legislation to pressure university endowments to divest from Chinese companies or other entities that contribute to human-rights violations or pose a national-security threat.

More than 50 GOP lawmakers have written to U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin asking why defense funds are going to colleges with ties to the Chinese government.

To restart U.S.-China academic collaborations chilled by the China Initiative, “scientists, especially those in international teams, must be involved in crafting well-defined policies, and there must be mechanisms to prevent governmental over-reach,” Jenny J. Lee of the University of Arizona writes in Nature.

The U.S. government should start a program to recruit one million “tech superstars” from around the world by the end of President Biden’s term, in 2025, to jump-start innovation, propose a Harvard professor and Google’s former chief executive.

And finally …

A quarter of the billion-dollar startup companies in the United States have a founder who first came to America as an international student, according to new research. An analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy says that 143 so-called unicorn companies have at least one former international student as a founder. A total of 174 international students went on to start such companies.

Thanks for reading. I always welcome your feedback and ideas for future reporting, so drop me a line, at karin.fischer@chronicle.com. You can also connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn. If you like this newsletter, please share it with colleagues and friends. They can sign up here.