Latitudes

A big bet on Africa?

It’s customary for places like China and India to grab headlines about overseas-student recruitment, but when the Common App released its latest data this month, two of the leading countries for international applicants were in a very different part of the world: West Africa.

Nigeria and Ghana ranked behind only that pair of traditional powerhouses in the number of students submitting undergraduate applications to American colleges through the Common App.

For me, the data release resonated because it raised questions I’ve been asking: As student numbers from China, long the runaway driver of foreign enrollments in the United States, recede, where’s the next big thing in international recruitment? Could it be Africa?

Those questions led me to travel last fall to Ghana and Senegal, where I spent a week shadowing officials from eight public flagships, all in the Southeastern Conference, on a recruiting trip. The group visited schools, organized a citywide college fair in Dakar, met with college counselors and U.S. Embassy officials, and spoke with dozens and dozens of students and parents.

In many ways, Africa holds great promise for American colleges: It is home to more young people than anywhere else in the world, with 60 percent of the continent’s 1.25 billion people under age 25. Education rates have improved significantly; almost half of sub-Saharan teenagers now complete secondary school, up from just a quarter two decades ago. When I asked my travel companions about their impressions, one of their biggest takeaways was how bright and academically ambitious the students we met were.

One memory from the trip that really sticks with me was from a stop at the International Community School, in Accra. The group’s visit coincided with a school vacation, yet students still came to campus to meet the college representatives. One, a prospective biomedical-engineering major, said she had spent an hour in the Ghanaian capital’s gnarly traffic to attend the information session. “It’s my dream to study in America,” she said, “and it’s my parents’ dream, too.”

That dream may be more achievable today as families move into the middle class in countries like Senegal and Ghana, thanks to increasing economic growth and political stability. Lack of capacity in local universities also is driving African students abroad. Sub-Saharan students are the most likely worldwide to cross a border to earn a degree, Campus France reports.

Still, the story may not be that straightforward. The share of the population in Ghana and Senegal that is middle class remains much lower than in China, and many families still lack the means to pay for an American degree. Denial rates on U.S. student visas remain high in the region. It will be tough work for institutions to forge recruiting relationships in a part of the world where connections matter deeply, and college leaders, used to equating international recruitment with the enormous, and at times seemingly inexhaustible, flood of students from China, will have to exercise patience.

And then there’s America’s troubled record on race. “We see the news, and we worry,” one student told me of her concerns about going to the United States. “Because of the color of my skin. Because I am Black.”

In the end, I found that the answer is complicated, reflecting both incredible potential and genuine challenge.

You can read my Chronicle cover story on Africa and the future of international enrollments here.

I’d love your feedback, especially if you’re a college recruiter or high-school counselor working in the region: What resonates, and what did I miss? Plus, as I acknowledge in the piece, the future of international recruitment is less likely to rely on a single next big thing than it is on nurturing multiple sources of foreign students. The world’s a big place — what’s your institution’s focus? You can reach me at karin.fischer@chronicle.com.

I want to say a quick thank you to Samba Dieng, Louisiana State University’s senior international officer; our talks about African recruitment over the years led to an invitation to tag along on the trip, which he organized. Thanks, too, to the entire group of SEC college representatives for their warm welcome, thoughtful reflections, and boundless patience.

Digging deeper on Common App data

Back to the new Common App data, which show the numbers of applicants from Nigeria and Ghana have increased rapidly since the Covid-19 pandemic hit. According to figures the organization shared with me, there were 1,664 applicants from Nigeria and 1,303 from Ghana during the 2019-20 admission cycle. As of January, applicants from those countries were at 6,035 and 5,553, respectively.

A third African country, Ethiopia, also ranked among the top 10.

Over all, the rate of growth is much higher for international applicants than for those in the United States, the data show. Since 2019, the number of distinct applicants residing overseas has increased at nearly triple the rate of domestic applicants, a 45-percent jump compared with a 17-percent bump. Still, nine in 10 students applying via the Common App are in the United States.

Despite the global growth trajectory, the number of applicants from the largest foreign market, China, fell, declining from 20,521 in 2019-20 to 15,627 in the current admission cycle.

The Common App data, of course, represent just a slice of the total international-enrollment picture, documenting undergraduate applications at 841 participating colleges. But the numbers offer a nearly real-time glimpse into application trends, and they track individual applicants, meaning that the data are not distorted by students applying to more and more colleges.

One more resource for the data geeks among you: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security updated its numbers, showing that, as of this month, 1.08 million student-visa holders are in the United States. During the depths of the pandemic, enrollments tumbled below one million.

Colleges and private groups can sponsor refugees under pilot program

Groups of private American citizens, including community associations, faith-based organizations, and colleges, will be permitted to sponsor refugees, under a pilot program announced last week by the U.S. Department of State.

Previously, only a handful of refugee agencies had been permitted to resettle people fleeing war and violence in their home countries. The new program, modeled on a longstanding system in Canada, will allow small groups to sponsor refugees, provided they draft a plan, pass a background check, and raise $2,275 per refugee.

Colleges had pressed for the change, saying it could allow institutions to assume more holistic responsibility for refugee students’ educational, financial, logistical, and social needs. Miriam Feldblum of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, a group that advocates for international, undocumented, and immigrant students, told me that colleges have a “moral and talent imperative” to aid refugee students: “When they can’t access college and university, it’s not only a loss for them, it’s a loss for all of us.”

In its announcement, the State Department said it would soon release more details specifically about college sponsorships.

Around the globe

A federal judge sentenced a former University of Kansas professor to time served for failing to disclose to federal authorities his research ties to China, rejecting prosecutors’ request for prison time. Judge Julie Robinson of the U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kan., had already thrown out the most serious convictions against Franklin (Feng) Tao in the much-watched China Initiative case.

A former British higher-education minister and member of a new commission on international education is warning of a “weakening consensus” in Britain on the value of international students.

Dutch universities are opposing a call by the country’s education minister to halt international-student recruitment but have instead suggested some limits, such as restricting the share of foreign students in certain academic programs.

Almost 700 Iranian students have been arrested in human-rights protests, and many have been detained without access to lawyers, according to a report from the International Community of Iranian Academics.

Prosecutors in Saudi Arabia are seeking the death penalty for a law professor who they say shared “hostile” news about the kingdom on social media.

New Zealand’s education minister, Chris Hipkins, will become the country’s next prime minister after Jacinda Ardern, the current leader, announced she was stepping down.

Of the 245 distinct Indigenous languages in the United States, 65 are already extinct and 75 are nearing that point. My colleague Sylvia Goodman writes about how colleges could help preserve them.

There are no estimates of how many foreign workers have been caught up in the latest round of tech-company layoffs, but the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has released guidance about staying in the United States for those who have lost their jobs, a pool that is likely to include recent international graduates on Optional Practical Training. Have you been laid off while on OPT, or are you a college administrator advising international students? I want to hear from you.

And finally …

There’s a contretemps brewing in the State Department, and it’s got nothing to do with global diplomacy. Last week Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, sent out a cable directing the department to change its official font on all communications and memos, from Times New Roman to Calibri.

The reason for the switch, Blinken said, was that serifed fonts like Times New Roman have extra strokes that can make them difficult to read on adaptive technology used by people with visual impairments or other disabilities. But the announcement stirred outrage among the State Department’s serif partisans, one of whom told The Washington Post to prepare for “internal revolt.”

Over at The Chronicle, we’ve been watching the fracas. If you’ve ever visited our Washington, D.C., offices, you might have noticed the conference rooms are all named for fonts, such as Garamond, Helvetica, and Palatino, a reflection of our newsroom’s own typographical nerdishness. I’m now based in California, but I admit to cringing when I had to send out calendar invites to guests not in the know to meet in Dingbats — out of embarrassment and aesthetic principle.

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.