Latitudes

Visa denials spike, casting a shadow on an international-enrollment rebound

More than one in three applications for U.S. student visas was denied in 2022, according to data released by the U.S. Department of State.

The 35-percent rejection rate for F-1, or student, visas is both an uptick from 2021, when 20 percent of such applications were denied, and the pre-pandemic year of 2019, when the denial rate was 25 percent. It’s also more than double the rate of rejections, 14 percent, for all other nonimmigrant visas in the last fiscal year, which ran from October 2021 to September 2022.

Nearly 220,700 student applications were turned down in fiscal year 2022. That means more student visas were denied last year than were issued in 2003 or 2004, according to David J. Bier, associate director for immigration studies at the Cato Institute, who wrote about the visa-denial data for the think tank’s blog.

The spike in denials is worrisome as American colleges are trying to regain their footing globally after many international students were unable to come to the United States during the Covid-19 outbreak. And it seems to run counter to public pledges by the Biden administration to reduce barriers for students from overseas.

“International education is an important part of our diplomacy and our national security,” Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state, said in recorded remarks at the NAFSA: Association of International Educators conference in late May, calling efforts to encourage global student mobility “a priority for the Biden administration.”

In a written response to Chronicle questions about the increase in denials, a State Department spokesperson pointed to “unprecedented demand” for student visas — in 2022, consular offices around the world issued more than 581,000 such visas, the most annually since 2016. (This figure also includes M-1 visas, which are awarded for vocational or other nonacademic study, and certain J-1, or exchange, visas. Most students earning degrees at American colleges study on F-1 visas.)

So far in the 2023 fiscal year, the department has issued 33 percent more F-1 visas than it did during the same period in 2019, the statement noted.

But the increase in volume doesn’t necessarily account for the rise in denial rates. “When the overall numbers go up, you do expect the number of denials to go up,” said Ronald B. Cushing, director of international services at the University of Cincinnati, who has been working on student-visa issues for three decades. “But the increase in the rate is disturbing.”

Among those who received a denial may be students who later reapply and are successful in receiving a visa.

One factor in more-frequent denials could be a shift in where students are coming from to study in the United States. The State Department said that more than one in five student visas in 2022 was issued to students in India. A Chronicle analysis of data from the critical months of May through August 2022 found that more than 84,000 F-1 visas were issued in India, far outpacing China, which was long the largest source of international students in the United States.

While the latest visa-denial data does not break down rejections by country, student applicants from India historically have been turned down at higher rates than those from China. Growing interest from Africa, another region with higher-than-average denial rates, also could be contributing to the growth in rejections.

The failure to prove “nonimmigrant intent” — that the applicant doesn’t intend to move permanently to the United States — is the reason that most nonimmigrant visas, including F-1s, are denied. But the uptick in denials comes after the Biden administration loosened the requirements for international students to demonstrate their plans to return home after their studies.

In 2021, the administration instructed consular officers to use more discretion in evaluating the intent of student applicants, noting that students are not able to show the deep connections to their home countries, like a job or owning property, that are typically used as evidence. “They are not expected to, or do not necessarily have, a long-range plan and may legitimately not be able to fully explain their plans at the conclusion of their studies,” the update to the Foreign Affairs Manual said. Visas should not be adjudicated on “contingencies of what might happen in the future, after a lengthy period of study in the United States.”

That denials should surge though the standards for evaluating intent were eased may seem counterintuitive, but Cushing said it’s impossible to know how consular officials are applying the guidance on the ground. He said intent would always be a reason for denials unless the requirement to demonstrate future plans was removed from visa policy.

At the University of Cincinnati, the rise in denials hasn’t affected international enrollments because of strong growth in applications from abroad. Still, with high denial rates, colleges must go through the work of issuing visa-related paperwork for students who never enroll, stretching the already short-staffed international offices at many institutions. “It’s frustrating to invest the resources,” Cushing said.

It’s also lost revenue for colleges that have come to rely on international-student tuition. And there’s another worry: that the growth in rejections could discourage some students from applying to American colleges in the first place.

New oversight could chill international collaboration

Foreign researchers working with American universities or research institutes on National Institute of Health grants will be subject to additional scrutiny under a new policy.

The federal science agency announced new oversight for the overseas partners of American grant recipients on joint research projects. The foreign scientists will have to regularly provide copies of lab notebooks, data, and other documents to their American colleagues, which then can be reviewed by the NIH.

The agency has come under political fire for its oversight of foreign sub-grantees amid concerns that a leak from a Chinese lab that was doing U.S. taxpayer-funded research could have caused the Covid-19 pandemic. There is no evidence linking the Wuhan Institute of Virology to the pandemic, but a federal watchdog group earlier this year criticized the NIH for errors in its tracking of the nonprofit research organization that was the primary American grantee.

Colleges and scientific associations are raising concerns about the policy, saying it could reduce international collaboration. The requirements single out foreign researchers and create an additional administrative burden without providing any extra funding. Complying with frequent reporting deadlines could be especially challenging for scientists in less-well-resourced countries.

The NIH is accepting public comments on the changes until June 26. However, a spokeswoman told Nature that the agency is moving ahead with the new policy guidance: “These changes have been made, they are not proposed.”

Researchers of Chinese descent spur partnerships between China and the U.S.

Chinese-born researchers, whether working in China or the United States, are key to international academic collaborations between the two countries, a new study shows.

Seventy-nine percent of collaborative papers in 2018 had at least one author who was of Chinese descent working in the United States or who had previously worked or studied in America before returning to China, according to a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, or NBER. “This falls short of the 100 percent that would indicate that a diaspora or returnee author is necessary for a U.S.-China collaboration,” write the authors, Qingnan Xie, of Harvard Law School, and Richard B. Freeman, of NBER, “but is sufficiently high to potentially justify a term like nearly necessary.”

The role of Chinese-born academics is significant because scientific collaboration is higher among the two countries than anywhere else in the world — the number of joint papers published by Chinese and American authors exceeds the output of the second-most-prolific pair of bilateral partners by 74 percent.

But the environment for such collaboration is becoming tougher, the study’s authors note, pointing to an 11 percent decline in jointly published papers between 2020 and 2022. Given the lag between research activity and publication, that decline is likely to be tied to the China Initiative, the Trump administration investigation of economic and academic espionage by China, Freeman and Xie suggest. It’s the latest evidence of the possible chilling effect of the government policy, which was called off by the Biden administration in February 2022.

Around the globe

Refugees and asylum speakers can qualify for lower in-state tuition rates under an expansive new policy in Utah.

Educators who grew up before the creation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which provides some legal protections to undocumented young people brought to the United States as children, wrestle with how to counsel a new generation of students without legal status.

British universities are being criticized for taking part in joint research that may have helped Iran develop drone and other weapons technology.

Two students at the University of Nottingham were among those killed and wounded in an attack in central England.

The Polish government withheld funding to a research institute because it objected to the views of one of the scholars.

Egyptian authorities are blocking a graduate student from Central European University from leaving the country. Ahmed Samir Santawy had been convicted in 2022 for spreading “false news” but later received a presidential pardon.

Senegal’s largest university was closed following clashes between police and supporters of a leading opposition leader.

China opened its first Confucius Institute in Saudi Arabia. The Chinese-funded language and cultural centers have been central to its government’s soft-diplomacy efforts.

An online video in which a Chinese doctor advises a family to tell a high-school student that his mother is dying just before the gaokao, the national college-entrance exam, has lit up Chinese social media, sparking discussion about academic pressure the high-stakes test puts on students.

And finally …

Back when I first started covering international education, I asked my editor (now colleague) Beth McMurtrie to suggest some good sources I could talk with to get up to speed on my new beat. Among her recommendations was Philip G. Altbach, founding director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College. “Maybe,” she said, “he’ll even tell you about how he brought the peace symbol to America.”

Intrigued, I picked up the phone and called Altbach, although finding a natural segue from talking about global mobility to his background as an activist wasn’t exactly smooth! Now you can hear the story of Altbach’s role in the adoption of the symbol, first used by British nuclear-disarmament campaigners, by student peace activists. It’s part of a new multimedia project on Altbach’s history and the history of the Center for International Higher Education put together by Chris R. Glass, a professor of the practice of educational leadership and higher education at Boston College. Listen here.

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.