What a Trump administration 2.0 could mean for foreign students
About this time eight years ago, Benjamin Waxman, chief executive of Intead, a firm that advises colleges on global marketing, added a last-minute question about the upcoming U.S. presidential election to a regular survey the company did of prospective international students.
The findings of the March 2016 survey were, Waxman later told me, “jaw-dropping.” While international students said the election of Hillary Clinton, who would go on to be the Democratic nominee, would have little impact on their study choices, 60 percent said they would have second thoughts about coming to the United States if Donald J. Trump, then viewed more as a cable-news phenom than a serious candidate, were to become president.
Trump, of course, won the election. And while the decline in international students was not nearly as catastrophic as the survey suggested — new foreign enrollments fell 11 percent in the years leading up to the pandemic, in Trump’s last year in office — his presidency left an imprint on international education.
One of his first acts was to sign an executive order closing the U.S. border to students, researchers, and other visitors from a half-dozen predominantly Muslim countries. During his four-year term, Trump reportedly derided Chinese students as spies, his administration put global research ties under the microscope, and international students became a pawn in a political fight over reopening colleges during the pandemic.
With Trump again the Republican presidential nominee and leading in recent polls, apprehensions among international educators are high. I spoke with experts about what a Trump administration 2.0 could mean for international enrollments. You can read my piece here — registering for a free Chronicle account allows nonsubscribers to read two free articles a month — but here are a few takeaways:
Elections don’t affect international-student mobility, except when they do. There have been 19 presidential elections since the Institute of International Education began collecting data on international enrollments in 1948, and an analyst would be hard-pressed to discern any election-year trends.
But a study by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Southern Mississippi found that colleges in counties that voted for Trump in 2016 “experienced a greater and statistically significant decline” in new international enrollments the following year than those that went for Clinton. The “‘Trump effect’ on new international-student enrollment may not be hypothetical but empirical in nature,” the authors concluded.
Different populations of international students could be disproportionately affected by potential policy changes. During his term in office, Trump made stricter rules for Chinese students and researchers part of his standoff with China, even considering a plan to revoke the visas of all Chinese students. He could revisit similar policy proposals if reelected.
Some experts feared the number of international undergraduates could decline, as the parents of younger students may keep them away from the United States, while others worried that the enrollment growth from sub-Saharan Africa could slow because of racist rhetoric.
Some potential policies, however, could affect international students broadly. There are concerns that Trump could make good on past threats to restrict or even eliminate Optional Practical Training, or OPT, the postgraduate work program for international students. In a recent survey of 1,200 current, former, and prospective international students, four in 10 said they would not study, or would seriously reconsider studying, in the United States if OPT was no longer available.
Trump would be better prepared this time around. International-education advocates would be, too. As vice provost for global affairs at the University of Washington, Jeffrey Riedinger played a part in a lawsuit challenging the travel ban. It took a year and a half and three different executive orders before a version of the travel ban was eventually upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, but administration officials learned from their mistakes, said Riedinger, who is now retired. “By the last challenge, we realized we were giving them the playbook of how to get a ban that would survive legal scrutiny.”
Trump and his officials would return to office more experienced, with a better understanding of administrative policymaking. At the same time, international-education groups, which had stayed out of the political fray, have become savvy and more mobilized than in the past. Last fall, a group of education organizations, advocacy groups, and think tanks announced a new coalition to “speak with one voice” for international students.
“We’ve realized that what we in higher education need to do is not stay away from the issues but find ways to be thoughtfully engaged,” said Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance for Higher Education and Immigration, a nonpartisan group of college leaders that is one of the founding members of the new international-education coalition
It’s not just the election outcome but the campaign rhetoric. President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who Trump faces in a rematch, is generally seen as supportive of international education, although it has been less of a priority in his administration than many in the field had hoped for.
But Alan Ruby, a senior fellow at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, said the tenor of the election debate — with its isolationist overtones and competition to get tough, or tougher, on China — could itself have an impact on international students. “The message will be viral,” he said, “and it will echo beyond 2024, no matter who wins.”
Related: Nature took stock of what the presidential election could mean for cross-border science.
