The following appeared as an opinion piece in the Daily Item, 10 July 2020.
DHS Announcement is a Move in the Wrong Direction
On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security announced
that international students will be prohibited from staying in the United
States if they are enrolled in online-only instruction. This includes a shift
to online-only classes in response to changes in the status of the pandemic after
a semester begins. On Wednesday morning, Harvard University and MIT jointly
filed a lawsuit seeking temporary and permanent injunctions on behalf of their
students.
The policy change came with little warning, and it is
difficult to understand who benefits from this change. A headline in Tuesday’s New York Times posits that the move was
intended as leverage to impel institutions dependent upon international-student
revenue to remain open for face-to-face instruction in the Fall.
Like Susquehanna University, many institutions are doing all
they can to open their campuses for in-person classes safely, and no
institution that opens its classrooms this Fall is going to move to all-online
instruction mid-semester unless it is in the best interest of the health of the
campus population and that of the surrounding community. If that is the case, how
can immediately putting the international members of a student body onto
airplanes and sending them around the globe be a compassionate or responsible action?
Allowing those students to have the option of sheltering in
place until conditions improve is the ethical approach for the well-being of the
students, and it is better business for our nation. There are some countries,
like China, that will support visas for students to study in the U.S., but will
not allow the same students to enroll in online U.S. programs from home. Under
the new DHS mandate, were these students to attend a U.S. institution that
temporarily moved fully online, they would be sent home, and the semester would
end unfinished.
International students studying in the United States provide
remarkable benefits to all our students, they strengthen higher-education
institutions, and they are a boon to the U.S. economy:
·
International students diversify our campuses
culturally, intellectually, and experientially;
·
They enrich the global awareness and fluency of
our domestic students;
·
By educating citizens from around the world, we
develop advocates of the U.S. abroad, and many international alumni of U.S.
institutions become leaders in their home communities and nations;
·
We have the opportunity to engage some of the
best young minds from around the world in our domestic academic enterprise;
·
For many institutions, international enrollments
provide significant revenue to support the education of all our
students.
In 2018, international students contributed $44.7 billion to
the U.S. economy. The initial economic impact is revenue to universities, but
these students contribute greatly to the commercial vitality of our surrounding
communities and the nation. Sending students home if their programs move online
strips that economic opportunity from our communities, and worse, it is affront
to young people who have had the courage and passion to travel around the world
to learn and who have chosen to invest in those communities as part of the experience.
Just as we all benefit from international students enrolling
in the U.S., we are ethically obligated to be good stewards of them as our
students. This includes advocating for their ability to complete their courses
and their programs, tending to their health and safety as we would our domestic
students, and treating them as welcome guests on our campuses and in our
nation.
This has been a hallmark of international education in the
United States for decades. In the face of our global crisis, the need to
support our international students has never been more important. The DHS
announcement is a move in the wrong direction.
