As Students Head To Campus, Colleges Fear International Student Decline

As college students head back to school, campus administrators are anxiously making their final count of international students enrolled for the fall semester.

Visa numbers and college officials suggest that fewer international students have enrolled at U.S. colleges and universities over the past few years. And with the pool of college-age students shrinking due to demographic trends and state support for higher education sputtering, public colleges and universities that lose overseas students can find themselves in financial trouble.

"This has coincided with a decline in domestic student enrollment and has led to real financial pain," said Thomas Harnisch, director of state relations and policy analysis for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, which advocates for public institutions.

Changes in the international higher education market and President Donald Trump's nativist policies could be leading to students from China, India and other countries to enroll elsewhere, say college administrators and experts who track student data.

Not every college has seen a decrease in enrollments recently, and some have seen bigger swings than others. At the University of Central Missouri, for instance, an enrollment boom driven mostly by graduate students from India peaked at over 2,700 international students in 2015, then dropped to just 900 students last year.

Between 650 and 700 students will probably enroll this year, said Mike Godard, interim provost and chief learning officer at the university. Most of the international students weren't paying more than in-state students, but losing them still hurt the university's bottom line.

"When you have a reduction of 2,000 international students, there's a very significant impact on the institution overall," he said. The university had to lay off staff over the past fiscal year to account for the $14 million drop in revenue, he said.

Colleges have been cutting professors, programs, even athletic teams in response to falling international enrollments, The New York Times reported in January.

Many Reasons for Students to Stay Away

Overall international student enrollment increased by more than two-thirds in the United States over the past decade, hitting a high of more than 900,000 students during the 2016-17 academic year, according to a survey of college officials conducted by the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit based in New York City. But the number of newly enrolled students that same year declined by 3 percent. Preliminary figures for 2017-18 suggest a further decline of almost 7 percent.

Visa numbers tell a similar story. According to the State Department, the number of student visas issued dropped by 17 percent between 2016 and 2017, to 393,573. That's nearly 40 percent fewer than in 2015, when visa numbers peaked.

The slowdown has been most pronounced in the Midwest and Texas, said Rajika Bhandari, a senior adviser at the Institute of International Education who leads its survey. That's possibly because many of the institutions in those regions aren't well-known overseas, or - in Texas' case - because students are nervous about a state law allowing guns on campus.

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