Such pathetic leadership. International students already in the country must now either attend an in person class and risk their lives, or fly out from the country with the highest number of infections and spread it to their friends and family at home. Not to mention the loss to the research community.
I can’t see anything that is to be gained from this, other than pandering to a xenophobic voter base.
Only a visa extension (I-539), which will cost you > 400 bucks. We just went through with this for my mother in law, whose Delta return flight was cancelled a week before she was to go back after an almost 6 month stay. Fortunately, the USCIS is being pretty accommodating on letting people file extensions close to the end of their stays (usually you have to do it 45 days in advance), and she will probably go back before they even decide her case, hopefully (but she will have to carry around her I-539 app/judgement for awhile).
We've got her booked on a flight at the end of October, which is the best we can do right now. There are flights to China that you can get tomorrow through Taiwan or Hong Kong, but neither will allow you to board if you aren't Taiwanese or from Hong Kong (so no mainlanders). The remaining direct flights are in very limited supply and very hard to get and/or very expensive.
It's difficult, if not impossible, to fly to basically any country from the US.
The EU is currently debating exemptions for spouses who have been separated, so I doubt they have exemptions for students.
And even if the exemptions and all are sorted out, who thinks it's a great idea for a whole bunch of students to have to fly in what will now potentially be crowded planes, and then have to spend at least a couple of weeks in quarantine, for something that was not a choice of theirs at all.
Also, as if the rental/retail market wasn't bad enough, especially in college towns many of which are single industry towns, this is gonna add to even more completely unnecessary and avoidable hardship.
This is disastrous policy in every form, other than if youre someone who gets off on unnecessary cruelty.
In this case, the students would be returning home, and therefore be citizens of the country they are flying to. Generally speaking (including the EU, which you mentioned), citizens are exempt from the travel bans. Even during the quarantine, there were once-a-week flights to China from the US (https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/16/business/us-china-flights-int...)
Not saying that these changes aren't horrible, they are, but I don't think getting home is impossible. Very difficult, in most cases yes.
I finally shelled out the $ for the paid version of a flight radar app because I was curious. The friendly skies are mostly empty. 85ish% of all flights in and out of Bay Area is from/to China.
I always had the free version but the paid version will ping me every time a flight goes over me(my phone actually) and for a mere $6.99/month, I can find out the air traffic of the area. It’s an affordable hobby for covid. I highly recommend it.
I don’t know what it really means but just an observation.
That's not the same thing at all. There's always been a flight a week from the US to China, so even if it takes a while, it's still possible. Especially so with at least a month's notice.
Only possible good thing I can see from a US student perspective is that it's now more reasonable to go to grad school in US. Many programs in STEM have gotten out of hand with the number of the foreign graduate students--in some programs the number is over 80% [1]. I think this has led to the US educating many persons who later leave the country for visa issues. Also, some of the competition to get in can be considered bogus: near perfect GRE math which measures high school level math skills is hardly germane for research.
> I think this has led to the US educating many persons who later leave the country for visa issues
I’ve never been to the US but, if this is the problem then wouldn’t it be better to make it easier for people to stay also after they have finished their degrees? If the goal is to have a lot of highly educated people in the US I mean.
I agree. I'd like to see more educated foreigners stay in the US through a more sensible immigration policy. But another way to attempt to fix the weird brain-drain is by controlling who is getting the education.
USA educates more international students (by far) than any other country. I think the goal of policies like this is to prefer US students. But you're right that it would also be nice if foreign students had an easier time staying in USA after they graduate.
It wouldn't just be nice - it'd be smart. We could probably have more immigrant-owned business and immigrant-developed inventions of we made it easy for foreign born US graduates to stay. Both of which should add jobs to the economy and make the US more economically competitive.
I think everyone would support that kind of policy except where it would have an adverse effect on American students. The goal of policies like this are to promote USA students admission to higher education over foreign students. But the reality is that foreign student tuition is a huge money-maker. So USA students are at a disadvantage in the admissions process.
I highly doubt that's what will happen. How many of these programs are dependent on foreign tuition? These aren't efficient institutions, mind you, so a downturn could lead to collapse of the weakest ones, leading to increase domestic competition at the remaining ones.
How many of these programs are dependent on foreign tuition?
At least some are. And this is nothing new.
When I went to college decades ago, I and a bunch of my friends got kicked out of our university at the end of the semester because it was over its legislatively-mandated limit for out-of-state students. The university had loaded up on lucrative international students in previous years, and when the ratio was changed, people like me got the heave-ho.
The problem is that we have to remove the greed from the university administrators. But good luck with that.
My comment was only considering graduate students, whom I think, are the group most affected by this change. Graduate students in STEM usually don't pay tuition--their lab pays the fees for them to be enrolled.
Well yes, of course, international students pay significantly more than in state. Money makes the university go round, that’s how the Confucius Institutes got started.
> This seems designed/intended to chase away immigrants.
No, it's designed to chase away non-immigrant student visa holders.
But it's part of a broader set of policies designed to make the US hostile to foreigners, whether current visa holders, non-immigrants visa applicants, or immigrant visa applicants.
Many universities are planning to have at least some of their classes be in-person this fall. My daughter was just admitted to Seattle U, and they expect her to be moving into her dorm in about a month. I am mostly expecting this to be cancelled, though.
> Nonimmigrant F-1 and M-1 students attending schools operating entirely online may not take a full online course load and remain in the United States ... Active students currently in the United States enrolled in such programs must depart the country or take other measures ...
This is going to ruin so many lives. An example of how this could result is significant hardship for international students is the case of Iranian students.
Iran has mandatory military service for all male citizens ages 18 and over. People who are students can defer their military service until their studies have concluded. If the studies are outside of Iran, the temporary exemption from military service for the purpose of education status allows students to be present in Iran for a maximum of 3 months per year (approximate length of the summer intermission, so students can have some vacation and visit their family). Stays longer than that are deemed to be at odds with being an active student in a foreign institution, so if a student is present in Iran for longer than that, they are deemed to no longer be a student—the exemption is invalidated and the person has to go through two years of military service before they are allowed to leave the country again.
Any male Iranian student who is forced to leave the US due to this directive is effectively expelled from their program. I am sure this is not a unique situation. There are likely many other such edge cases that affect certain demographics of students. I hope they reverse their decision, otherwise so many careers will end before they even begin.
I am not going to defend the Iranian regime or military services in general, which I think is a waste of time for all parties. But is it the role of the US immigration regime to circumvent military duties in foreign countries?
My point was that there are likely hundreds of edge cases that ICE did not think about (or care about) when they decided to change the rules. When you create rules carelessly, people fall through the cracks. ICE has now created a massive crack many will likely fall through.
Military service is just one of such cracks, there are likely many many more. Just imagine how many people are likely to lose their scholarships (that is their only way to pay for the program they are in) because this ruling triggers a clause in the scholarship terms, how many mature students with families now have to take their children out of school and out of country for who knows how long and what the effect of this on those children is going to be, ...
Have the rules been changed though? These on-line education restrictions (known as "Full course of study") had been in the law for a while, see 8 CFR 214.2(f)(6)(G) [1]. What ICE has done is a temporary suspension of enforcement. Now they just resume normal operation. You could argue they had to suspend it for longer but accusing them of changing rules seems bizarre as what you actually want is for them to change rules (because current rules say that F-1 students cannot do full-time on-line classes).
For F-1 students enrolled in classes for credit or classroom hours, no more than the equivalent of one class or three credits per session, term, semester, trimester, or quarter may be counted toward the full course of study requirement if the class is taken on-line or through distance education and does not require the student's physical attendance for classes, examination or other purposes integral to completion of the class. An on-line or distance education course is a course that is offered principally through the use of television, audio, or computer transmission including open broadcast, closed circuit, cable, microwave, or satellite, audio conferencing, or computer conferencing. If the F-1 student's course of study is in a language study program, no on-line or distance education classes may be considered to count toward a student's full course of study requirement.
That is true. But the difference is that students used to have a choice (online vs in person classes), and now most don't.
To be honest, there is no purpose for most students to be in the US if they're taking online classes. But there are a lot of edge cases (e.g., students doing research in the lab, graduate students with a research stipend, students in economical hardship with a part time job, etc.) I wonder whether there will be exceptions for them.
This isn't even related to the military service. This is related to making a promise to someone when giving them a VISA and then breaking that promise for no good reason.
There is literally no reason for ICE to be doing this.
I think one is not the same as the other. The intention is to get an education, the benefit is avoiding Iranian military service. That analysis has no basis in federal law, so no, it’s not the governments responsibility.
I feel so bad for my Iranian brothers and sisters :(.
The IRR keeps losing more and more value, which means if they were getting help from home it keeps getting more and more expensive to be able to afford to live here.
And then on top of that they have to worry about piece of shits running this country that give no regard to their lives.
As some have pointed out elsewhere, the idea that "they can just do the courses remotely from their home country" has some issues:
- live classes may happen in the middle of the night
- tools like GSuite are blocked in China
- internet connection quality varies
Given the amount of revenue foreign students bring in, this seems like the admin is using access to those students as a lever to force schools to reopen prematurely.
There's also the sad reality that for many students, it's not possible to work unimpeded on school work at home. For many, university is the a psychological retreat from home circumstances that are distracting at best the best of times and downright abusive at the worst. It doesn't matter if your Internet is solid if you can't actually focus on the work.
Post quals grad students are going to be hard pressed to get a PCR machine, vivarium, or fluoroscope up and running in their parent's house. You know, machines vital to figuring out covid vaccines.
I've no idea how most of them will get any quality lab-bench research done. It pretty much nukes them.
Limited lab access is a lot easier to safely implement with shift reservations and people looking after each others projects than classes, so I'd expect that to happen to a degree. At least some universities here in Germany already do allow occasional lab access if needed, with appropriate precautions.
I know a few grad students at 'closed' campuses currently. Though the admin says the labs are off limits, the PIs are turning blind eyes to it. The labs are effectively open.
At the school where I work, they disabled key card access for everyone campuswide. You need to special permission to have them unlock it for a limited time period to get in.
Of course a few old buildings still use regular keys so people can sneak in potentially.
That last point seems particularly apt. I didn't consider that, but maybe should have, it explains this decision in the context of Trump's desire to punish people into getting what he wants.
the money they save on rent they can use on getting a kick ass internet connection. internet is pretty good in most countries if you are willing to pay up. GSuite is blocked, means use word online? not insurmountable barriers
"Active students currently in the United States enrolled in such programs must depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction to remain in lawful status. If not, they may face immigration consequences including, but not limited to, the initiation of removal proceedings."
I wonder if the Harvard decision today will be modified in response to this. I imagine their international students, especially in graduate studies, must be highly impacted.
Probably international students will now attend in person classes and others will be fully remote.
Weird to even think that such drastic changes are all happening during a pandemic.
Agree. I wonder what is the rationale for all this. Other than plain old xenophobia.
Will this reduce pandemic ? No, it will incentivize colleges to offer in-person classes promoting COVID.
Will this reduce students on non-immigration visas ? Not sure it does (students might find in-person classes somewhere). Some students might just say 'fuck it' and study elsewhere. Maybe that's good for them.
Will this reduce unemployment? Maybe. But I'm doubtful. Most F1 students are barred from working off campus other than internships, and I doubt on-campus work and internships make a dent in unemployment.
Plain old xenophobia? How about double digit unemployment rate? We can debate the means. But I can understand why Trump would want to cut down on immigration.
Now a good question is whether there will be unemployment among highly educated people with STEM degrees, who were in hot demand only a few weeks ago, and if not this is counterproductive. But every economic indicator seems to point at a major recession (beyond a technical recession during the lockdown). I would assume everyone will be impacted.
You may not know this, but graduate research assistants make less than what many Americans get in unemployment benefits. You are basically getting cutting-edge research work done by non-immigrants for that money. Do you think it is more beneficial for your country to pay a US citizen for doing nothing?
I am a GRA and I work on translational research in neuroimaging and data science. With my career prospects dwindling, I'm considering leaving US if the president gets reelected.
Students on F1 visas are not immigrants, and in general can’t stay after their studies are over (with a limited-time exception via OPT status), unless they get a different type of visa.
All my friends who emigrated to the US did so from an F1 visa (followed by a work visa sometime during their first year of employment). Of course it is a source of immigration.
What a mess. There will be schools that have confusing plans, ICE won't quite get that student A is in program B that followed plan C and now they switched to D so something something. Just another piece of terror for all those students to deal with, worrying about immigration confusion.
The students may not have that choice. Professors are equally worried about their health and that of their students and are trying hard not to be in classrooms.
There's no perfect solution and many conflicting needs.
1. The health needs of students and professors, some part of them are vulnerable, plus the normal health considerations of covid-19
2. The learning needs of students, plenty may struggle to succeed in an entirely online world. It might be required by reality, but there will be new difficulties for people.
3. Financial needs of the school - they still have to pay for classrooms, office space, dorms, the campus, even if they aren't using it right then
4. Financial needs of the student - they might have financial aid from the school or other sources, how does it apply when the school is remote or unclear, what if things change, what do you pay, what does your scholarship cover?
5. And now immigration clarity. That student might need to be in the us for other reasons - if it's grad school, your relationship with your advisor used to be crucial. Now you'll never have a chance to see them in person. No one wants to be terrified of being deported for violating a rule or the govt confused about their status. The school might close down with little notice, what happens to that person who can't afford to fly back overseas?
This has become so absolutely stupid at this point. I can even maybe understand this for future admissions. But from the messaging it looks like they want to deport students who came after a valid visa process. This is just absurd.
I hope unis do a hybrid thing like CMU, otherwise it is a lot of pain for students who are already here.
This reads like "open your campuses or go fuck yourself". International students make up 6% of all the students in the US with certain institutions probably averaging very large numbers of international students.
This is the sad current state of affairs in this country. A pandemic became a political weapon.
I don't see anything to be gained from this call other than solidifying the current administration political stance. Unless I'm missing something, this seems to be an incredibly destructive decision creates little to no benefits to the American society... For instance, that "6% of all students" alone contributes a great deal to the US economy:
> According to the Commerce Department, international students contributed $45 billion to the U.S. economy in 2018.
This is lunacy. Also likely will fail in court since it doesn’t follow proper procedures - something the recent Supreme Court DACA ruling pointed out. These nitwits are cruel and incompetent. But all of this has damaged America’s higher education system and its attractiveness to foreign students for the long term. Many an economics PhD thesis will model GDP lost from doing everything in our power to scare away educated immigrants.
This is why I'm afraid of Pence getting President in the event Trump catches corona or has a heart attack or whatever. Or for whatever the Republicans put up after Trump. Because right now the only thing that keeps this administration from doing massive unrepairable damage is their own incompetence because Trump took a bunch of yes men as his advisors and Cabinet.
A government filled by someone with the malice of the current Republicans and the competence of actual professionals? Good night democracy.
This also pressures universities to have in person classes regardless of the safety of that practice. Universities want to support their students, and indeed one of the draws of many university programs for international students is the entry into the visa system for employment in the U.S. One effect of this policy is to push universities to NOT be in the online-only category, even if it means risking lives by a policy the school would have otherwise preferred to avoid.
I don’t understand how universities think they can get away with charging full tuition to students while offering online only classes. I would be so furious if I was stuck in this situation of trying to graduate on time but being scammed out of the whole experience I worked so hard to get in to.
If the schools feel so strongly against reopening they should waive their tuition for anyone already enrolled to attend online and close enrollment to new students, and give anyone the option to defer if desired.
I don’t blame ICE for not extending their exemption past the summer for online classes. The visa does not allow for online courses. Schools are not making an evidence based decision here, and should not expect special treatment if they aren’t willing to offer actual classes. I hope the students who are suing will prevail in court for unjust enrichment.
Tuition is a consensual transaction. Students can withdraw if they don't like what the school is offering. How is it unjust to sell something people want? Remember, tuition is for the diploma. The education is already available online for free, or for much cheaper at a local community college, in almost every case.
> I don’t blame ICE for not extending their exemption past the summer for online classes.
1. difficulty of returning home
2. risk of pandemic spread by returning home
3. internet connectivity issues
4. timezone issues
5. software availability issues
6. home suitability for studying
7. ....
"I don't blame ICE". Destroy ICE. This is appalling.
When I became a citizen 3 years ago, I told people that one motivation was that I was very very slightly afraid of Trump even though I was a white european permanent resident of 28 years. It's only taken 3 years to get to where I'd say "not imminently but genuinely afraid" for that sort of immigration status.
The schools really should have thought through of all this before canceling classes on all their students who depend so much on attending them.
There’s no excuse for outright canceling classes. Classes can absolutely be held safely, if these universities simply chose to invest in the training, procedures, and equipment necessary to do so.
Instead they chose to bank their tuition payments and setup a Zoom call.
This is not a new policy, student visas have never allowed for online classes, and the universities certainly knew this. I think the blame pretty clearly lies with schools who decided to close up shop.
Probably because they didn't consider the downside to their decision. They don't empathize with the students who can't possibly learn the material without a classroom environment, or for those who worked and dreamed of attending that University for years only to be sent the bill without most of the benefit. To say nothing of those students who literally don't have a (safe) place to live lined up besides being on-campus.
The people making the decision are Administrators who get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to cash the tuition checks and did the calculus that they could shut down "for the safety of their students and faculty" and still cash those checks.
> And US college is about a lot more than classes.
Absolutely true. I'd say classes are no more than half of what you're paying for. Harvard and Princeton just announced today that many students will be returning in the fall, but still taking classes online. They want freshman and juniors to return in the fall, and sophomores and seniors to return in the spring.
If the decision was simply based on the actual data, the reality is that the student body is much more at risk from the drugs and alcohol on campus than they are at risk from SARS-CoV-2. More to the point; if you take a holistic view, the social, economic, physical and mental welfare of their student body is massively degraded overall by canceling on-campus housing and classes versus by holding them.
What about the students that can't go to class because they're with family or friends that are at risk? What about the immigrants who came here to get an education that are now being kicked out because of the administration's cruelty? Why are you encouraging something that would exacerbate the spread of the coronavirus and celebrating forcing people to travel back home and potentially spread the virus cross country?
So you agree there's a lot more than classes, but think that the claim that classes can be held means that schools should just stay in regular mode.
I don't disagree with you about the cash flow. My disagreement is with ICE telling students they cannot remain here just because schools went online-only.
>Nonimmigrant F-1 students attending schools operating under normal in-person classes are bound by existing federal regulations. Eligible F students may take a maximum of one class or three credit hours online.
This pretty nuts. From what I understand, even schools that are allowing everyone on campus will have a majority of their classes online or have them be up to the discretion of professors.
This may keep the vast majority of international students out of the US.
A vast majority of international students already admitted into the fall semester are already looking for alternatives because 1) coronavirus situation in the US and 2) US embassies being shut down in many affected countries.
I had hoped my university (Brown) would follow Harvard's suit and err on the side of remote instruction this coming year. With this policy announcement, the chances of that dwindle.
Brown had made special accommodations to allow their international students to remain in dorms over this summer. By eliminating extraneous travel, these accommodations were in the best interest of both these students and the general public. Who is served by expelling them!?
This will further encourage universities to offer in-person instruction. Paying top dollar for a sub-par online education is not what students are after.
Chinese students will be safer in China.
Bad news for US universities that built dorms and counted on the cash from foreign students. Now they can't come.
Many families viewed studying in the US as a pathway to eventual residence. That's gone, at least until there's a new administration.
Can someone offer a sensible reason for this policy? I am trying to look for anything that would make it not look like an outright political decision, but I can't.
This is intended to punish foreign students - either move to an unsafe university or get out and reset your visa. With a government that’s decided to block visa applications arbitrarily.
Alternatively universities have to reopen to people so that it looks like they agree with the absurd demands of the current administration to open earlier than they should.
Any prospective international student reading this should REALLY reconsider education in the US. The administration is using everyone as pawns in a massive game of vote pandering.
It's hard enough to study hard and achieve goals. Why come here where you will be treated like unwanted foreigners at best and asylees who should be arrested at worst?
My partner has been struggling with the US immigration system her entire stay here. With this administration things have gone even further downhill. They're violently, cruelly dedicated to the idea of shutting down immigration and dying a slow intellectual death.
Trump hates universities. So he’ll do anything to ensure universities are on life support. This is a great way for him to bring the uncertainties to follow his orders.
Trump is telling universities to open up for in person classes or lose all their international students, who will mostly choose universities that have in-person classes over online classes after ICE's ruling.
This is a diabolical move, arm twisting universities into opening up or else losing international students - a major sources of revenue.
I doubt this decision is coming from the WH. It's a very simple calculation made by an agency with different priorities from what might be represented here in this forum.
You have thousands of foreigners, a large portion of which might not be in the country, waiting to return to the US to continue their studies. Many of those countries don't even allow US travelers to arrive at this time. Everybody is urging for caution, but that there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of individuals preparing to arrive back here, with possible infections, is something an agency might be concerned about. So naturally, why not prevent this travel from happening in the first place with a policy like that?
Of course it's a heavy handed approach, but so are the lock-downs and closed schools. So we go to great length trying to prevent the spread, we close schools for over 4 month, and some don't even want schools open in the fall, but somehow an influx of half a million students is something nobody should be concerned about?
Those are valid discussions to be had. Assuming right away that this is a way to force universities to open is not a very genuine way of thinking. You cannot encourage full online classes for health reasons, and applaud that on Monday, and on Tuesday complain we don't allow students from all over the world to return just to sit in front of a computer.
Everybody is laser focused on these case numbers, and some states will close schools due to high case counts in the fall, impacting millions of families. If you support that, you should probably also support any measures possible to keep case counts low, including discouraging international travel.
> Active students currently in the United States enrolled in such programs must depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction to remain in lawful status. If not, they may face immigration consequences including, but not limited to, the initiation of removal proceedings.
I read that. And again, this is a policy. You are not thinking this through, in my opinion.
Think about this in a way an accountable official would think.
Most universities don't know what they will do yet in the fall. If you make an exemption for people who are currently already in the country, what would that solve? It would artificially pick those students over those who happened to travel home for the summer. You can't do that. That would probably make such a rule unlawful. So you have to craft such a "heavy handed" rule in such a way that it doesn't have loop holes that can be exploited. Don't think lawyers didn't review this exemption for weeks.
And my earlier points still stand.
I'm not trying to convince people that this rule is all that good. But understand where it comes from, and don't think it's all because of a particular administration. There is certainly logic to this rule. You may not agree with it, but I might not agree with closed schools either.
> Think about this in a way an accountable official would think.
No they wouldn't. I've held various (small scale) public facing offices before and this isn't how I would think.
Thinking of the consequences of your actions is a very important thing.
> If you make an exemption for people who are currently already in the country, what would that solve?
Decrease the damage done?
> So you have to craft such a "heavy handed" rule in such a way that it doesn't have loop holes that can be exploited. Don't think lawyers didn't review this exemption for weeks.
They probably didn't. We've seen this administration do bullshit orders before. This isn't a new one. Remember when they banned green card holders from coming to the US and there was chaos for 12-24 hours until they came and said whoops those are exempted?
The reason the other commentator thinks your post is bullshit because it doesn't address the clause in the order that requires F-1 students currently already in the country to leave if classes are online-only. This order is not done by some agency being thoughtful about covid19, it's about using the pandemic to put out more xenophobia that the WH will more than approve.
I can’t see anything that is to be gained from this, other than pandering to a xenophobic voter base.