By David L. Di Maria, Associate Vice Provost for International Education, UMBC

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, made a decision on July 6 regarding international students in the U.S. that will affect far more than just the roughly 870,000 international students themselves.

Based on what I know about the power and influence of higher education in the U.S., this decision could increase the tuition American students pay, cost thousands of jobs throughout the nation and erode America’s stature in the world.

Under this new rule, international students may stay in the country only if they attend a college or university offering in-person classes this fall. Otherwise, they won’t be able to get visas, enter the country or stay here if they plan to attend one of the many schools that are teaching students entirely online.

In effect, thousands of students from other countries who attend schools that do not plan any in-person instruction this fall may have to immediately transfer to another school or leave the country. Otherwise, they could face deportation.

Against the backdrop of what top U.S. public health officials describe as an out-of-control virus, this new immigration rule puts U.S. colleges in a jam. Schools must choose between bringing students together on campus to comply with the immigration restrictions, or adhere to public health precautions related to physical distancing.

It may be hard to do both if the online option is off the table when it comes to international students. Which means U.S. colleges and universities could take a significant financial hit in the form of lost tuition revenue beyond what they were anticipating as a result of COVID-19.

Colleges must scramble

As of July 6, more than 1,000 colleges and universities have already released plans for fall instruction. Of those, 60% plan currently plan to offer in-person classes, 24% plan to offer hybrid and 9% plan to offer courses online. The remaining colleges are still undecided.

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Now, some institutions will have to scramble to develop alternatives that can enable international students to remain enrolled without breaking the new rule. Schools must report how they plan to proceed by Aug. 1, based on the ICE announcement.

Far-reaching impact

The impact of this rule is not just limited to the hundreds of thousands of international students enrolled at U.S. colleges, who represent 4.39% of the 20 million people who currently attend U.S. colleges and universities. It also affects their institutions, their faculty and the local communities as well.

Consider that colleges and universities, which are the largest employers in 1 in 5 states, are already reeling from heavy financial losses associated with the pandemic.

While many schools have had to slash budgets due to refunds issued to students in the spring of 2020, disruptions to research, canceled athletic events and cuts to state funding, others are still waiting to see whether or not they will meet their enrollment targets for fall.

Still, more than 200 colleges and universities have already announced layoffs, furloughs or contract nonrenewals.

At a time when the U.S. is trying to overcome record unemployment and manage its biggest public health crisis in a century, international students seem to be caught in the middle of a partisan divide on reopening the country.

The new guidelines could place many colleges and universities in an impossible position: Increase the number of in-person classes and risk that COVID-19 will spread further.

What they bring to the table

Given how much international students contribute to the economy, you might assume ICE would find a way to keep them in the U.S.

The students affected by the new rule are the same people who help support about 460,000 American jobs.

The higher tuition and fees they pay helps keep tuition lower for American students. But their contributions transcend economics.

Their academic talents help advance scientific discoveries, which are more critical than ever given the nation’s ongoing battle against COVID-19. The fallout will be severe should these students choose to study in other countries instead. Australia and New Zealand, for example, have recently made their policies more welcoming.

Giving ground to other nations

Booting international students would surely reduce America’s influence in the world as well.

According to the State Department, the alumni of educational and cultural exchange programs include more than 75 Nobel Laureates and nearly 450 current and former heads of state and government. Having established personal ties, international students often return home as unofficial ambassadors for the U.S.

International alumni are more likely to look to the U.S. for ideas and trade agreements and to otherwise exert influence abroad that benefits U.S. interests.

While the share of international students studying in the U.S. has steadily declined – from 28% of the world’s 2.1 million international students in 2001 to 21% of the world’s 5.3 million international students in 2019 – other countries have made significant gains in attracting global talent due to national strategies.

Most notably, China now hosts nearly 1 in 10 students who study abroad globally, including more students from Africa than the U.K. and U.S. combined. One reason for China’s rise as a study destination is its leaders’ realization that it is lagging behind the U.S. in terms of soft power with only a few world leaders having graduated from Chinese institutions.

In my view, ICE’s new guidance is only the latest step in a steady retreat from global engagement that clears the path for other nations to attract more of the students that might otherwise study in the United States.

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David L. Di Maria, Associate Vice Provost for International Education, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Header image: Boston Globe/Getty Images

Anjali DasSarma is the summer editorial board intern at The Baltimore Sun.

She is a senior Humanities Scholar in Media and Communication Studies with a minor in Journalism, Editor-in-Chief of The Retriever, as well as a Humanities Senator and a member of the Honors College.

This commentary is from The Baltimore Sun July 6, 2020

As quickly as my Instagram feed swells with people my age gathering together sans masks — grinning, holding drinks and pressing close to one another — it seems the youth COVID-19 rate also rises. Forty-one percent of the total cases of COVID-19 in Maryland, where I live, are people under the age of 39. And my growing frustrations with this increasingly lax approach to social distancing are directly correlated to my concerns about university life this fall, as stay-at-home orders are lifted in states all over the country and people rush to reunite.

When students return to campuses across the nation, there is an implied expectation that they will somehow be eager to enforce one another’s mask-wearing and social distancing. But after watching people of all ages fail to follow through in restaurants, beaches and boardwalks over the past few weeks, as well as on social media, it’s obvious these expectations are unrealistic.

Infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci told a Senate committee during a hearing last week that the country is going in the “wrong direction” on social distancing, and he singled out young people in particular.

“It is critical that we all take the personal responsibility to slow the transmission of COVID-19 and embrace the universal use of face coverings,” he said. “Specifically, I’m addressing the younger members of our society, the millennials and the generation Zs — I ask those that are listening to spread the word.”

To Dr. Fauci from a rising senior in college: My experience suggests the social contract of “positive peer pressure” will almost certainly fall flat. Just look at the attempts to rid campuses of binge-drinking or drug use. Or look at this worst case scenario: Young people in Alabama are throwing “coronavirus parties” and giving a cash prize to whomever contracts COVID-19 first.

But if our federal and local governments largely don’t enforce mask wearing, leaving retail and customer service workers to enforce mask policies, why does it make sense to expect students to be policing one another? The expectation that students will see one another engaging in specific “no-no” behaviors and call each other out is impractical, and campuses that expect to enforce a “mask-on” policy have no real way to ensure that students are actually wearing masks properly — if at all.

Administrators at my school, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, have said they will require everyone to wear a mask on campus when social distancing isn’t possible, and overall are taking a relatively conservative approach to reopening. Ninety percent of classes will remain online during the fall semester, and housing will be prioritized for those who must be on campus and can’t commute.

I hope to be one of those people. I’m set to become the executive editor of The Retriever, our campus newspaper, in the fall, and need to be on campus for reporting purposes as well as for one of my classes. This raises another concern. Part of the “college experience” is found in social gatherings. In fact, many freshman-year courses have remained in person in order to uphold the bonding opportunities for these students. But I’m more concerned about the time outside the classroom, when there’s no professor around to push mask wearing.

“Even very small rates of contact in large group settings like dining halls or parties may be sufficient to sustain an outbreak on campus regardless of any other protective measures which have been put into place,” professors from Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania wrote in a recent paper about the spread of COVID-19 in the university setting.

From sharing a bathroom with your roommate to grabbing coffee with a classmate, contact in shared spaces throughout campus is nearly inevitable. What do administrators actually know about college students?

The implications of an outbreak on campus are just as disruptive as those in workspaces, causing lost revenue and learning opportunities. And while healthy young people usually suffer less severe disease complications on the whole, they’re not immune from illness and can pass COVID-19 on to others, including professors, who might not fare as well.

There is no easy solution to the issue of reopening college campuses. But universities should stop pretending as though students will begin scolding one another about not wearing masks or throwing parties. Administrators need to be prepared for an inevitable outbreak and likely shutdowns. If post-college age adults can’t follow the rules and social distance, college students are sure to break them, too.

That makes bringing students back on campus, at the most primitive level, a return to normal, even with the stated precautions. As we’ve seen with Gov. Hogan’s decision to drop the stay-at-home order, which inadvertently endorsed “a return to normalcy,” phased reopenings mean almost nothing when the social contract doesn’t exist.

Anjali DasSarma is a rising senior at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; the incoming editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, The Retriever; and the summer editorial board intern at The Baltimore Sun. Her email address is adassarma@baltsun.com; Twitter: @anjalidassarma.