Not a Blank Check

Even before COVID-19 turned U.S. higher education upside down, international student enrollments have been a growing concern for American colleges and universities.

For decades, international students have been a financial lifeline for nearly the entire sector, from small private liberal arts colleges to large public state flagships. Their enrollments have helped to offset demographic changes, while the higher tuition they often pay has helped to equalize decades-long cuts in state funding to public institutions and growing tuition discount rates at private ones.

Meanwhile, despite the absence of any national recruitment targets like those in Australia, the U.K. and Canada, the United States had long been the destination of choice for many international students. Of the more than 5.3 million students crossing international borders to pursue higher education, more than a fifth still choose to attend colleges and universities in the United States.

Yet warning signs began flashing in the late 2010s, as the number of enrolled international students coming to the United States started to plateau. At the same time, international student enrollments in Commonwealth countries have been on the rise.

Australia, most notably, began setting national international student enrollment targets more than 20 years ago. Its efforts, which combined federal policy strategy with aggressive marketing, especially in East Asia, have been nothing short of impressive. In 1998, the number of international students was around 75,000. By 2017, the number had jumped to more than 350,000. As part of the country’s latest National Strategy for International Education, Australia is projecting to attract 720,000 international students by 2025.

Meanwhile, the U.K.’s International Education Strategy aims to attract 600,000 international students by 2030. Canada, which launched its Comprehensive International Education Strategy in 2014, aimed to attract 450,000 international students by 2022. It surpassed its target by 50,000 in 2017.

Many of those local and national efforts to mobilize ever-greater numbers of international students have fallen under the guise of internationalization. However, the way internationalization has been defined and practiced has changed over the last several decades.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, higher education associations in the United States, such as the American Council on Education and NAFSA: Association of International Educators, sought noneconomic forms of internationalization. They included second-language acquisition, study abroad and intercultural curriculum development. Internationalization was seen as essential to lifting the United States out of its cultural isolation. In addition, cross-border collaborations were meant to harness the academic potential of the world’s leading scholars.

But economic globalization would eventually turn its gaze to higher education as a new and lucrative competitive marketplace. The result has been a near 20-year push of a narrow definition of internationalization, a version that focuses -- at least administratively -- not on developing second-language skills and intercultural competencies but instead on international student recruitment and revenue generation. Now, it’s not uncommon for 15 to 20 percent of the student body be international. Tuition revenue is so important to the University of Illinois, for example, that it took out an insurance policy against a potential drop in Chinese student revenue.

One might say that internationalization is now governed by economic rather than teaching and learning priorities. Take, for instance, how states have collectively slashed $9 billion in public funding to higher education from their 2008 levels, shifting much of the cost burden from states to students. Institutions have turned to international students to help fill those funding gaps, particularly due to the higher out-of-state tuition they pay in most states. And while international education has tapped into the desires of international students to seek their own self-improvement, it has also harnessed their productive capabilities by collecting their highly prized tuition dollars.

That was, of course, all before COVID-19 wreaked havoc on higher education worldwide. While institutions sent students packing, an untold number of international students were left mostly alone on nearly abandoned college campuses and vulnerable to everything from visa uncertainties to racist hate crimes. Yet what lies ahead for them, and for many higher education institutions, may be even less certain.

Earlier this month, the director of the Centre for Global Higher Education, Simon Marginson, noted that it may take up to five years for international student numbers worldwide to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. Whatever concerns college administrators previously had regarding the declines in international student enrollments should pale in comparison to what comes next.

America’s position as a top destination was already compromised due to fragmented internationalization strategies, aggressive immigration policies, soaring tuition costs and high crime, among other issues. And while Australia, Canada and the U.K. are all facing the same global health crisis, there’s reason to believe their nationally formulated internationalization strategies will be more successful at attracting more international students their way. For instance, Canada has already announced it will ease immigration rules to allow incoming students to begin their studies online, while the U.S. sends mixed messages on suspending immigration.

To maintain its position as a top international student destination, the U.S. will need to do more than continue to compete for international student enrollments. To make the American higher education more attractive, colleges and universities should return to earlier conceptions of internationalization. That means focusing not on revenue generation but rather intercultural learning and academic partnerships.

That, however, would require a complete retooling of higher education strategy -- federally, state by state and institutionally. The federal government would need to relax student visa restrictions and increase postgraduate working opportunities. States would need to increase public funding and lower international tuition rates. Both publics and privates would need to make costs more comparable to what international students pay next door in Canada.

Will any of these suggestions become realized? The likelihood of them doing so right away is rather slim at best. States have already threatened cuts to community and four-year colleges in order to mitigate looming budget shortfalls. The long-term picture is even blurrier, with much depending on how this next academic year shakes out. Either way, U.S. higher education leaders must quickly come to terms with the prospect that international students may not be the blank check they’re hoping for this time around.