Covid-19 Interrupts Flow of Foreign Students to U.S.
The question for colleges and universities is: Will they come back when the pandemic is over?
A lot of empty desks this year.
Photographer: Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images
Since 2016, the U.S. has been seeing declines in the number of new foreign students coming to study at colleges and universities here. Likely culprits include currency fluctuations, stronger competition from other English-speaking countries, big cutbacks to Saudi Arabia’s once-huge study-abroad program and, yes, the foreigner-unfriendly policies and rhetoric of President Donald Trump.
Still, there didn’t seem to be too much cause for alarm. The sharp rise in foreign-student enrollments in the first half of the 2010s had been the product in part of desperation, as public universities struggled to make up for cutbacks in state funding after the Great Recession, so some modest pullback was probably healthy. Also, the decline had seemed to be ending. The 2018-2019 new-student numbers were barely down from the previous year. The Institute of International Education won’t release full numbers for the 2019-2020 academic year until November, but State Department visa-issuance data seemed to show a pretty stable picture through the end of last year. Then came Covid-19.