Fewer immigrants hurt colleges
At Wright State University in Ohio, the French horn and tuba professors are out. So is the accomplished swimming team. At Kansas State, Italian classes are going the way of the Roman Empire. And at the University of Central Missouri, The Muleskinner, the biweekly campus newspaper, is publishing online-only this year, saving $35,000 in printing costs.
Just as many universities believed that the financial wreckage left by the 2008 recession was behind them, campuses across the country have been forced to make new rounds of cuts, this time brought on, in large part, by a loss of international students.
Schools in the Midwest have been particularly hard hit — many of them nonflagship public universities that had come to rely heavily on tuition from foreign students, who generally pay more than in-state students.
The downturn follows a decade of explosive growth in foreign student enrollment, which now tops 1 million at U.S. colleges and educational training programs, and supplies $39 billion in revenue. International enrollment began to flatten in 2016, partly because of changing conditions abroad and the increasing lure of schools in Canada, Australia and other English-speaking countries.
And since President Donald Trump was elected, college administrators say, his rhetoric and more restrictive views on immigration have made the U.S. even less attractive to international students. The Trump administration is more closely scrutinizing visa applications, indefinitely banning travel from some countries and making it harder for foreign students to remain in the U.S. after graduation.
While government officials describe these as necessary national security measures, a number of U.S. colleges have been casualties of the policies.
“As you lose those students, then the tuition revenue is negatively impacted as well,” said Michael Godard, the interim provost at the University of Central Missouri, where 944 international students were enrolled in the fall, a decline of more than 1,500 from the previous year. “We’ve had to make some decisions, budgetary decisions, to adjust.”
International students pay double the $6,445 tuition of Missouri residents, and the lost revenue amounts to $14 million, according to Roger Best, chief operating officer for the school, in Warrensburg, Mo. Best said that the university has been forced to cut instructors in computer programs, where many of the foreign students were enrolled.
Nationwide, the number of new foreign students declined an average of 7 percent this past fall, according to preliminary figures from a survey of 500 colleges by the Institute of International Education. Nearly half of the campuses surveyed reported declines.
Now that the revenue stream appears to be diminishing, the financial outlook may be dire enough to weigh down the bond ratings of some schools, making it more expensive for them to borrow money, according to Moody’s Investors Service.
“Growing uncertainty for international student enrollment stems from immigration policies that are in flux,” Moody’s said, warning that universities without global brand recognition would be hit hardest. While some flagship public and elite private colleges have been affected, the Institute of International Education said, the biggest impact will be felt by second-tier institutions.
The shift comes just as some states are experiencing a drop in domestic students, partly the result of a decline in birthrates two decades ago. This year, the number of domestic undergraduate students dropped 224,000, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
An increasingly diverse population in that age group means that more of the students come from low-income families in which no one has ever gone to college, also presenting recruitment challenges for universities, according to Doug Shapiro, the organization’s executive research director. “Affordability issues are the biggest hurdles,” Shapiro said. “There’s only so much you can do with recruiting if the families can’t afford the tuition.”