Can we expect international students in the Fall term?

[Anselm]

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/map-and-travel-notices.html

Most foreign nationals who have been in one of these countries during the previous 14 days will not be allowed to enter the United States.

Do we have any estimates on whether we can expect the usual numbers or a much smaller amount of people?

[Hibush]

Students who live in countries where the embassies are closed and don't already have visas are unlikely to arrive.

[Parasaurolophus]

Things are different up here, but the only internationals we're expecting are those who are already here and didn't go back to weather the crisis with their families (so: mostly those with a year's worth of courses or fewer left).

Our fresh intakes are usually in the winter, and there's some idea that we should see those students, but I doubt it. They're not coming from a country with its cases under control, so...

[mamselle]

I wonder if "Quarantine hostels" with semi-skilled care will start up to accommodate the 14-day stayover.

It's a terrible thought on several levels, but someone may try to make hay from the situation in that way.

Or the schools themselves might....

M.

[sandgrounder]

I work in the UK and we're expecting a big drop and that we'll need to teach in a way that international students, who don't want to travel can study remotely for at least the winter semester, as quite correctly they do not trust the British government's competence on pandemic management.  Given the global publicity that the US's failure to contain Covid-19 is getting, I can't see parents being very keen to send their children your way either.

[polly_mer]

Everything I'm reading indicates that most of the international students in the fall will be the ones who didn't go home and are probably still on campus.

Getting new visas was paused for a while for processors to stay home and I've seen worries about clearing the backlog in a timely manner

Forbes has a recent, relevant article with a good overview


May article on higher ed economics that includes why universities would need international students

[Anselm]

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/06/politics/international-college-students-ice-online-learning/index.html

[peitho]

We have a large Asian population that I expect to remain on campus.

Moving in the opposite direction, my students who were scheduled to study abroad in the fall have recently enrolled in classes. 

[picard]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/08/ice-is-putting-international-students-terrible-position-hurting-america/

Quote from the op-ed:

"According to the 2019 Open Doors Report on International Education, there are more than 1 million international students in the United States. These students typically pay full tuition, which subsidizes the costs of enrolling more U.S. students. For public colleges and universities, the revenue generated from international students also helps moderate the effects of federal and state education budget cuts. This policy may force schools such as San Jose State, where international students account for nearly 11 percent of the student body, to choose between what they believe is safe and their bottom lines. How many U.S. students will have to defer enrollment or take on more student debt because of this ICE policy?"

[Puget]

I have an incoming MA student who is international but currently living on the opposite side of the US, having finished undergrad there. We had just given our incoming MA students the message that they could work remotely their first semester if they needed to, and she was planning to do so. Then this. She has now bought a plane ticket and is scrambling for a lease. I feel really bad for her and all the other students who have been thrown into uncertainty and stress through no fault of their own.

We're also going to have to move a lot of our graduate courses to at least partially in person to comply, which is a problem for a lot of our older faculty who were planning to stay online for their own safety.

This is so stupid-- there is clearly no reason other than the anti-immigrant agenda of the current administration. As the article quoted by picard notes, it is diametrically opposed to the supposed goal of improving the economy.

MIT and Harvard just sued, so we'll see if that gets anywhere.

[nonsensical]

We're also going to have to move a lot of our graduate courses to at least partially in person to comply, which is a problem for a lot of our older faculty who were planning to stay online for their own safety.

Does it count as an in person class if some of all of the students are gathered together in one room, and the professor (and perhaps some other students) are online? I'm imagining a scenario where one of the in-person students sets up a laptop at the front of the room and the professor joins via Zoom. I'm assuming this is not workable for a bunch of reasons I haven't thought of because I don't see any institution proposing this kind of set-up, but off the top of my head this seems like a possible way to have some students be "in person" while (older, potentially more vulnerable) faculty are not. Intuitively, a class could count as "in person" if the professor and some students were in a room together while other students joined via Zoom, but maybe the status of the course depends on the physical location of the professor more than it depends on what proportion of the people associated with the class are physically gathered together in one place.

[Puget]

We're also going to have to move a lot of our graduate courses to at least partially in person to comply, which is a problem for a lot of our older faculty who were planning to stay online for their own safety.

Does it count as an in person class if some of all of the students are gathered together in one room, and the professor (and perhaps some other students) are online? I'm imagining a scenario where one of the in-person students sets up a laptop at the front of the room and the professor joins via Zoom. I'm assuming this is not workable for a bunch of reasons I haven't thought of because I don't see any institution proposing this kind of set-up, but off the top of my head this seems like a possible way to have some students be "in person" while (older, potentially more vulnerable) faculty are not. Intuitively, a class could count as "in person" if the professor and some students were in a room together while other students joined via Zoom, but maybe the status of the course depends on the physical location of the professor more than it depends on what proportion of the people associated with the class are physically gathered together in one place.

This would be a creative solution but I don't know if it will fly-- I'm sure general counsel and the ISSO office are trying to figure such things out. What a mess!