Changing Policies, Mixed Messages
That so many international students continue to apply to universities in the Big Four countries is a testament to determination and long-held aspirations, given that the process now entails navigating a minefield of admission applications, financial requirements, English-language tests, and visa interviews, well before traveling away from home to increasingly inhospitable destinations.
“There are a lot of pressures,” Yiman Wu, co-president of the Sydney University Postgraduate Representative Association, says with some level of understatement. A Chinese student who got a bachelor’s degree in the UK, Wu is studying toward a master’s in media in Australia.
Students around the world who wish to pursue an international education have found it confounding to follow the changes in, and frequent reversals of, policies that affect them. They face, at worst, hostility, and, at best, confusion.
“It impacts your studies. It impacts your success,” says Moghadam, the doctoral candidate in Toronto. Mary Feltham, chair of the Canadian Federation of Students, says, “People are being treated in a way that they no longer feel human.”
Fifty-five percent of international students in the UK said anti-immigration rhetoric and visa and financial anxieties affect their mental health, a survey by the Migrants Nights Network found. About 3 in 10 international students in Australia said they had experienced discrimination, one survey found.
“It’s very coded now, that ‘international students’ equals ‘other,’” Su says. “They’ve had coffee thrown at them. They’ve been threatened. They’ve had their turbans ripped off their heads. They’re just easy to blame.”
As Thomson puts it: “Just imagine if you are a student. How are you feeling? Or if you’re a parent. Why would you send your student to Australia if you don’t feel like they’re going to be welcomed?”
Policies change quickly, and messages are mixed. In the United States, for example, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in May that applicants to U.S. universities from China would face heightened scrutiny, and the administration would “aggressively revoke” the visas of some students from China already enrolled. Then, as fears mounted of the economic toll, the president said in August that he would welcome Chinese students. “I think it’s very insulting to say students can’t come here,” Trump said.
“It’s very coded now, that ‘international students’ equals ‘other,’” Su says. “They’ve had coffee thrown at them. They’ve been threatened. They’ve had their turbans ripped off their heads. They’re just easy to blame.”
As Thomson puts it: “Just imagine if you are a student. How are you feeling? Or if you’re a parent. Why would you send your student to Australia if you don’t feel like they’re going to be welcomed?”
Policies change quickly, and messages are mixed. In the United States, for example, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in May that applicants to U.S. universities from China would face heightened scrutiny, and the administration would “aggressively revoke” the visas of some students from China already enrolled. Then, as fears mounted of the economic toll, the president said in August that he would welcome Chinese students. “I think it’s very insulting to say students can’t come here,” Trump said.
For those students, “the piece that’s really unsettling is the capriciousness of policy change,” Collett says. “You want to know that when you go to a country in year one, the requirements will remain the same, and it feels a little less stable at the moment.”
Prospective international students are increasingly adrift in all of the added red tape, says Laura Charge, who runs a UK immigration consulting firm called Charge Solutions. “There are too many changes. There’s too much risk. If they get a refusal, their chances of studying in the UK are more or less over.” More confusing still is the fact that “these are the people that Britain keeps saying they want. So the message is really mixed for the students.”
A former government immigration officer, Charge says, “I wrote policy for 25 years and I still find it jarring to keep up with all the changes. If you’re a student, why would you have this information?”
This unstable policy environment is taking a toll even on international enrollment professionals, says Clay Harmon, executive director of the Association of International Enrollment Management, which represents recruitment agencies.
“It’s exhausting and really challenging,” says Harmon, who says he’s also seeing student interest shift to other countries. “The fact that the Big Four are in a more restrictive mode right now means that the demand has to go somewhere.”
International students appear to have at least one group of supporters: their domestic counterparts.
Angus Fisher, president of the Students’ Representative Council at the University of Sydney, concedes that some Australian students may express annoyance when international students arrive with poor English skills—but sharing a campus with visitors from around the world actually “drives down xenophobia. It drives down stereotypes. We need to be able to work with a diverse set of people.” Besides, he says, it isn’t lost on Australian students that their international classmates “subsidize everybody else’s education.”
For that entirely practical reason, Cuibus, at Oxford, is optimistic that politicians in the Big Four destination countries will eventually reconsider what they stand to gain by accepting students from abroad.
“It’s too early to think that all of the progress of the last decades will be reversed,” he says. “Even though you have these political pressures going on, you also have quite strong structural factors for students to keep on coming.”
