International students are a significant benefit to the U.S. economy, university diversity, and are critical for the long-term American workforce. According to NAFSA, the Association of International Educators, during the 2022-2023 academic year, international students (who made up only 4.7% of overall college enrollments) contributed $33.8 billion to the U.S. economy and created or supported over 335,000 U.S. jobs. The impressive and meaningful statistics that reflect the positive impact these students bring go on and on. After all, immigrants or the children of immigrants have started more than half of America’s billion-dollar start-ups. International students also bring other less tangible but not less important benefits to the United States. They diversify campuses, provide meaningful cultural experiences to other students, dispel myths and break down barriers, and for those who go home after their studies, they increase wealth production in their country and in the best circumstances, bring a first-hand view of the United States and its people, which can be meaningful for long-term national security and U.S. bilateral and multilateral relations. For anyone who might scoff at the national security implications, we quote the Department of State and Department of Education joint statement (2021) which states (emphasis added) “While the United States remains the top host nation of international students in the world due to its quality of education and diverse offerings, other countries, including our closest partners and allies, are now aggressively competing with the United States to host those students. This competition especially from nations that are not our allies and do not share our values represents a direct challenge to U.S. leadership in research and innovation, our ability to tackle common global concerns, and our capacity to effectively champion universal values, such as human rights, the rule of law, and equity and tolerance, on the global stage.”
As Mark Twain so famously wrote in The Innocents Abroad, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
It is hard to overstate the value international students bring.
So then, why are there so many barriers that these students must overcome to study in the United States? Why did the student visa denial rate increase from 15 percent in 2014 to 36 percent in 2023?
If the matriculation of international students into U.S schools is so valuable to the United States, why is the process so difficult and unsupported, especially when compared to processes in other countries. The U.S. needs and benefits from these students, but according to NAFSA, from 2000-2022 the United States lost 13% of its market share of international students.
80% of the U.S. Diplomatic Corps Is Non-Hispanic White
As Chris Richardson wrote in The Hill (https://shorturl.at/kDNQR), serious reform is needed to address the dark history of the “politics – racial and otherwise” of the U.S. immigration system. This includes hiring a diplomatic workforce that reflects the population it represents. Currently, Richardson notes, nearly 80% of the U.S. Diplomatic Corps is non-Hispanic white and therefore non-representative of the general population. And while the Department of State is increasing its recruitment efforts to attract a more diverse workforce and at the same time placing an emphasis on diversity and inclusion-related efforts and training, more must be done to address the impact of implicit bias on visa decisions, especially in countries with predominantly non-white populations.
But in the near-term, there are changes that could be made quickly to improve the process and reduce structural barriers to international students (and the United States has already committed in principle to values that would underpin these changes). And we best act quickly, since even Canada is eating our lunch, wooing away in 2023 as many as 10,000 H1B visa holders in the U.S. to Canada with the promise of an open work permit for three years for approved applicants, along with allowing dependents to live on a temporary resident visa.
So What Can Be Done?
There are a number of steps the United States can take to increase competitiveness for international students, while making it easier for them to matriculate in the United States.
Improve the Customer Experience – Too Many Clicks
First and foremost, the Department of State should invest resources in improving the customer experience of student visa applicants. Currently, students encounter a significant obstacle in just figuring out how to apply for a visa. U.S. Embassy websites are terribly designed, and the information there is unclear and incomplete. The Consular Affairs website travel.state.gov is easy to navigate, but if you are a student overseas and want to apply for a student visa, why would you go anywhere but the Embassy website. Once you get there, good luck. (And it is worth noting that this is a reason why so many students and other U.S. visa applicants turn to immigration and mobility fixers and advisors – the process is too opaque). This is a relatively easy fix that the U.S. could make – consolidate and clarify the information students need in one place, from the programmatic information available on educationusa.state.gov and exchanges.state.gov/us to all of the visa information (with step-by-step guides and checklists) on travel.state.gov and embassy websites. Please, make it easy.
More Outreach!
Second, while consular officers necessarily need to remain objective and neutral in regards to an individual visa applicant’s case, the United States needs to use its incredibly talented workforce at embassies and consulates overseas to not just adjudicate or facilitate student visa applications, but to encourage and recruit students to apply. Embassy public affairs and consular staff sometimes coordinate student visa information sessions – this needs to be the norm everywhere, with regularly scheduled sessions set as an expectation from Washington. These sessions are valuable for the students (to hear about and better understand the visa process in advance), but also help embassy staff get to know the student applicant population, which certainly will lead to better visa adjudication decisions.
Standardize Outcomes Across Embassies
Third, the Department of State needs to ensure that their consular officers at smaller consulates have the information and resources they need to make fully informed decisions. This is a little weedy, but larger consular sections normally have more experienced consular officers who can mentor and teach newer officers the nuances of adjudicating a student visa application. For example, it seems obvious but a fully-funded student applicant should almost never be denied, and yet that happens. The regulations the officers follow make clear that applying the residence abroad/intending immigrant standard in these cases is different than for a tourist visas and that the officer “should consider the applicant’s present intent, not what they might do after a lengthy stay in the USA,” and “given that most student visa applicants are young, they are not expected to have a long-range plan and may not be able to fully explain their plans at the conclusion of their studies. You must be satisfied at the time of the application for the visa that the applicant possesses the present intent to depart at the conclusion of their approved activities.” All of that is to say that if the officer believes that the student does intend to study and has the means to cover the cost of that study, and plans to follow the rules of the visa and depart at the end of their studies, that they should qualify for the student visa. And yet we hear stories of fully-funded applicants accepted at top U.S. schools being denied a visa. More needs to be done to ensure that consular officers, especially at embassies and consulates with traditionally higher refusal rates for student visas, have a more nuanced understanding of how to approach student visa adjudication decisions. Furthermore, less experienced officers at smaller missions may be overwhelmed and may not focus on this guidance, leading to poor outcomes. The Department of State should take steps to reinforce this guidance during CONGEN (the required training all consular officers must go through prior to assuming their duties as consular officers). In addition, the Bureau of Consular Affairs has a program of Regional Consular Officers (RCOs), who are more experienced consular officers who visit and advise smaller consular sections around the world. The State Department should instruct the RCOs to emphasize the importance of facilitation of student visa processing, and to coordinate webinars to help standardize the approach to student visa cases across consular sections of all sizes. Finally, the Bureau of Consular Affairs should leverage data to do more to standardize outcomes across various consular sections. After all, an applicant that is qualified should be approved wherever they apply.
Turn Attention to Africa
Fourth, let’s turn our attention specifically to the African continent. U.S. international student denial rates are higher in Africa than in any other continent, so while Russia, China, and India are recruiting African students with scholarships and process facilitation, the U.S. is falling behind. It is no surprise that U.S. consular sections in many African countries are small, and are faced with the challenges described above. The Bureau of Consular Affairs and the Bureau of Public Affairs in the Department of State need to coordinate and develop a joint strategy to encourage and facilitate student visa applications from Africa. This could be as simple as regular and measured student visa outreach sessions to help student visa applicants be better prepared for the interview and reviewing decisions made by more junior officers to ensure fully-funded legitimate African students are not being denied at the interview. Considering the backlog of visa workload in most places in the world, the State Department may need to commit to bring in resources from Washington to backstop consular officers to help such sessions occur. But whatever the approach, more time and resources need to be applied to making up the ground with African students.
Foreign Governments Need to Help Fight Fraud
More can also be done by governments around the world to ensure their citizens have access to U.S. education. First, they can work closely with U.S. embassies to combat and prevent fraud from slowing the process and undermining legitimate students. When there is an active market in fraudulent local university transcripts, bank documents, and other supporting evidence that get used by individuals to get admitted to U.S. universities and apply for student visas all with the intent of some other activity in the United States, all student applicants are negatively impacted. Host governments that see the value in facilitating the study abroad of their citizenry need to work hand in hand with the U.S. embassy and other third-country embassies to curb the use of fraudulent documents. Solutions could be as simple as online document verification sites to more complex efforts, such as coordinated arrests of the document vendors and producers. But whatever the solution, we cannot pretend that this fraudulent activity does not continue to impact the credibility, albeit unfairly, of legitimate students.
Keep STEM Students in the USA
Last but not least, there is the question of “what happens to this educated workforce upon graduation?” Programs like Optional Practical Training (OPT) especially after a student graduates from a science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) related field, help train these students on the ground in the United States – that is, if the employer does not object to knowing the student will need some sort of a visa sponsorship within 1-2 years of their initial employment. But the process for these graduates to remain in the U.S. to gain experience or work are limited and byzantine. While the H-1B visa offers the traditional avenue for many international students to remain and work in the United States following their studies at U.S. universities, it is based on a lottery system and is capped at 65,000 visas that are issued each fiscal year. This system forces many international students to depart the United States, leading to a brain drain in these critical areas. Congress should pass legislation that provides these students, especially in STEM related fields, a path to residency. As they say, let’s staple a green card onto every STEM diploma.
But once again – before we can worry about keeping these students in the United States, we need to first fix the problems related to them getting here. And if the United States wants to continue to be the “the top host nation of international students in the world due to its quality of education and diverse offerings” as the Secretaries of Education and State proclaimed – we need to significantly improve how we attract and admit these students into the United States. After all, as the Secretaries rightfully stated, these students help the United States maintain its leadership in research and innovation, its ability to tackle common global concerns, and its capacity to effectively champion universal values, such as human rights, the rule of law, and equity and tolerance, on the global stage.
Dean Kaplan is a retired Senior U.S. Diplomat who worked overseas in Nigeria, Nepal, Jerusalem, and Spain, where he interviewed tens-of-thousands of immigrant and non-immigrant visa applicants and reviewed visa decisions by officers he supervised. He also served in various leadership roles in the Office of Visa Services in Washington.
Düden Freeman is a former U.S. Diplomat who worked overseas in Mali, Spain and Malaysia. She is the founder of Idelire Consulting, and together with Dean Kaplan, she launched Visas 101 (visas101.com) – the first and only online course platform focused on educating visa applicants around the world so they may confidently navigate the intricate world of U.S. visa procedures.
