Aside from that, this is a dumb move, and going to potentially affect up to hundreds of thousands of students. If not in actual effect, then at least in perception and concern about whether the US is the place for them to study and want to contribute to.
And moreover in the short term, basically incentivizes some significant portion to stop wanting to pay full tuition for essentially remote study that could be given by anyone. I await the trickle down effects on the lost spending and economic impacts in college towns of people getting kicked out from this.
It's actually no visa even if you are on-site and taking in person classes but take more than 1 class (3 credits) from online classes.
Full text: https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/sevp-modifies-temporary-ex...
If you want to make the US an unappealing place to emigrate to, and thus drive down immigration and please your nativists, then it’s a smart move.
Based on the way the wind blows in US politics, this is a smart move. They could be even smarter, and once they’ve got the students out of the country, terminate their courses. There’s no way they’d ever want to come back after that, and it would be raucously popular with the natvist support base.
I was initially reacting in a very knee-jerk and emotional way because I personally see this as a Bad Thing® as it does not align with my values and my wants for my country (US). Your comment made me think about it from a different perspective.
It saddens me to think that you may be right - that this may be deliberate - but you made me at least acknowledge that it might be the unfortunate 'will of the people', or at least some of them, even if not a majority.
I hope you were sarcastic there..
A huge portion of grad students are international students. PhD students don't tend to take many classes. Not only does this hurt the international students, but now a huge portion of TA labor is at risk with no real alternative - a month before classes start again.
In all honestly, this likely has little to do with international students and more the Trump administration purposefully forcing the universities hands.
Just a theory.
It's one thing to not grant any new student visas because international travel and relocation is iffy right now. And it's one thing to yank visas for international students that have gone home because of the pandemic. That's understandable. But this impacts students that are already in the US, have already paid tuition for the fall semester, and are essentially shoveling free money into the country.
It makes no sense whatsoever, unless as some kind of political bullshit play around "re-opening".
https://www.statista.com/statistics/233880/international-stu...
[1] https://macropolo.org/digital-projects/the-global-ai-talent-...
This is a move aimed at destabilizing or collapsing the higher educational system. If safety from the virus continues to be a concern (as seems likely for the foreseeable future), universities cannot just resume fully, no matter what. Caught between the Trump order and the virus, things will start going downhill.
I think the larger weakness in your line of argument is that whatever happens to students will have externalities that reverberate beyond universities themselves. Students who are not in school will probably live at home, reifying the pandemic in the minds of their parents. They may question their tuition, creating a quagmire for universities that suddenly have to explain the high price of education via glorified webinars. They may choose to take time off and compete for jobs in the labor market.
It would be somewhat demoralizing for a middle-class family to be unable to send a college student back to school.
