The renewed surge of COVID-19 cases in the US caused by the highly transmissible Delta variant has pushed some international college students to defer their enrollments.
Bloomberg states that the worsening health situation, coupled with the difficulty of securing student visas and flights, has discouraged international students from pursuing their education and may signal that the return to in-person learning this fall semester will be anything but normal.
Before the pandemic, US colleges and universities usually expected about 1 million international enrollees (mainly from China and India) and deferrals were not that common. However, the overall enrollment rate of students from abroad took a massive hit during the 2020-2021 academic year and has only been on the road to recovery recently.
“As of the last week or two, we’re starting to get phone calls. When we get phone calls from overseas, they’re usually deferrals,” said Erin O’Brien, assistant dean and chief enrollment officer at the University at Buffalo School of Management in New York.
O’Brien shared that 44 percent of the students admitted to the school’s graduate business school last year had to defer, and 59 percent were international students. With only a week left before the fall semester begins, O’Brien believes that the trend will only increase and leave a negative impact.
“If they [international students] were completely absent from our campus, it’s obviously a revenue hit. It’s also a campus community hit, a cultural hit, a student life hit,” O’Brien said.
Affected Colleges
Pennsylvania State University has already received requests from 185 students to allow deferral of their visas to Spring 2022 or later. University spokesperson Lisa Powers said that the school might hear from more students in the near future.
“We have seen a bit of a scramble in the last two weeks of students who have discovered that they may not be able to arrive in time. We are attempting to help these individuals as much as we can, however, some things are beyond our control,” Powers said.
Michigan State University has also been affected. University spokesperson Dan Olsen shared that MSU has heard from international students about their intention to defer for the semester.
Lehigh University also saw about 10 percent of its 260 graduate international students defer last week. Amanda Connolly, director of international students and scholars at Lehigh, said, “If we had not planned to allow students the flexibility to start remotely, definitely deferrals would be much higher.”