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Credit: Nick Romanenko
Naomi Fleming, left, a Ph.D. candidate
in oceanography from New Zealand with
Urmi Otiv, associate director for
student cultural programs and advisement
at Rutgers in New Brunswick. Fleming has
mixed feelings about her time in this
country.
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Enrollment of foreign students at Rutgers has declined over each of the last two years, and administrators are blaming a combination of post 9/11 legal barriers along with strong anti-American sentiment overseas.
And while Rutgers officials say they are not worried about the university’s long-term ability to attract top students from other countries, they are hoping that factors behind the decline will ease in a few years.
The number of nonimmigrant, international undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at the New Brunswick campus fell to 2,647 in fall 2004, compared with 2,832 in 2003 and 2,906 the year before. The Newark campus, which had about 600 international students in 2002-03, has seen a decline over the last few years, said Janine Maslov, coordinator of international student and scholar services. Camden hosted 88 foreign students in 2002-03; the number has declined slightly since then.
While the official 2005 tally of international students at Rutgers won’t be known until this spring, administrators believe the total will decrease again.
“I think that since 9/11, it has become harder for students to secure visas in their home countries,” said Danyelle Thurman, assistant dean in the Office of Student Affairs in Camden.
Nationally, the number of foreign students on American campuses declined in 2003 by 2.4 percent, the first such drop in enrollments since the 1971-72 academic year. (The Institute of International Education, which publishes the “Open Doors” survey each year, will release national figures for 2004-05 foreign student enrollments in November.)
“Fewer people want to come to this country, in part because of the increased cost and bureaucracy it now involves,” said Marcy Cohen, director of the Rutgers-New Brunswick Center for International Faculty and Student Services. “At the same time this is happening, a number of other countries are investing heavily in recruiting internationally – countries like the U.K., Australia, Germany and Canada.”
While higher education in the United States is still considered the best in the world, it is also the most expensive, Cohen said. Meanwhile, the quality of education in other countries is improving. Another factor is the difficulty for foreign students, especially from Arab countries and Asia, in gaining security clearances for visas after Sept. 11, 2001.
“A lot of our international students feel that there’s a xenophobic attitude toward them – not on campus so much or in the classroom, but in renting apartments or in the absolutely byzantine bureaucracy that they have to go through to get a driver’s license,” Cohen said.
Last October, for example, the Social Security Administration made it even more difficult for international students to obtain Social Security numbers, she said. Foreign students now must document that they have a job offer before they can even apply for the number that is vital for everything from getting a driver’s license to renting an apartment.
On the other hand, the State Department has decreased visa delays in the past year “pretty significantly,” Cohen said. “The average time now for a visa security clearance is 15 days, compared to three to five months” previously.
About half of the foreign college students in the United States are graduate students, but at Rutgers, international graduate students outnumber their undergraduate counterparts two to one. Like other universities, Rutgers relies heavily on outstanding foreign graduate students for teaching and research. International students also bring a global perspective to campus, contribute to the local and national economy, and generally return to their countries with a positive view of the United States.
Despite the lower foreign enrollment figures, Rutgers administrators said it is important to track this cohort, but not to panic. Judith McCarthy, director of graduate and professional admissions in New Brunswick/Piscataway, believes that foreign student enrollment may simply be returning to more normal levels after a “bubble” upward from 2001 through 2003.
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