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Education Government The Internet United States

Foreign Students Must Leave the US If Their Universities Transition To Online-Only Learning (reuters.com) 169

ugen shares a report from Reuters: Foreign students must leave the United States if their school's classes this fall will be taught completely online or transfer to another school with in-person instruction, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency announced on Monday. It was not immediately clear how many student visa holders would be affected by the move, but foreign students are a key source of revenue for many U.S. universities as they often pay full tuition. ICE said it would not allow holders of student visas to remain in the country if their school was fully online for the fall. Those students must transfer or leave the country, or they potentially face deportation proceedings, according to the announcement.

The ICE guidance applies to holders of F-1 and M-1 visas, which are for academic and vocational students. The State Department issued 388,839 F visas and 9,518 M visas in fiscal 2019, according to the agency's data. The guidance does not affect students taking classes in person. It also does not affect F-1 students taking a partial online course-load, as long as their university certifies the student's instruction is not completely digital. M-1 vocational program students and F-1 English language training program students will not be allowed to take any classes online.

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Foreign Students Must Leave the US If Their Universities Transition To Online-Only Learning

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  • Very sneaky... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MiniMike ( 234881 ) on Monday July 06, 2020 @07:39PM (#60269564)

    Seems an underhanded way to force universities to have in-person classes to retain students, regardless of the actual situation at the school. Maybe the schools will have in-person classes just for students in danger of losing their visas (as opposed to those students in danger of losing their health/life).

    • Maybe the schools will have in-person classes just for students in danger of losing their visas (as opposed to those students in danger of losing their health/life).

      This one's easy to work around. The school just needs to make the F-1 or M-1 student attend ONE in-person class each semester.

      Which means they have to run such classes. Kinda kills the point of doing remote education in a pandemic.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Sneaky? Hardly. They're being overt about that being their intent. Within hours of ICE announcing their new policy, Trump tweeted [twitter.com] (caps and all):

      SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!

      On the one hand, I can't disagree with the logic that if your school isn't offering in-person classes, you have no reason to remain in the country (nor, frankly, would I think that they'd want to stay here, given the current situation). On the other hand, my time in grad school was made so much better thanks to all of the international students we had in my researc

  • Does this apply to students with a darker skin? Or do Norwegian students have to go too?
  • by spinitch ( 1033676 ) on Monday July 06, 2020 @08:20PM (#60269692)
    Other countries could impose mirror policies on Americans studying abroad. Foreign students help subsidize the education for local students. Hope there is some push back. Foreign students come to US also to improve English which is good for Americans to expand use as a global language.
    • by cowdung ( 702933 )

      Many other countries have let Americans stranded because of the virus stay without penalty.

    • At the college I work for there are 2 tuition levels - in-state resident, or non-in-state resident. No differentiation on "how far out of state". And yes, for the fall we'll be remote (but not asynchronous) for classes that don't have special requirements like clinicals (we have nursing, dental assistant, radiology tech, nuke med tech, resp. therapist, cvt) or things that require specialized/expensive equipment to do the labs (our Cisco classes).

      What I'm wondering about is the schools that have "first yea

  • The Great Firewall is not built to allow uncensored information from outside. It will take the Chinese bureaucracy too much time to pass judgement on all those documents and lesson plans for various courses from the USA.

    Those hardest hit, will be the princelings and ambitious students who value a degree from a good US university. This also sinks all the private, fake universities that are immigration scams, used by Indians and Chinese to get students who really become indentured servants in return for a so

  • The logical step is the Trump administration going after all those H1B visas because one could work as easily from another country from your own home.
    Most H1B visas are just for programming jobs that don't require any attendance in the office.

  • by stikves ( 127823 ) on Monday July 06, 2020 @09:31PM (#60269882) Homepage

    I was once an F1 student, and had spent a lot of effort to actually be up to date with all the paperwork (one does not appreciate how much bureaucracy there is until they run into it). Fortunately I graduated, and was able to find a full time job. However those years were stressful, one one side there is your research, on the other side TA/RA remittance is barely enough to keep you from starvation.

    It would be really bad for those folks who are into later years of their education, and need to scramble to find a transfer. If you are a masters or PhD student that means changing your professor, lab, and most likely your entire research area. It would be several years going down the drain. It is also bad for the research labs that lose those students, since most of the research activity is actually done by students and/or post-docs.

    It would we much more prudent to implement a temporary rule to keep those students in place.

  • The DHS/ICE/CPB is "guidance" not "rule" nor "law" and is subject to interpretation and -- hopefully -- court fight. It's another stupid Trump initiative to remove people legitimately in the US from staying.

    Do they have the mandate and the right and authority to take a visa and revoke it because the school is teaching online. My opinion is no. Hopefully some immigration lawyers will step up and fight this.

    Whether your school offers online classes, or makes you go to a physical class, or whatever, the vis

    • Do they have the mandate and the right and authority to take a visa and revoke it because the school is teaching online. My opinion is no.

      When I was getting a green card the immigration lawyer warned me that the US government could arbitrarily revoke or restrict the green card of any given foreign nationality. So if they can do that to a green card holder they can almost certainly do it to a mere visa holder.

      Of course, this was 20 years ago so things may have changed but, if they have, they will certainly not have changed for the better.

  • by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Monday July 06, 2020 @09:50PM (#60269922)
    This administration knows absolutely nothing about higher education or these strange people from other lands that come to our shores. The country is being run by people that are using maps where the US is the center of the universe, beyond our shores is "here be dragons" and the world might as well be flat.

    if it wasn't so damaging to so many people, I'd say to let this happen. When tuition goes up by 20- 50%, a few of the smarter ones will realize that the foreign students were paying WAY, WAY, WAY more and subsidizing the locals. It takes about a million dollars to train up an engineering student to the Ph.D. level. This administration is making their lives as miserable as possible. Whenever one of them gives up and goes back home, A MILLION DOLLAR INVESTMENT GETS TRANSFERRED TO ANOTHER COUNTRY. They take all that training and knowledge with them. If they start a business, it benefits some other country.

    At the end of the cold war, Russia lost almost all it's scientists and engineers. The government simply stopped paying then and left them to fend for themselves. A few of them found jobs as taxi drivers. Most held on for a few years, then gave up and emigrated to other countries...... the US.... Europe..... about 100,000 engineers and doctors went to Israel. The expertise they brought to those countries was an enormous benefit. If we're not careful, we will repeat this history.

    These points will be entirely lost on the people setting the policies though. All they know is that the voters who put them in office think "FURINER BAD".
    • Tuition will continue going up by leaps and bounds regardless. It will be difficult to pinpoint what percentage of that is the result of kicking foreign students out and what's the continuing result of unmitigated greed. I would be willing to bet that most of it will remain a consequence of the latter.

      I'd like to return to school, but I'm waiting for the crash. When universities start collapsing maybe tuition will fall with them.

    • The problem is that foreign students don't go to the local community college, they go to private universities or flagship public universities, which actually have added value over their native countries. Given the demographics at these universities, nearly all the people affected by the 20%-50% higher tuitions would have opposed Trump and opposed this policy from the beginning.

      Which makes this just another case of Trump's "handouts for my supporters, screw everyone else, and forget equality or ethics" polic

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      On the plus side if they can take online classes from the other side of the world then so can you. Get a cheap degree from Europe or maybe even India.

    • America has the capability of getting almost all of the highly trained people in a particular area of specialty. This can be a huge economic advantage, as it prevents other countries from competing against you.

      If you send all of those highly trained people back home, then they can go back home and compete against you. This happened with the H1B program. Limitations and cutbacks led to the development of outsourcing companies. Once the outsourcing companies existed, then entire departments of companies

  • by xystren ( 522982 ) on Monday July 06, 2020 @11:07PM (#60270112)
    Had to leave the country, because my school went to a blended formation 60% online, 40% on-campus... that put my F-1 visa "out of status" and I have to bounce back to Canada to finish the rest of my course load online. I had only 2.5 semesters left, with all my major requirements out of the way, so transferring to another school was not cost-effective option, as I would have to retake all my majors. It was a royal pain in the ass, at the end of the winter semester, they just announced they were going 100% blended and online. I was assured that as an international student (F1) I would not be impacted by the changes... well I needed 50% on-campus, which they were unable (read: unwilling) to provide that extra 10%
  • by sentiblue ( 3535839 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @08:45AM (#60270980)

    foreign students are a key source of revenue for many U.S. universities as they often pay full tuition

    Actually... they ALL pay full tuition, not often.

  • Blocking off immigration isn't the brightest idea when you consider the contributions of immigrants in the recent past. The 1950s to 1970s space program and the atomic bomb back in WWII was entirely designed by immigrant or refugee German scientists and engineers. We wouldn't have put anything on the moon without a bunch of German immigrants like Wernher von Braun, Arthur Rudolph (who we deported), Hans von Ohain (jet engine pioneer), Adolph Buseman (supersonic aerodynamics), Hermann Oberth, etc. --too many

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