Got some frantic messages over the past week from few Indian students in the U.S. asking why does it matter to ICE whether their classes are online or offline and what are their options, so I thought of writing this post to share with the larger audience the advice I gave them to help you if you are ever in a similar situation, again.
If you are a foreign student already studying or planning to study in the U.S., there are many do’s and don’ts that you should follow, irrespective of the ICE’s directive. However, there is one mistake you should never make, no matter what situation you are in. Let me share that with you.
Having studied (MS and MBA) and worked in the U.S. for many years, counseled prospective students to study at American universities, and seen few Indian friends struggle through life in the U.S., I have a long experience of observing the American system up close and personal. Based on it I believe there is one mistake that an international student should always keep on top of his or her mind.
For the uninitiated, life is not as easy as it seems from the outside for an international student in the U.S. One of the biggest challenges that you face even before you reach the U.S. shores is the long convoluted U.S. immigration system. It may seem very daunting and it almost seems like it is kept so on purpose to dissuade people but then you also cannot blame the system because it has a very important task of protecting American people and interests just as any country would ought to. It may not be a fair system probably because people who make the rules never actually jump through legal hoops themselves but then who said life will always be fair.
THE CONTEXT
First, let us look at some facts to understand the scale and context of the issue. The U.S. offers two types of student visas for foreign students — F-1, for most high school, college, and other academic programs, and M-1 for vocational or non-academic studies. In order to obtain a visa, international students must be accepted into a school approved by the SEVIS, a database used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Now, look at the mind-blowing facts about Indian students studying in the U.S. According to the 2019 Open Doors report by the Institute of International Education (IIE), the total number of Indian students in the U.S. increased by about 3% to 202,014 and, as per some estimates, these students spent about $15 billion in 2018 up from $7 billion in 2016 on their U.S. education. Even if we take conservative estimates, the money being spent by Indian students annually for studying in the U.S. is more than India’s annual budget amount for the higher education of $6.33 billion.
If the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) is taken as a comparable for U.S. education, the Indian taxpayers spent a relatively meager average of $31.33 million to fund a single IIT in 2016. So it is not just brain drain from India but also GDP loss and foreign exchange drain from India. This is why some people find it absolutely ridiculous that rather than creating hundreds of free-market equal-opportunity world-class quality educational institutions in India, the Indian government is wasting even more of Indian people’s money in convincing the U.S. government to take in more Indian students, who in many cases a few decades down the line would renounce Indian citizenship to proudly call themselves Americans. If it was not for regulatory albatross around the Indian education’s neck, all this outward remittance money could have been spent on quality education within India but that is a topic for some other time.
THE CONSEQUENCES
According to the ICE’s July 6 directive, students attending schools operating as before will remain bound by existing federal regulations that permit them to take a maximum of one class or three credit hours online. However, for a foreign student whose university has either shut down campus or gone entirely online, July 6 directive feels like someone pulled the rug from under feet, especially when as an international student you may have already spent hundreds of thousands of U.S. dollars on out-of-state tuition fees and living expenses and in some cases backed by hefty expensive student loans and supported by a negligible on-campus hourly wage all in the hopes of a good degree and employment thereafter.
Whether the Coronavirus pandemic exists or not and whether you are taking an in-person on-campus class or online off-shore class, you still have to pay the same expensive tuition fee to your U.S. university and pay off your debt. For Indian students, the cost of capital can be as high as 15%.
In addition, there are other challenges like being unable to return home if a student’s home country has closed its borders for incoming flights to control the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic. Or even if the student returns home, she may be putting herself and others at risk by traveling at this time. And do not forget, even so-called developed countries lack good quality reliable broadband internet services required for attending online classes. There are other issues too like meeting school working hours due to time difference between the U.S. and a foreign student’s country timezone, online services accessibility and internet censorship, etc.
Going to a university campus, especially graduate school, is not just about attending classes but you pay for the whole experience, which is what U.S. colleges compete to sell to you. One also learns from interactions with peers and non-students from various backgrounds beyond the classes and professors. You just cannot replicate the 100% offline experience of attending high-quality in-person on-campus classes with fellow students from different cultures, ethnicities, and countries with online-only classes living in your home cocoon. If you could then for-profit colleges with online-first Higher Ed model like the University of Phoenix, DeVry University, Grand Canyon University, etc. would have been competing with tier-1 non-profit universities for the top spot and not going defunct like ITT Tech leaving students high and dry with subprime education. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
THE REASONS
From the USCIS or ICE’s angle, it is only logical that if a school’s full course load is entirely online then nonimmigrant F-1 and M-1 students do not need to be physically present in the U.S. To understand the motivation behind July 6 directive, you have to understand that a student visa is just an enabler for you to seek admission and remain in the U.S. just to help you attend a class in-person. Of course, this is a literal interpretation of the law by ICE and they could have been more generous but that is a U.S. government’s call.
It was only expected after the U.S. government’s decision in June 2020 to suspend work visas (H-1B, H-2B, H-4, J-1, L-1) of some nonimmigrant workers, which it argued compete with U.S. citizens for jobs, that it may also take similar steps for nonimmigrant students. With huge job losses and high unemployment in the U.S. accelerated by Coronavirus pandemic, why would the U.S. government let hundreds of thousands of foreign students stay in the country and later compete with its citizens using the extended 36-month Optional Practical Training (OPT) program upon graduation?
While mentoring I have noticed one of the biggest assumptions prospective foreign students make is the misconception that just getting admission to a good U.S. school gives you an automatic right to enter and remain in the U.S. Getting admission to a university only enables you to ask for the U.S. State Department’s permission to get a visa and enter the U.S. You still have to convince a visa consular officer (VO) at a U.S. Embassy or Consulate that you have genuine intention to study and no intent to immigrate upon completing your education.
Even after starting the coursework while you are studying in-person on-campus the onus is still on you to comply with rules and regulations set for international students and maintain lawful status. ICE’s July 6 directive is essentially saying that taking full online course load may make you out-of-status and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) may not let new or even existing students with such enrollments into the country.
THE MISTAKES TO AVOID
This brings me to the one mistake an international student should never make, no matter what situation he or she is in. Someone forwarded to me a tweet about how a few students with the help of a faculty member’s sponsorship at the University of California at Berkeley are allegedly creating one unit in-person student-run class to supposedly help foreign students escape the online-only restriction and avoid university transfer or deportation. There are other presumed stop-gap solutions being used to buy time like class swap sheets, impromptu in-person courses, and relentless petitions.
My advice to foreign students in the U.S. is to not panic as this decision has already been challenged in the court and rescinded for now since Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had filed a lawsuit at District Court in Boston. Yale, Stanford, John Hopkins University, and many other universities have followed suit.
The jury is out on the legality of the ICE’s July 6 directive, but while we wait for legal eagles to fight it out, the one mistake that an international student should absolutely avoid is to take any shortcuts like taking fake on-paper in-person classes in order to show compliance with July 6 directive. It is understandable some of your American friends and professors may want to help you out of sympathy through these stop-gap solutions but trust me this has the potential to backfire on you very badly.
If you take random classes or electives that do not match with your intention of pursuing a declared major or degree then this may be held against you since F-1 is a non-immigrant intent visa. Clearly he or she is trying to remain in the U.S. not to study but only with the intention to stay there.
A U.S. visa consular officer or CBP agent may see your actions as an exploitation of a loophole and hold it against you as a violation of visa terms. Your single moment of weakness to take a shortcut may jeopardize your future visits to the U.S. especially if you are deported by the ICE through removal proceedings.
Feel sorry for those foreign students who fall for imprudent advice to sit idle in hopes that ICE’s July 6 directive is supposedly unimplementable. It is like taking an extra tax deduction without supporting paperwork betting against the odds of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) auditing you. Do you really want to take that chance with ICE?
THE SOLUTIONS
Nevertheless, if you really need to transfer credits to some other university to remain in the U.S., the Chronicle of Higher Education, which is tracking the reopening plans of more than 1,000 U.S. colleges, can be a good starting point. According to its tracker, more than fifty-six percent of schools are planning for in-person instruction.
Transferring for Fall 2020 semester would be challenging though because the fall semester’s application deadlines are around March and classes usually start from August 19. Generally, students entering the fall semester get their visas in June-July. It is unlikely that commercial flights will resume. Even if they do, U.S. embassies have been closed since mid-March. Worst, in desperation for getting transferred to some other school, you do not want to get scammed.
At the very least, you should reach out to your college or university’s SEVP Designated School Official (DSO) in the International Affairs Center or Student Union for the next steps and latest updates. You may also reach out to your university’s local chapter of India Student Association (ISA) to know what other Indian students are planning to do.
Do what is best but better obey the law.
Are you a foreign student affected by recent regulations? Or a prospective student not sure if studying abroad is a good idea anymore? Want to share your experiences or ideas? Let me know in the comments section below…
Disclaimer: The views presented here are purely for informational purposes only and not meant to be misconstrued as legal advice. It is not a substitute for the advice of an immigration attorney.
This is a republished copy of my popular LinkedIn Pulse article “Worst Mistakes: Don’t Do This If You Are Foreign Student In US” and Medium story “Worst Mistakes: Don’t Do This If You Are Foreign Student In US”.
