Why did the United States go abroad? The Nature of the 21st Century Survey of International Students in the US: What do they want to do?
But, the IIE report identified positive trends in US universities’ recruitment efforts of international students. Student enrolment in US institutions was higher from only a few nations, notably India, whose numbers increased by 19% from 2020–21. The report also records an 80% increase in the number of first-year international students during autumn 2021 compared with autumn 2020. Glass thinks it’s a return to the growth seen pre-pandemic.
It is not known how long that will take or whether those numbers will recover. In August, The Wall Street Journal reported that the number of international student F-1 visas issued to Chinese students had declined by more than 50% in the first 6 months of 2022, compared with the same period in 2019. Furthermore, a September 2021 poll for the U.S.–China Perception Monitor found that a majority of Chinese people have a negative view of the United States.
Universities in countries such as Australia and Canada, which are increasingly reliant on foreign-student tuition fees, also saw COVID-19-related declines in the number of international students in 2020. Australia has struggled to re-establish an international-student pipeline following its stringent COVID-19 border closure. The number of study-permit holders in Canada increased to more than 750,000 international students in the academic year that ended in June, but African applicants have complained of excessive visa application delays. Last month, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada stated that more needs to be done to stamp out internal racism against African applicants.
Nature spoke to five researchers who shared their thoughts on why they’ve chosen not to pursue positions in the United States. The reasons ranged from legislative decisions that block a woman’s right to an abortion in many states, the frequency of mass-shooting events (586 so far in 2022), the high cost of insurance-based health care, persistent racism and the rise in hate-crime violence, spurred by COVID-19’s emergence in Asia and divisive culture wars.
The United States has always been off the table for me. My biggest qualms are the cost and availability of health care, the gun violence and the rise of white supremacy. My impression is that the people who are on the right of the political spectrum do not want anyone associated with them to be allowed to live in the country. My main concern is how white supremacists can have little to no consequence for provoking or harassing people. Being from one of the right-wing states would not appeal to me, as I am not white.
Malaysian Anatomy Postdoc Candidate: How I landed and How I Came to the States to Study Medicine in the U.S.
In 2020 I earned my PhD at University Putra Malaysia to develop a targeted therapy for bladder cancer. I came home to Nigeria after that. I currently lead the anatomy department at Bauchi State University, where I am passionate about genomics, bioinformatics and open science. The United States and Canada have top-ranking institutions and researchers in these areas, and I applied for several positions in both countries.
Immigration is an issue for a Malaysian. As far as I’m aware, beyond winning one of the few immigrant visas distributed through a lottery system, there’s no easy way, as a student or postdoc, to become a US resident. And if any friends or family want to visit, they would have to go through a lengthy US visa-application process. [Editor’s note: The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program provides up to 50,000 immigrant visas annually.] In most European countries, you apply for residency, then stay on once it’s approved.
There are other aspects of daily life to consider. Right now, I am in a relationship with a British citizen who lives in Ipswich, only a 40-minute train ride away. One of the first things anyone should think about when moving to a new country is how much money one needs to survive. Public transport and bicycle are acceptable in England. In many US cities, I would need a car, which adds considerable expense.
I spent a few days at Yale University in Connecticut in order to interview for my PhD. Although it appeared to be a fun and inspiring place, I experienced a frightening feeling when students mentioned that it was best not to reside too far from campus for safety reasons. There was a shuttle bus that the university provided that would take you to the campus but I preferred to live in a place where I could walk at night without having to use a taxi. My other concern was health-care costs, because students and postdocs in the United States typically get minimum levels of insurance coverage. In the United Kingdom and Sweden I have not had to pay more than a small surcharge for health issues.
The Republican party in the US had a plan to update their taxes and included a provision to tax graduate-student tuition waivers. That piece of the plan eventually got dropped, but I realized that things can change very quickly in the United States. I was not going to risk going to a country where I could be destitute — either through health-care costs or because of a rapidly shifting tax environment.
I earn around 30,000 (US$29,800) a year while doing my doctorate in Austria, as well as five weeks of paid holiday. Health care, which is largely publicly funded, is wonderful, and I also receive a retirement pension plan. I don’t have any complaints. I have a year left and need to find a job. I have no intention of applying for US funding. One of the main reasons is that it is not a good place for people like me who identify as queer. The United States has a reputation of being a place where it is dangerous to present as other than cis gender and straight.
In July of this year, I went to the Animal Behavior Society conference in Costa Rica and found it to be very LGBTQ-friendly. The organization’s meeting was going to happen in Tennessee. But I was one of the more than 50% of society members who voted not to attend if it was held in a state passing anti-transgender laws — that ban transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports or deny transgender students use of the bathrooms consistent with their gender identity — and restricting a woman’s right to an abortion, such as Tennessee. Spending money in there wouldn’t make me feel good. The society has changed the venue for the meeting in 2023 to Portland, Oregon.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03604-9
Why is Canada so hard to go to? Why should I go to the United States? Are gun violence incidents increasing in the U.S.?
My preference for Canada is based on advice I got from my colleagues. Both postdocs and principal investigators recommended that I go there because, they say, a visa to do a postdoc in the United States is very problematic to get. [Editor’s note: International postdocs in the United States typically use the study-based-visitor (J-1) or the specialty-occupation (H-1B) visas.] Even if you get a visa, it can be challenging to renew. And I was told that these US visas can’t easily be used to seek citizenship without a permanent position. By contrast, in Canada, a visa can count towards permanent residence.
The other big concern is gun violence, which seems to have increased in the United States. That is scary — especially given that Black populations in the United States are targeted by police.
I didn’t apply for positions in the United States after finishing my PhD in Oxford because of a number of reasons. Europe is closer to Thailand, which means getting home is not as hard for me, even if I had relocated to the US.
October last year was when I began my career as a researcher. Next year, ideally, I plan to start looking for tenure-track assistant-professor positions, but if I can’t find anything I’ll look for a second postdoc. Earlier this year, after attending the Biophysical Society’s annual meeting in San Francisco, California, I thought about applying to universities in that state because the weather is amazing and it seemed like it could be a good fit. The rent sounds terrible and it doesn’t correspond with a postdoc’s salary. I was disturbed by the level of homelessness there. I have also considered applying to laboratories in Ithaca, New York, as well as in Chicago, Illinois, and St Louis, Missouri, large cities with notable gun violence. Given news stories of hate crimes against Asians, my family and I agree that safety is the biggest factor to consider.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03604-9
What the New Zealand Pandemic had to teach me about the science of the 21st century? How much science do we need to know about New Zealand?
I think back to the early twentieth century, when people who pursued science did so with their own money and out of sheer curiosity or their love (or madness) for the subject. I think that we are going to come back to science being a hobby pursued by people who can afford to do research. If you are doing science as a hobby, you don’t want to worry about your health-care or other costs. In many European countries, those things are often provided or subsidized, those are on the table for you.
As I was finishing my PhD at the University of Otago in 2021, I did think about looking for a postdoc outside New Zealand. But, to be honest, I didn’t even consider the United States.
One of the biggest concerns for me, because I have a family to consider, is gun violence. I’m aware that we see only a particular media representation, but every time the United States is in the news, it seems as if it’s because of mass shootings. It’s strange to me coming from New Zealand. Following a mass shooting in New Zealand, we banned semi-automatic guns and created a buy-back programme. I don’t feel as though carrying a gun is a big deal in a culture that is used to being safe.
The other political events are equally unnerving. The June 2022. US Supreme Court ruling that invalidated the right to abortion, along with the roll back of trans rights is frightening to see. Although I am not a huge fan of New Zealand’s left-wing agenda, the US is still pretty conservative in their social policies compared to New Zealand and the rest of the world.
Most of the postgraduates in New Zealand who head abroad go to Australia, the United Kingdom or European Union countries. I don’t have a perception that the United States is considered a more coveted place to study, nor do I think others here would buy into the idea of ‘American exceptionalism’. I would consider going to a US-based conference, but I haven’t travelled much in recent years owing to the pandemic. I was troubled watching the US pandemic response from the sidelines. Lack of measures to address the Pandemic caused the complete inability to follow the science. We had people in New Zealand protesting against mandates for vaccines or wearing masks, but they were in the clear minority. Yet US society’s reaction — ‘my personal inconvenience is more important than your health’ — was horrifying.
Keerthiraju has been working for five years for a PhD at the Jagiellonian University in Poland. While he is pleased with his progress, he is excited about his future. But his doctoral programme posed obstacles that many of his colleagues never had to face. Whereas other students could focus on experiments and papers, Ravichandran had to expend huge amounts of time and mental energy on applying and reapplying for successive one-year visas to stay in the country. He couldn’t travel to international conferences or take his samples to laboratories in Poland for analysis because his application took at least six months to process. “That part of my experience was lost,” he says.
All told, he estimates, he could have graduated a year or two earlier if it weren’t for the hassles of immigrant life. “My project went well and I put in quite a lot of effort,” he says. The bureaucratic process has been a nightmare.
Discrimination is one of the many challenges international students face as they pursue their goals. 26% of international students say that they have experienced discrimination in their studies compared to 17% of domestic students according to a survey. Over 50% of International students say their treatment is based on race. In the future, Nature will examine the issues of racial discrimination. Wang has not seen much discrimination at her university. “Taking the subway in New York City is a different story,” she says.
This is the fourth article linked to the global survey of graduate students. Further articles are scheduled for the weeks to follow, covering explorations of master’s students’ responses and of participants’ experiences of racism and discrimination. The survey was created together with Shift Learning, a market-research company in London, and was advertised on nature.com, in Springer Nature digital products and through e-mail campaigns. It was available in multiple languages: English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French and Portuguese. The full data sets can be found at http://go.nature.com.
Ravichandran says that he senses a strong anti-immigrant sentiment whenever he heads to the Polish immigration office to renew his one-year visa. He doesn’t think international students like being there. They keep asking for the same documents. They don’t believe in the documents I gave them.
Xiangkun Cao: How international students can learn to live in the United States without fear of grammar and pronunciation in a 2021 essay
Survey respondent Xiangkun Cao, who is from China and started a postdoctoral position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge this year, says he encountered a faculty member during graduate school who would ridicule students for their English. He says that even students who had already earned master’s or undergraduate degrees at universities in the United States, including himself, were subject to over-the-top criticism of pronunciation and grammar. “One of my colleagues quit because he couldn’t take it any more,” Cao says. He recounted some of his experiences as an international student, including his search for role models and mentors, in a 2021 essay (X. E. Cao Matter 4, 332–335; 2021) .
Wang says finance is a struggle for many international students. “There are very rich students who don’t really care about money, and there are other students who really need financial support,” she says.
The United Kingdom and Canada accept 10% of international students, according to the Institute of International Education, which is a non-profit organization in New York City.
That means anyone working or studying in the United States and engaging with China might fear they are being watched or that they might be falsely accused of violating intellectual-property laws, explains Lee.
Glass says that more welcoming rhetoric and federal immigration policies would encourage international students to choose the United States. “We are not living up to our potential,” he says.
More specifically, the data shows that higher education in the United States can still have a lot of growth potential. International students represent 5% of total enrolment at US institutions, but they make up 25% at Canadian and Australian universities.
International graduate students go to US institutions for particular areas of study, the report found: mathematics and computer science garnered 23% of enrolments for 2021–22, as did engineering. Another 11% of students chose physical and life sciences.
Bista says that students studying in the United States have faced waits of up to a year for visa interviews at US embassies and consulates, causing delays in their studies.
Many international students take advantage of optional practical training (OPT), the report says. If you have a degree in a certain area of science, technology, engineering or mathematics, you can extend your stay by up to 36 months in the US. The number of OPT participants boosts student numbers, Glass says. “International student enrolment has been propped up by OPT since 2015.”