Balancing safety and financial health: Non-resident student enrollment and reopening plans at US higher education institutions amid the COVID-19 pandemic

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Leading during a global crisis: Institutional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

Proposal

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced higher education institutions (HEIs) to close and shift to remote learning. As the semester ended, and still amidst extreme uncertainties regarding the pandemic, institutions started planning how they would operate the following term. In the U.S. especially, where a large proportion of the institutions’ income comes from tuition, colleges and universities feared that continuing with remote-learning formats could discourage students from enrolling. However, in early July, when the pandemic in the U.S. seemed to be at a national peak (CDC, 2020), several institutions started signaling the possibility of offering a fall semester in online or hybrid formats. Shortly after, on July 10, USCIS reversed an earlier exception to standard visa protocol that allowed international students to take online classes while residing in the country. This meant that international students enrolled at institutions that were planning on remote instructional delivery formats would have to change enrollment plans, leave the country, or face deportation. In an unprecedented effort to reverse this policy, as many as 200 HEIs began legal action against the government or signed amicus briefs in support of these lawsuits (Binkley, 2020). Eventually, the government changed course and allowed returning international students to remain in or re-enter the country but also indicated that newly admitted students would not be given a visa or let into the country if their institutions did not offer in-person classes.

But what was behind such a rapid and strong response from institutions against the USCIS ruling? Although institutions acknowledged the cultural richness international students bring to campus, the strongest defending arguments were financial. Simply put, a steep decline in international enrollment would mean a financial catastrophe for many U.S. HEIs given their dependency on international students’ tuition, which partly compensates for declines in state appropriations (Cantwell, 2015). While previous literature has amply documented a shift that has brought international higher education closer to the global market, the extent to which HEIs are willing to alter their behavior (e.g. changing campus reopening plans to accommodate international students’ enrollment) to keep this source of funding is still understudied.

To fill this gap, we designed a study to understand to what extent U.S. HEIs’ reopening plans were influenced by international student enrollment. Specifically, we wanted to explore whether international student enrollment numbers significantly predicted the probability of an institution switching reopening plans from less in-person instruction to more in-person instruction, thus complying with USCIS policy. We address this purpose using two theoretical frameworks: 1) resource dependence theory and 2) academic capitalism manifested through the marketization of internationalization of higher education.

The data that we used to explore the relationship between international student enrollment and changes in HEIs’ reopening plans derived from three sources. First, daily information about reopening plans came from the College Crisis Initiative (C2i) (see https://collegecrisis.org/). We limited the dataset to July 2020 to capture changes in reopening plans during the peak of immigration uncertainties in the U.S. For this reason, we use a panel dataset, with institutions represented 31 times, once for each day of July 2020. We looked specifically at changes in reopening plans that involved a shift to more in-person learning (e.g. from fully on-line learning to a hybrid model of course delivery or fully in-person instruction).

Our predictor of interest, the percentage of total student enrollments consisting of non-U.S. residents (as a proxy for international student enrollment) was derived from a second data source, IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) survey data. We additionally derived several time-invariant covariates from IPEDS such as whether the institution offered graduate degrees, its region, reliance on tuition revenue, and percentage of total revenue comprised of state appropriations. These variables are collected annually and do not vary over time during the period of observation in this study (July 1-31, 2020). We also included one time-variant covariate: the daily cumulative COVID-19 case counts in the county where an institution is located. This information was taken from a third data source, the New York Times’ COVID-19 data files (see https://developer.nytimes.com/covid).

To analyze the relationship between changes in reopening plans and international student enrollment over time, we used event history modeling, namely a Cox proportional hazards model. This kind of analysis is used with longitudinal data to predict the occurrence of an event (a shift in reopening plans) and is able to incorporate both time-variant and time-invariant covariates (Box-Steffensmeier & Jones, 2004). The result of an event history model is a hazard rate, representing the probability that an event will occur (DesJardins, 2003).

Preliminary results suggest no significant relationship between the percentage of non-U.S. resident students enrolled at a public four-year institution and a shift from a less in-person mode of instruction to a more in-person mode of instruction during July 2020. Private not-for-profit four-year institutions, on the other hand, present a different story. At these institutions, increases in the percentage of non-resident enrollments were significantly and positively related to a shift towards a reopening plan that incorporated more in-person instruction. For example, a shift from 6% (the average non-resident enrollment at private not-for-profit institutions) to 7% nonresident enrollment was related to an approximate 20% increase in the likelihood that the institution would shift reopening plans to incorporate more in-person instruction (p<.01).

To our knowledge, this study is the first to link international student enrollment to U.S. HEIs’ plans to reopen their campuses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous studies have discussed the financial importance of international student enrollment at U.S. HEIs. However, this study extends this line of work to explore to what extent a dependency on international students can influence policies related to institutional operations, in this case, the institution’s plan to reopen during a public health crisis. This study is an especially relevant and timely contribution to the literature on institutional incentives to enroll international students given a political and social context that deters international students from attending U.S. HEIs (Rose-Redwood & Rose-Redwood, 2017).

Authors

• Melissa Whatley, North Carolina State University

• Santiago Castiello-Gutiérrez, University of Arizona