"At least one in-person class" doesn't make any sense. Either in-person classes are safe, and the rules can go back to pre-pandemic, or they aren't, and forcing students and professors to attend them is dangerous and cruel.
There is no legitimate justification for this. There's no slippery slope issue or anything, everybody accepts that these rules will go back to normal once it's safe to do so.
Why can't they go home for one semester?
1) It's expensive. Flight home, rent for a US apartment they no longer occupy, potential rent for a new apartment at home, flight back here next semester. Where is a student supposed to get $5000+ to deal with this?
2) They need good internet access (and a laptop) wherever they're going. Not guaranteed, and not something the university can easily provide.
3) Timezones. Many classes are synchronous and discussion-based. Not only do you need internet good enough to support video calls, but you need to be awake at the same time as 15 other people in however many timezones.
4) It might be illegal. What if you're from China or Iran and your school uses G Suite for Education? Or they use Zoom, which is banned in 6 countries. Participating in your classes would be illegal. Can the university switch their entire infrastructure to a new platform in a couple months to support a few students for one semester for arbitrary reasons?
5) It might be unsafe. Not all students have a safe and stable place to go.
6) It achieves nothing. Literally no benefit for anyone. If you expect these students to come back in a semester or two, there is no point.
That's not to even mention that when you're on an F-1 student visa, you can legally renew it while remaining in the US even while the visa stamp in your passport has already expired. But once you leave the US, you have to have a valid visa stamp in your passport in order to reenter, even if you already have a valid F-1 visa document approved and signed by all the right people. This means that, in your home country, you'll need to make an appointment, spend hours lining up at the US embassy (if they're even open due to COVID), then go through the interview process (which you have to repeat every single time you renew your passport visa stamp) in order to get that stamp reissued.
Once, after already having spent years in the US on a student visa, I was actually turned back during that interview because the particular consular officer on duty that day decided that I needed to provide a detailed printed transcript of my American high school experience. I had to leave the interview, schedule a second appointment, and have the printed transcript ready at that time. All of this is to say that not only would requiring students to go through this process simply because their universities aren't offering physical classes during COVID will not only cause intense stress, but also will probably result in some students not making it back into the country for arbitrary reasons.
I see this same thing everywhere. From race issues to out of touch boomer tech managers and PM's.
7) Lost rent to the landlord in the college town, and their ability to fill the apartment/room (doubtful).
- Lost reputation (if there's any left) among embassies that will have to work to repatriate these students for no reason.
- Lost business at supermarkets, bookstores, cafes, whatever else.
- Many students are probably just going to transfer to a college that's holding in-person classes rather than deal with this, putting them in danger and disrupting their education.
- Lost societal contributions from future college graduates who may no longer want to live and work in this country.
- Massive waste of government resources as ICE agents try to deport people to countries that aren't accepting flights from America.
- Waste of everyone's resources as the government and universities work through this inevitable court case.
- Loss of future international students who are now seeing an example of how arbitrary and capricious the US government can be that hits a little too close to home.
- Endangering the lives of faculty and students and neighborhoods of every college that is now forced to hold in-person classes because they can't afford to sue the United States government and don't expect this lawsuit to succeed.
- Waste of fossil fuels for completely pointless international flights.
- etc. etc. etc.
If we create obstacles or burdens that stand in the way of completing that education, it serves to jeopardize the returns on the investment we've made.
If it was in the US's best interests to let them start, it's in the US's best interests to give them best odds of finishing. Let them choose whether or not to return to their home country as best fits their individual situation.
This sounds ridiculously reductive, and too black and white.
"Either driving a car is safe, and you shouldn't need to apply safety rules, or they aren't, in which case driving a car is cruel".
There is no such thing as completely safe, only levels of risk, and how you mitigate risk. You can still catch a disease even if you wore a N95 mask, for example. There is a reason why essential groceries stores are open during the pandemic, while barbershops are closed. It's about how you manage the risk/reward balance. Starving is not an option, whereas not getting a haircut is.
Well, some classes clearly work better online than others. You can teach a webdev class online. Would you want someone who is learning to become a surgeon to learn purely online and without hands-on experience? Some other classes, like biology labs, chemistry labs, etc produce a lot more value in person.
This means that in order to manage risk, a university could implement a strategy where it reduces the number of in-person classes as much as possible, but still have some in-person classes (with added social distancing and other safety rules).
This doesnt mean international students should be forced to leave the country if they are not taking an in-person class, for example. But I don't think it means universities should be prevented from allowing in-person classes if they take precautions and understand the risk.
?
Nobody is being prevented from holding in-person classes if they want to. And yes, international students being forced to leave the country is what we're talking about.
This rule has nothing to do with risk/reward balance or picking which classes benefit most from in-person interaction. The driving analogy would make sense if students were being forced to drive one hour a week without a seatbelt for no reason in order to remain in the country.
Actually, in-person classes are completely safe and this is a gentle nudge from the federal administration to make the universities reconsider their (completely political) decision to not resume normal classes this Fall.
But that's the part that people are upset about. People aren't angry that there exists a policy to prevent students of fully online universities from getting visas.
People are upset that because it is completely reasonable for a traditional brick-and-mortar university to run classes 100% online this coming semester (e.g., Harvard) and that suddenly a bunch of students who are attending Harvard and have been doing so for years are forced to leave the country on a moment's notice.
What nuance is there? The original exception (you can take 100% online classes) was thoroughly reasonable given the pandemic and the new updated policy is completely unreasonable. It only harms people and benefits no one.
Also my understanding is that the criteria for being allowed to stay doesn't differentiate on the level of the degree. For instance, Phd students who have completed their course work but are busy working on their thesis and building their publishing record are royally screwed. I expect a number of transfers of some of the best and brightest to research universities in Canada and Europe. I personally witnessed how much of a boon the mistreatment of Iranian students by the US govt. was to universities in Canada. They got some of the best and brightest who would have otherwise been gobbled up by top schools in the US.
I expect a massive and permanent exodus of foreign students to other countries with more pragmatic policies in place.
I also find it funny that you bring up Canada as Canadian schools openly discriminate against international students thanks to government policies.
Any reasonable administrative body would look at the circumstances involved in this and do the thing that would disrupt lives the least for the benefit of everyone involved.
"So on the one hand it's actually an improvement."
This seems kind of silly.
From my experience, distance learning isn't really worth very much. This applies to K-12 as well as university. I think it's entirely reasonable to expect in-person classes in the Fall if you're paying full tuition. We expect our grocery store workers to show up and do their jobs during COVID, I think it's reasonable to expect the same of university faculty.
Remote classes are not as good as in person classes.
These two things are unrelated.
If the students choose not to continue their education because the quality is degraded by remote learning, that is an entirely different matter.
Literally none of that makes it okay to evict people from the country under this policy. This isn't about the Trump administration standing up for students against universities. This is about the Trump administration shitting on immigrants.
I went to the original ICE/SEVP documents and I didn't find any mention that the rules were for Spring and Summer, and not for Fall.
Here they are: March-9 document:
https://www.ice.gov/doclib/sevis/pdf/bcm2003-01.pdf
March-13 document:
https://www.ice.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Document/2...
The American economy and society is essentially a kind of massive Ponzi scheme or con job (short for trick of confidence), where the foreign "human resources" are required to keep the scheme from collapsing. The day that China, India, Europe, Russia, etc. realize that they are being extracted of some of their very most important and valuable resources, their best and brightest, and they cut the USA off; it will cause massive panic and pangs of terror among the US ruling class that needs to keep the flow of fresh supply of the foreign best and brightest to prevent their con job from being exposed.
There is all this talk of slavery and colonialism and resource extraction of the past that has sabotaged and disadvantaged countries and societies and communities. In reality though it never stopped, it only took on a different and largely more profitable form like how a con artist may shift and move around and dissolve and form new companies as needed while the con always remains more or less the same.
The same cynical exploitation and extraction of resources from one society to fuel and enrich another has always remained in place even if the branding, labeling, and narrative around it has changed over time. If people want to "tear down the system of exploitation and abuse" (or however it is characterized) all they would need to do is stop feeding the American economy with their best and brightest, let alone even their hard working manual labor like Central America is doing, who are not available to contribute to developing their own societies because they are busy serving the American corporations to "Make America Great Again".
In reality, the US economy is so riddled with massive holes and flaws that it is like a sieve that requires a constant and ever larger flow of the best and brightest and hardest working and most motivated and driven just to keep the con going. If that were to seize up, if foreign countries and leaders realized how they were sabotaging themselves and stopped fueling the US economy, the energy and economic activity of the USA would immediately start draining out at a dizzying rate.
I would love for someone to correct me if I am looking at this incorrectly.
1. Benefits and harms are not zero sum, that goes for "elites" and "common people" as well as countries. I thought the Coronavirus already demonstrated this quite well. The "common people" dying didn't benefit the elites nor the elites dying. 2. Even if we accept false premises of value it isn't a Ponzi Scheme. Even if it is an unsustainable demand for talent it wouldn't be a Ponzi Scheme. A Ponzi Scheme lies about generating benefits and instead just redostributes from new to old while escalating recruitment. For it to be a Ponzi Scheme no learning would be taking place, just idea extraction from immigrants and plagerism to attribute it to the professors. To put it mildly that is very counterfactual, akin to suggesting that crowds of thousands of people watching a musician perform is what creates talent and any rando you put up on stage would gain talent faster than if they practiced in an empty concert hall. 3. Just because they are educated abroad and the US benefits doesn't mean their native country is harmed or "harmed". They can and have enriched their native country either when they return or through remittances above what they earn domestically. 4. Source country interests may also be selfish. They may be glad to be rid of those pesky intellectuals with their "western" values of things like equal rights. 5. The entire reason many go abroad to study is because their native country is unable to use their full potential for whatever reason. That is like saying recruiting a subsidence farmer's genius son and training him to be a doctor stole hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the farmer because the doctor now earns that in the city. At most the farmer lost $400/year from a farmhand's labor.
The entire intellectual frameworks involved are wrong on several levels really.
The options here are either that the administration is risking lethal consequences for these students out of: 1) incompetence (they forgot to extend the exemptions), or 2) active negligence. Either is exceptionally bad. Whether it was an active decision or not to let these exceptions end, ICE seems almost gleeful to take the opportunity to kick these students out of the country, and ICE is entirely under the control of the executive branch.
Or: why is it news that Trump refuses to wear a mask? Obama never wore one.
> How can you not see the hardship of kicking out international students who are already here? COVID forcing the closure of universities is not their fault.
- For as far back as I could find, students that wanted to qualify for a student visa to study in the US could take at most one online course per semester. The rest of the coursework had to be in-person.
- Starting in the spring of this year, the SEVP program (part of ICE) created exemptions so students could continue to stay in the US even though universities had moved entirely online. These exemptions were for Spring and Summer and universities were awaiting the rules for Fall.
- As of Monday, they are changing the exemptions. They are allowing any number of online classes, but with the caveat you have to have at least one in-person class.
- If you are already in the US you have to leave if your university is online-only. [This is the part that feels punitive and particularly onerous to me]
What is interesting to me is the framing of this. The new exemptions are still more flexible than the pre-existing student visa policy (which has been around through both Democratic and Republican administrations as far as I can tell). So on the one hand it's actually an improvement. On the other hand I think most of these universities were hoping the full exemption would continue as COVID is still very much a thing.