Arizona State University is a top destination for international students. More than 17,000 of its students, or about 15%, are foreign born.
“It makes us a better university because our other 70,000 that are from the United States compete against the best talent from the entire planet,” said ASU President Michael Crow. “To see a kid that grew up in the Philippines talking to a kid that grew up in Window Rock, it just is tremendous. It’s a tremendous tool for the advancement of the democracy that we have inherited.”
It’s also a tool for keeping college affordable for that kid from Window Rock or Phoenix or Yuma. International students pay about $37,000 a year in tuition alone to attend ASU. That’s about two and a half times the in-state price.
“International students pay a premium to be here,” Crow said. “Our margin for international students helps us to pay for the American students that we give substantial financial aid to.”
Immigration and visa restrictions on international students are piling up as part of the president’s feud with elite and highly selective private institutions. But Crow said those moves also threaten the balance sheets of big private universities like ASU. Recent policy changes have caused “uncertainty and confusion” among current and prospective ASU international students, he said. He expects to see a drop in enrollment for the upcoming school year.
Many other public universities are facing a similar shortfall, according to Gaurav Khanna, an economist at UC San Diego.
“I actually think of those kinds of schools as being more reliant on international students,” Khanna said, compared to the prestigious private universities that have been in the spotlight.
That reliance dates back to the 2008 recession when many public universities saw their budgets slashed by state legislatures at the same time that domestic students were struggling to afford college, he said. “That's when these universities said, ‘OK, now to survive, we really need to look abroad.’”
Flagship public universities like the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Texas A&M and Ohio State University depend on this strategy of subsidizing cheap in-state tuition by admitting international students who pay the full sticker price or even a little extra.
Khanna said the picture at Ivy League and other elite private institutions is different: “The reason Harvard cares a lot about international student body is that they're basically attracting the top talent.”
Many of those schools offer need-blind admissions to foreign-born students and foot the bill for those who might bolster its prestige. A slowdown in international enrollment would hurt those schools’ exclusivity more than their bottom lines. They can still tap into long waitlists of domestic applicants.
“But those land grant schools, those state public universities, the regional ones, universities that do not have the cache will have a much more difficult time making up for that revenue loss,” said William Brustein, who has worked on international recruitment strategy for West Virginia University, the University of Illinois and Ohio State University.
Brustein said that public universities operate on thin margins. Fewer international tuition dollars on top of the demographic crunch universities are facing domestically could mean faculty layoffs, cuts to course offerings and degree programs, and even closures of rural satellite campuses.
“These budget cuts — which are already happening at some universities — are going to be exacerbated, hitting the quality of the academic education,” Brustein said. “It’s not a pretty picture that we’re looking toward in the future.”
Brustein said elite schools will weather the president’s crackdown on foreign-born students, but it could put a high-quality public education farther out of reach for the average American.
