Fears that Donald Trump’s election would drive a decline in the number of international students who want to study at American universities appear to be overblown, at least in the Bay Area.
While four in 10 schools nationally say they’ve seen a drop in applications from other countries and many worry Trump is to blame, diplomas from the Bay Area’s elite schools are still in demand. International applications to Stanford University haven’t dropped off, and Santa Clara University and UC Berkeley’s graduate programs have even seen upticks.
Two-thirds of nearly 400 international students who enrolled at Santa Clara during the 2016-17 school year told the school they chose to study there because of its location.
“It’s California,” said Victor Figueroa, a 28-year-old graduate student from El Salvador who is earning a master’s in electrical engineering from Santa Clara this spring. “I think if it was a different state, I would have second thoughts.”
Stanford also remains a top choice for many international students. Aaron Sekhri, who was born in Hong Kong to Indian parents, graduated from the school in 2015 and now works in tech in the Bay Area. While he’s sensed a “kind of diminishment in enthusiasm” about studying in the U.S. broadly during conversations with people in India, he said, “I think the Bay Area negates that.”
A national survey, published in March by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, generated headlines like “Amid ‘Trump Effect’ Fear, 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applicants.”
And while some local schools like the University of San Francisco, San Francisco State and San Jose State have seen some drop-off in applications from other countries, officials say it’s not clear the new administration is the culprit and it’s too early to know the full impact.
“Silicon Valley has a lot of job opportunities in my field,” said Shraddha Lanka, who came from India for a master’s in health informatics at the University of San Francisco and said she would make the same choice again.
Some of her friends in places like Texas and Georgia have faced discrimination since the election. “For me, it’s not been like that at all,” she said. “It’s almost like we’ve come to two different Americas.”
Now, when she talks to worried friends and family back home, she encourages people to apply to local schools. “I always tell them, if you have the option, come to the Bay Area,” she said.
San Jose State’s graduate school of business has seen a dramatic 35 percent decline since last year, but Dean Dan Moshavi thinks that has more to do with an overall diminishing interest in business school that predates November 2016.
“Nationally, enrollment and interest in MBA programs is down when you take the top 25 programs out of the mix,” he said.
UC Berkeley has seen its numbers grow for its graduate programs but uncharacteristically decline at the undergraduate level — but administrators are not blaming Trump.
Berkeley had about 200 fewer freshman applications from international students this year. The only other UC to register a drop was Riverside, and the two schools accounted for a small systemwide decline of 353 fewer international applications. It’s UC’s first decrease in a decade. There are declines among applicants from countries that Trump has criticized, such as Mexico, but there’s also been an even bigger drop in the number of out-of-state applicants.
“At this point it’s too early to say with any certainty what caused the decrease,” Ricardo Vazquez, a spokesman for UC’s central office, wrote in an email.
The drop comes after critics complained UC had become more accommodating to students from outside California who pay a premium to attend universities that are highly regarded across the globe. In light of that, UC is shifting its recruiting efforts to focus on California residents and ending financial aid for nonresidents. Tuition for out-of-state students is also set to go up.
Some people, including Assemblyman Rocky Chávez, R-Oceanside, pushed back at the idea that a “Trump effect” is responsible for the decrease in applications. “It’s the effect of the Democratic Party,” he said, blaming Democratic lawmakers for supporting limits on the number of international students who can study in the state.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for reduced immigration to the U.S., doesn’t see the decline, regardless of what caused it, as a problem. “American students are losing the opportunity to go to the university of their choice because of the excessive admission of foreign students,” he said.
But in 2015, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, international students contributed $35.8 billion to the economy. The vast majority of international students get the bulk of their funding from outside the U.S. and advocacy groups like the Association of International Educators say they provide badly needed money to cash-strapped universities. Even a slight dip, for any reason, could have dramatic consequences.
International graduate applications are up at Cal overall. And while applications for graduate programs at Berkeley from some specific countries, including Mexico and Chile, declined, interest from countries that would be affected by Trump’s proposed travel ban, including Iran and Somalia, dropped by less than one percent.
Manli Li, a 24-year-old from southern China, just finished a year-long master’s in law program at Cal and is preparing to apply to jobs in California and back home. She applied because “Berkeley is a very good law school and my home city is considered the Bay Area of China,” she said. Trump’s election wouldn’t have deterred her, she said.
The University of San Francisco has seen a slight decline in international applications. But it’s for the second year in a row and the impacted countries aren’t those Trump has been maligning in speeches and on Twitter, said Michael Beseda, vice provost of strategic enrollment management. They’re Southeast Asian nations like Thailand.
For now, “for whatever reason, we’re not seeing the kinds of declines that we feared,” he said.
Still, it is true that places like the University of Toronto in Canada have seen an uptick, and that does make some local admissions officers wonder about the coming years. “They regularly thank us,” Beseda said.
