I know the saying because sometimes I’ve said it myself: Washington is broken. Nothing good gets done. It’s getting more tied up in unnecessary red tape.
Well, that’s wrong. A few days ago, the Biden administration made a little-noticed but highly significant change. And that change can have a profound and wonderful effect on global education, something that is important to many of you in the diplomatic corps.
In short, the US government has just lifted an onerous restriction on hundreds of thousands of students from around the world.
A bit of background: This past August, Homeland Security and the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) tweaked a few words in “guidance” for international student visas, called F-1 visas. With no warning, students leaving the United States to study elsewhere learned they had a strict five-month limit to return to their US campuses.
And worse: Those who exceeded that limit would lose their student visa and the work-study benefits that come with it.
From everything we can tell, this was a mistake, not an intentional reversal. Someone was trying to clean up the language in regulations, but accidentally tightened restrictions.
And it might sound like an inconsequential bureaucratic matter, but it could have restricted higher education in this country and around the world. Every year, the US issues about 400,000 F-1 visas. India alone receives about 130,000 of those visas for its students.
Most study-abroad programs last about five months, but several US universities are trying to expand that model to encourage true cultural immersion with longer study abroad programs.
I’ve seen this welcome trend in true globalization. I’m the president of Minerva University, a nonprofit based in San Francisco. Our students spend a year in the US. Then they move on to what we call “global rotations” to Asia, South America and Europe, returning to graduate in San Francisco. This model has helped us train future entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders from more than 100 countries.
We’re only a dozen years old, but we can see this approach works. Right now, two of our recent alumnae are Rhodes Scholars, pursuing fully funded graduate studies at the University of Oxford.
In the last few months, I’ve been to Japan, Korea, Qatar, Switzerland and other countries. I realize many of us fear borders are shutting as distrust increases. But I’ve sensed a hunger for connections and business partnerships. I’ve met young people, like Minerva students, who want to join across geographical boundaries to solve problems such as climate change, pandemics and poverty.
The sensible change of guidance by USCIS brings us a step closer to this cooperation.
In this season of thanks, I want to thank the Washington Diplomat. At Minerva, we decided to first tell the story of the wrongful F-1 rule in this publication. That led to international coverage and attention. We also thank the diplomats and State Department readers who worked to restore the full benefits of F-1 visas.
And now, as Washington prepares for a change in administration, I challenge all of you to tell the stories of the benefits of global education, global immersion and global cooperation.
Mike Magee is the president of the nonprofit Minerva University, where students from more than 100 countries study on four continents in four years.
