Over the past two weeks, thousands of New Hampshire college students graduated into an unstable economy and an uncertain future. But while most college grads may be concerned about finding their first job, many international students are wondering when they will be able to go home.
Many of the state’s campuses are still housing a few international students and some American students who have nowhere else to go. Plymouth State University, which currently has four international students living in its dorms for the summer, has been able to offer housing free of charge.
“We’ve basically told all of our international students that if they have nowhere else to go because of COVID… that we would provide them with free housing for as long as they needed,” said Marlin Collingwood, Plymouth’s interim vice president for communications, enrollment and student life.
Bao Nguyen, from Vietnam, is one of those students. He graduated this semester with plans to spend the summer with his family. Then the pandemic hit.
“It’s disappointing, because you have the whole four years of working, and you just have one time of like, parents coming over to attend…and you’re just not able to do that. I was really looking forward to that,” he said.
Although he graduated this semester, Nguyen reached out to Plymouth’s Residential Life department looking for housing options. The university was able to offer a private room and bathroom to ensure social distancing. Though dining halls are no longer open, students cook in a communal kitchen on a rotating basis.
“To be honest, it’s very quiet and boring here, but I guess summer here is always like this when the semester ends and students go home,” Nguyen said. “But aside from that, it’s a pretty good living situation here.”
Nguyen will pursue a doctorate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the fall, so he decided that staying in the United States would be a safer and more reliable option than returning home for the summer.
New Hampshire’s colleges recently received millions in federal CARES funding, much of which will be distributed to students in need of financial support. International students are not eligible for CARES funding, but officials from Plymouth and the University of New Hampshire (UNH) said those students can apply for financial assistance from an emergency student fund through their respective universities.
Ruichun Zhang and Wei He, two recent UNH graduates from China, had similar plans to start graduate school in the fall. They both hoped to return to their home country once UNH transitioned to remote learning in late March, but travel restrictions imposed by China late that month have halted those plans.
He had purchased a plane ticket to return to China at the end of March only for his flight to be cancelled when Chinese authorities ordered international airlines to limit flights to China to once per week. He currently lives at the Lodges, an off-campus apartment complex in Durham, and intends to relocate to Durham, North Carolina should in-person instruction continue for the fall semester at Duke, where he plans to pursue a master’s in engineering management. But if classes are online, he may defer to the next semester and return to China.
“The situation has been hard for almost everyone, and I know there are so many people whose situation is worse than mine,” He said. “I’m not affected too much emotionally. My plan just got disturbed by the situation.”
Zhang also may try to return to China if her graduate classes switch to online. She had been looking forward to pursuing her master’s degree in public relations and advertising at the University of Southern California, but now, she says, due to the pandemic, “I’m not looking forward to it at all.”
Zhang has been trying to get flights back to China every day with no success.
“People who can get a ticket for now or recently are the people who have troubles living in the United States, like people who go to junior high school or are underage. For me, I’m not in one of those groups. I can only wait until there is an available ticket for me to go home,” she said. “At this time last year I was back in China. I feel a little depressed and a little bit upset.”
Many international students at UNH who have chosen to remain in the United States have done so out of fear that they may not be able to come back in the fall due to ongoing travel restrictions, says Kerryellen Vroman, associate vice provost for international programs at UNH.
“They wanted to know that they would definitely be able to go on with their studies,” Vroman said.
Most students moved off campus when UNH switched to remote learning in March, but more than 100 stayed. According to Erika Mantz, a UNH spokesperson, many have found other living arrangements since then. Now, 55 remain on the campus for the summer and are paying regular room and board fees. Many of them are international students.
The University System of New Hampshire announced earlier this month that it plans to welcome students back for face-to-face instruction in the fall. However, officials acknowledge that this may not be an option for some international students who have already returned to their home countries.
“We know that some of them might not be able to come back,” Collingwood said, “and in that case we will continue to work with them to continue remote learning.”
Still, there are many unknowns for international students who want to attend class during the fall.
“The university is opening up, so the intent is that those students will come back and join us,” Vroman said. “The office of international students and scholars is working with them on their visas, but that is going to be governed by a number of things like what policies are at the time and whether embassies are open in their countries for processing visas. So there’s not a definitive answer right now.”
Typically F-1 visa students are allowed by law to count only one online class toward their degree. That policy has been temporarily suspended due to recent distance learning measures implemented across the country’s colleges. But as New Hampshire’s colleges – and others across the country – plan for in-person learning in the fall,whether that policy will remain in place is uncertain.
In the fall 2019 semester UNH hosted a total of 847 graduate and undergraduate international students, more than any other public college in New Hampshire. Over 350 of them came from China. International student enrollment numbers have already been in decline nationally in recent years, and Vroman expects a continuation of that downward trend in the wake of the pandemic.
These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.