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Physics Students From Abroad: Monitoring the Continuing Impact of Visa Problems

by Michael Neuschatz and Patrick Mulvey

Highlights

• After decades of sustained increases, the proportion of foreign citizens among students entering US graduate physics programs started to decline during the past few years (Figure 1).
• In the Fall of 2004, about half of the PhD-granting departments and about one-quarter of the Master's departments reported they had accepted one or more foreign students who were either denied entry or substantially delayed because of visa problems (Table 3). However, this is an improvement over what was reported two years earlier.
• Visa problems were not just restricted to entering students. Around 60% of PhD departments reported that currently enrolled foreign students had experienced problems securing return visas during the previous year after leaving the US to travel abroad. Almost a quarter of these departments also reported similar difficulties encountered by foreign faculty and staff researchers.
• Visa problems were not distributed equally among departments. Smaller PhD-granting departments and Master's departments continue to be the most adversely affected, with a substantially larger proportion of their accepted international students being denied entry than was the case among the larger PhD departments.
• Overall, we estimate that 12% of the admitted foreign students for the Fall of 2004 were at least initially prevented from gaining entry into a physics department because of complications in securing a visa. This is down from the 20% reported for the Fall of 2002.
• Changes in the number of applications departments receive continue to be a poor indicator of the number of international students they ultimately accept and enroll (Table 2). Many factors come into play that affect the number of applicants that ultimately enroll, and difficulties in obtaining a visa is just one of them.
• Despite the difficulty many international students encounter in securing a visa to enter the US in recent years, declines in the absolute number of foreign first-year physics graduate students have not been as great as one might expect. First-year foreign student enrollment for the Fall of 2004 fell 3% from the Fall of 2002 and a total of 13% since the Fall of 2000 (Table 4).