Are We Shutting the Doors on Tomorrow's World Leaders?

Soft Power

The term was coined by Joseph Nye of Harvard and defined as “getting others to want the outcome you want.”

Professor Nye writes, “A country may obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries want to follow it, admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness.”

If we are perceived that way by other countries, we have soft power.

With all due respect, you don’t get soft power through propaganda, through doing a better job of telling the world what a wonderful country we are, as many in the debate about public diplomacy would have it these days.

You get it through people getting to know you, and that happens through exchange—both ways—from students to the Peace Corps to all kinds of citizen exchanges at all levels.

It’s broader than just facilitating certain desired policy outcomes of the moment. Educational and cultural exchange is fundamental to building a more peaceful and secure world.

If we want that—and it has been an articulated objective of U.S. policy for decades—soft power has to be one of the tools for getting it, and educational exchange is fundamental to that.

Considering how important most statesmen would argue that international education is to our soft power and to the achievement of basic U.S. interests, it’s striking that we’ve never as a nation articulated a policy for using it. It’s time we did so.

That’s one of NAFSA’S fundamental advocacy priorities, as outlined in our white paper, “Toward an International Education Policy for the United States.” It’s available on our Web site for those who might be interested.

My task this morning is to talk about one piece of such a strategy, the piece that involves international students—and I might mention international scholars as well—to the United States.

The International Student Market

It’s in that context that I’ll get to another of my assignments and talk about the international student market.

I’m going to try to go into this in some detail, because this context is very important to be able to understand what we have to do.

United States competitiveness in the international student market, as measured by our share of the market, has been declining for at least 20 years. Until 9/11, this was largely unnoticed except among international education professionals.

Basically, four things have been happening.

First, competitor countries have increased their capacity.

Second, those countries have begun adopting and implementing strategic plans to capture
a greater share of the market.

Third, new competitors have entered the market.

The emergence of the EU is critical. Higher education is now entirely portable among the EU countries. Any university student from any member country can study in any other member country and the credit will transfer. English has become a common
language of study. You can now study in English for a degree in several EU countries. That has made the EU, overnight, highly competitive for international students worldwide who seek higher education in English. And they market that.

Other, non-traditional competitors are entering the market. Japan is now the top destination for Chinese students. Singapore actively markets itself in India, Indonesia, and other sending countries of the region. Finland, France, Japan, Singapore, Germany, and Poland have become serious competitors offering intensive English programs. All of these countries offer high-quality, low-cost alternatives to a U.S. education.

So the emergence of new competitors is the third thing that has happened. And fourth, the sending countries are building their own capacity and are encouraging students to stay home for their education. In particular, our traditional competitor countries are, like us,
feeling the effects of the dramatic opening of China’s higher education system over the past 5 years. Chinese graduates of Chinese schools are finding opportunities in the booming Chinese economy for which they are highly competitive. So they stay home, and their government encourages that.

Now--in the midst of this diversification of the market, this buildup of competition, 9/11 hit. And that created the perfect storm.

Just as other markets were taking off, just as our competitors were launching their national strategies for attracting this market, the United States implemented a series of visa restrictions which, overnight, made it exponentially harder to get into the United States than to get into other countries and sent a message that we don’t really want you all that much. And that really helped jump-start the competition.

To get into this country:

• People had to travel sometimes hundreds of miles for personal interviews.
• People had to be fingerprinted.
• Visa applications of scientists had to undergo prolonged interagency security clearances in Washington.
• Scientists who left the country to go home for holidays or family emergencies found themselves stuck for months without being able to re-enter while they underwent yet another clearance.
• Arab and Muslim males had to undergo extra scrutiny.
• People seeking entry to attend intensive English programs were told by consular officers, “Why do you need to go to the U.S. to study English, you can do that elsewhere.”
• People met hostility—or at least perceived hostility—at ports of entry.
• Arabs and Muslims read about their countrymen being detained and held incommunicado for prolonged periods of time without being charged.

And on top of that were all the other foreign policy and military actions that we took that made the United States unpopular in the world.

The market reacted pretty clearly to this situation.

In the first full year after 9/11, 2002-2003, we had only a 0.6 percent increase in international students over the previous year, following several years of increases in the 5-6 percent range.

In the next year, 2003-04, international student enrollments in U.S higher education institutions declined, by 2.4 percent, for the first time in more than 30 years.

Authoritative data for the current academic year won’t be available until October, but a survey of a sample of schools last fall by my association and others suggested that we will see a further decline this year. I don’t know if there has ever been a decline two years in a row before.

Where will the market trend? No one knows.

My own sense is that post-9/11 security measures surfaced long-term trends that were already making us less competitive, and provided a shock that has moved the market to a different place.

The Need for an International Student Access Strategy

If international students and scholars are in fact as important for our foreign policy and national security as generations of our leaders have said that they are, then we are in danger of losing an important national asset without having intended to do so.

The problem needs to be approached on two levels. So far, we’re only focusing as a country on the first level, which has to do with fixing the problems that we’ve introduced into the visa system since 9/11.

That needs to be done. The key to doing it is to recognize that it really isn’t “accessibility versus security,” as is commonly thought and as is the subject of this event. Openness to international students is part of security.

A better way to think about it, I think, is that we need to return the visa process to one which maximizes security, both by denying access to those who threaten us, and by facilitating access for those whose presence contributes to important national interests. It’s because we forgot the second part of that equation, in the heat of post-9/11, that we got ourselves into trouble.

We released recommendations a year and a half ago for fixing the visa problems, and we updated them last year, and we’ve been engaged in a very productive dialogue with the State Department about our recommendations ever since.

I won’t go into our recommendations in detail, because they’re available to you here, in an annotated version that shows the implementation status of each recommendation as of last month. And Tony Edson has already talked about it.

My summary statement would be: State has gone a long way toward addressing our concerns—and I congratulate them for it—but much remains to be done.

But the State Department’s mistake is to think that’s all we have to do. It is not. You can’t get a market back just by fixing the problem that drove it away. You have to win it
back.

The market is in a different place. That’s why I went through the market analysis. We have to win back the loyalty of our customers in the international student market who have decided that the United States is not necessarily their preferred destination anymore.

We need what our competitors have, but we’ve never had: a national strategy for attracting international students to the United States.

I’ve preached this to my friends at State til they’re sick of hearing it—but they’re still not getting it. They’re still in the mode of conducting an information campaign—telling the world that we really want students after all.

Information is an essential part of a strategy—but only a part. Action is essential on a variety of fronts.

We call for and outline a comprehensive strategy in a report that is available to you, “In America’s Interest: Welcoming International Students.”

We urgently need both our government and the private sector to join with us in implementing a strategy that looks something like what we recommend in this report.

If we do that, I have no doubt about our ability to compete successfully in this market.

And in so doing, we can contribute in an important way to augmenting our nation’s soft power, and ultimately our security and our international leadership.

I hope all of you—government and private sector alike—will join us in this essential task.