Summers Blasts Visa Policies

The U.S. government needs to make immediate revisions to its national security policies to improve the current visa application process if it wants to help universities across the country retain their most promising international students, Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers wrote Monday in a letter addressed to Secretary of State Colin Powell and U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge ’67.

“If the visa process remains complicated and filled with delays, we risk losing some of our most talented scientists and compromising our country’s position at the forefront of technological innovation,” Summers wrote.

Summers’ letter points to one of the repercussions of the national security measures established in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Summers said these regulations are spawning an alarming trend that may soon lead to a nationwide brain drain of international graduate students.

“[They are] a very serious problem for our students, for the University and, ultimately, for the United States,” he said in an interview yesterday.

In his letter, Summers cited a study conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools which reported that 90 percent of graduate schools surveyed experienced a decline in applications from international students.

Dwindling application numbers have hit Harvard’s professional schools as well.

Every single one of Harvard’s nine faculties reported “a sharp drop” in applications from international students since last year, Summers wrote in the letter.

According to statistics compiled by the International Office, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) received 48 percent of its applications from international students in 2000, but only 40 percent of its applications came from international students this year. The number of applications to the Business School dropped significantly from last year; 10,379 foreigners vied for a spot at the school last year, while a mere 8,526 applied this year. At the Kennedy School of Government and the Graduate School of Education, international students comprised 5 percent less of the applicant pool than before the attacks.

In the wake of Sept. 11, the process of applying for and securing a student visa has become even more arduous than before. The government bars citizens of countries with high immigration rates—like China—from entering the United States unless they can prove that they have legitimate plans to return to their homeland after finishing their education.

“The drop in the number of applications from Chinese and Indian students is particularly striking,” Summers wrote in the letter. “Applications from Chinese students alone declined as much as 40% in some of our graduate programs.”

And according to statistics from the International Office, GSAS received almost 500 fewer applications from Chinese students this year.

This loss hits Harvard’s sciences the hardest, Summers said in an interview yesterday. “The higher fraction of our scientific graduate students are from countries sort of like China where these problems are particularly serious,” he said.

In his letter, Summers proposed a number of strategies the U.S. government could use to relax the visa requirements for students from foreign countries like China. He suggested that the government implement the State Department’s new proposal to give priority to students scheduling immigration-related appointments. He also wrote in his letter that the government should consider creating “timeframes for the adjudication of visa application,” appoint an ombudsperson within the State Department to help universities with speciality visa cases, allow university students security clearances, and conduct “comprehensive background checks.”

Summers is working on the issue with the American Council on Education, the American Association of Universities, and a small group of trustees at leading institutions like MIT, Yale, Princeton and Stanford.

—Staff writer Lauren A. E. Schuker can be reached at schuker@fas.harvard.edu.