Go back exactly one year, and see what the new normal means when it comes to recruiting students for New Jersey’s colleges and universities.
In the first week of May 2019, more than two dozen of the institutions’ presidents griped in an open letter to the state’s congressional delegation that Trump administration hard-line immigration policies were keeping foreign students away. Smart students from other countries were missing entire semesters, and admission offers to overseas students had to be withdrawn because of visa complications.
The whole situation was “weakening not just our individual institutions, but American higher education as a whole, and, by extension, our country’s global competitiveness ” according to the letter.
Fast forward to last week. Guess where several of these college presidents are begging for students to come from now? Yup. New Jersey.
There’s a brand-new campaign, born out of the coronavirus pandemic, to reach out to grads of Garden State high schools now attending out-of-state higher-learning spots to come back home for the fall semester.
The pitch seems to play partly to fear — maybe that of parents who’d rather have their college-age children close right now — and partly to home-state patriotism: Please come back, and help us dig out of the medical and economic stresses New Jersey is facing.
The campaign is currently limited to 10 public colleges and universities, excluding Rutgers. The foreign-student push also included private schools, but presidents of Rowan, Stockton, the College of New Jersey, Montclair State, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Ramapo College, Thomas Edison University, Kean University, William Patterson and New Jersey City University signed onto both efforts.
Is this two faced on the part of these administrators? Not necessarily. Foreign students often pay full-rate tuition, as well as fostering diversity, as the May 2019 letter stated. An editorial here supported unblocking the immigration logjam, noting that South Jersey schools, with relatively low foreign enrollment, could use more of these students, not fewer.
With the new bring-‘em-back-to-Jersey plea, however, concede a minor point to those offended by last year’s call to ease the path for foreign students. More overseas enrollment means fewer spaces for Jersey kids, critics noted, in a state that’s famous for exporting two things, according to the old joke — college students and garbage.
This isn’t caving to the xenophobes, but why did it take a pandemic to start a concerted effort to find Jersey Fresh students at faraway U.S. schools who’d rather finish their degrees back home?
The new program is called the New Jersey Scholar Corps, and enticements include volunteer opportunities, a streamlined application process and guaranteed credit transfer for any course work that earned a “C” or better. It has a new website, njcomhome,org. About 120,000 New Jerseyans attend colleges and universities in other states.
Actually, a push to make it easier for foreign students can coexist with a campaign to collar domestic ones who felt the need to leave the state for their education. If the Jersey schools begin to overflow with quality applicants, they can cross that expansion bridge when they come to it.
Temporarily, that doesn’t seem to be the case, as more prospective students mull a “gap year” or delay processing fall uncertainties. Colleges everywhere face budget challenges, even as they refuse partial tuition refunds for shifting all students into less-expensive online courses.
In order for New Jersey Scholar Corps not to be viewed as a cynical revenue grab while schools are in a money fix, it needs to be an ongoing outreach effort that extends beyond the immediate fallout of coronavirus, and includes more institutions.
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