Welch Leads Colleagues in Letter Calling on State Department to Clarify Student Visa Adjudication Standards
This news comes after months of advocating with Senator Welch’s office on the issue of creating more transparency in visa processing. Our team is very pleased to see him take the lead and have several strong senators join him as he works with the State Department to better understand the issues. This request came from our work on global visa denial rates.
WASHINGTON, DC — U.S. Senator Peter Welch (D-Vt) led seven Senators in sending a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling on the State Department to update its student visa adjudication guidance to ensure that all qualified students have an equal opportunity to continue their academic journey in the United States. The Senators’ letter cites data from the past eight years obtained from an investigation into the State Department’s student visa denials showing students from African countries were denied at significantly higher rates than those from other regions of the world.
Indian Student Visas Beset by Long Delays
It is encouraging to see so many in our sector push on the State Department to address visa processing delays and visa denials!
In a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on behalf of a consortium of 20 higher ed organizations, American Council on Education president Ted Mitchell urged the government to address the delays for F-1 and J-1 visas. He wrote that some students are being offered interview appointment dates 100 to 200 days after they apply.
Read more on Inside Higher Ed >
One-Size-Fits-All Caps Fails Australia, Fails Our Students
Our team has been reporting on major policy changes taking place in the UK, Canada, and Australia. Australia has put in place a several new rules that impact international students including, limiting students ability to transfer within a six-month period, increasing visa denials to curb net migration, and now potentially looking toward imposing a cap rate. This is something we will continue to monitor.
Imposing a flat 35% or 40% international student cap on all Australian universities, as some have suggested, will inevitably reduce the overall quality of Australia’s tertiary education system. It will immediately affect the country’s top-ranking universities, forcing them to cut thousands of international student places and forego hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. The staff cuts, infrastructure upgrade deferrals, research foregone, and reductions in diversity-promoting scholarships will have to be immediate – and will be lasting.
Get more details on the University of Melbourne newsroom >
