During Trump Presidency, Colleges And Students Anticipate Change In Student Visas
With visas in hand, about 85,000 undergraduate and graduates students from overseas are pursuing their higher education degrees in schools around New England. That’s out of more than a million who come to study every year in the United States. Graduate students, in particular, are big business for colleges. But President-elect Donald Trump’s many anti-immigration stances have brought uncertainty into the classroom.
The greatest number of young men and women come from China, India, Saudi Arabia and Korea. Among the graduate students, the top areas for research are science, technology, engineering and math, known collectively as the STEM fields.
“Ultimately anyone gets into STEM because they believe, or they hope, they want to change the world,” said student Archit Rastogi, who is doing his PhD at UMass Amherst in molecular and cellular biology.
“I’m working on studying how fetal exposure to certain environmental toxicants can lead to diseases later in life,” Rastogi said.