The Tribune

Parents want the best for their children. Parents in Paraguay, Uganda, Cambodia, Fiji, Pakistan, Haiti and Bulgaria want the best for their children. And parents in The Bahamas also want the best for their children. Perhaps the best gift a parent can give to a child is education.

Options for higher education and training for Bahamians have been varied and distinctive. The new University of The Bahamas, still emerging from the legacy of the College of The Bahamas, is our flagship institution. The Bahamas Training and Vocational Institute offers a more technically focused path to employment security. There are local alternatives. The University of the West Indies provides a regional option.

Colleges and universities in Canada, the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth beckon to our most accomplished secondary school graduates with promises of top-quality education and training, glittering career prospects and the potential to return home to help in the continual process of moving our beloved land forward to further heights and greater opportunities for those who will follow us.

In more recent times, though, young Bahamians seeking higher education and their families have looked to the nearby United States for opportunities. There are many reasons for this, including but certainly not limited to proximity, family ties, strong cultural influences and a rich diversity of higher education possibilities. America continues to attract many of our best and most ambitious students.

Especially since the end of the Second World War, U.S. colleges and universities have established a world standard and reputation matched only by their rightful progenitors in the UK.

But with the ascension to power two years ago of a proudly ignorant xenophobe as American president, there have been whispers of the effects of his shortsighted and divisive policies on access to American higher education for foreign students. Educators around the world have been increasingly concerned the U.S. might try to close its doors to foreign students.

When American politicians of both parties loudly complain of Chinese economic espionage and infiltration and theft of American intellectual property, it is partly an acknowledgment of the seemingly ubiquitous presence of many eager, able Chinese students in American universities, often in graduate departments. The careful Chinese, valuing education as much as any nation, have clearly indicated their preference for sampling what they see as the world’s best in the United States.

Two recent developments in the United States are therefore cause for concern. The first was the announcement by private Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore of a historically huge $1.8 billion gift to the school by one of its most accomplished alumni, former New York City mayor and multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

Parents and educators all across the United States took careful note that the purpose of Bloomberg’s massive donation was to permit the university to remove loans from the packages of financial assistance it can offer to incoming admitted students. At Johns Hopkins, a rising undergraduate program, this means freedom from some financial anxiety for families of applicants facing a $70,000 annual fees and expenses bill.

The university’s president said the grant would help Hopkins “recruit more first-generation and low-income students.” Nearly lost in the dramatic announcement was the fact that Hopkins’ new need-blind admissions policy would only apply to applicants from the United States. Only a very few American universities, including Yale and Harvard, have enough endowment money and foresight to offer need-blind admissions to foreign applicants.

Second and more ominous is a new report issued by the non-profit Institute for International Education. According to this annual report, the total of new international students arriving in the United States in the 2017-18 school year was around 272,000. This figure includes undergraduate and graduate students, and represents a 6.6 percent decline from the previous year and is ten percent less than the number of new international students as recently as three years ago. Bahamian applications to American universities do not so far appear to have declined.

American universities still want and need foreign students, for their diversity and for their full tuition payments. But in an era of America First, do the foreign students still want and need American higher education as much as before? Time and our Bahamian families will tell.