You Can't Get Here From There

Cambridge, Mass. -- Last year, the number of foreign students at American colleges and universities fell for the first time since 1971. Recent reports show that total foreign student enrollment in our 2,700 colleges and universities dropped 2.4 percent, with a much sharper loss at large research institutions. Two-thirds of the 25 universities with the most foreign students reported major enrollment declines.

The costs to the American economy are significant. Educating foreign students is a $13 billion industry. Moreover, the United States does not produce enough home-grown doctoral students in science and engineering to meet our needs. The shortfall is partly made up by the many foreign students who stay here after earning their degrees.

Equally important, however, are the foreign students who return home and carry American ideas with them. They add to our soft power, the ability to win the hearts and minds of others. As Secretary of State Colin Powell put it, 'I can think of no more valuable asset to our country than the friendship of future world leaders who have been educated here.'

One cause of the recent decline has been increased competition from universities elsewhere, particularly in English-speaking countries like Britain and Australia. But most observers attribute our loss to a self-inflicted wound. Ever since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, getting an American visa has been a nightmare of red tape, and the hassle has deterred many foreign student applicants.

Horror stories abound, like the Harvard postdoctoral student in biochemistry who went home to Beijing for his father's funeral, then waited five months for permission to return. And China, of course, had nothing to do with the attacks on Sept. 11.

In an effort to exclude a dangerous few, we are keeping out the helpful many. Consular officials know that they face career-threatening punishment if they are too lax, but face little sanction if they are too strict. Add to those perverse incentives, the need to coordinate with the extensive bureaucracy of the Department of Homeland Security, and you have a perfect recipe for inertia. More resources can help speed the process, but little will happen until Congress and the Bush administration make the problem a higher priority.

The admission of foreign students to the United States has been controversial in the past. During the cold war, the Eisenhower administration negotiated a student exchange program with the Soviet Union. Opponents argued that our Soviet enemies would misuse the student visas to send spies who would steal our scientific and industrial secrets. That did occur, but it was not the most important effect of the program.

In the first exchange in 1958, one of the students was a young Communist Party official named Aleksandr Yakovlev. He was strongly influenced by his studies of pluralism with David Truman, the Columbia political scientist. Mr. Yakovlev eventually went home to become the director of an important institute, a Politburo member, and one of the key liberalizing influences on Mikhail Gorbachev. A fellow student, Oleg Kalugin, who became a high official in the KGB, said of the visa program: 'Exchanges were a Trojan horse for the Soviet Union. They played a tremendous role in the erosion of the Soviet system. They kept infecting more and more people over the years.'

Starting in the 1950's, more than 110 American colleges and universities participated; some 50,000 Soviet academics, writers, journalists, officials and artists visited from 1958 to 1988. Imagine if the visa hawks had prevented Mr. Yakovlev and his like from entering the United States.

Balancing security risks against the political and economic benefits of admitting foreign students has always been a problem. It is now doubly difficult in a post-Sept. 11 world, but the recent enrollment decline suggest we have not yet got the balance right.

Joseph S. Nye Jr., a professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the author, most recently, of 'The Power Game: A Washington Novel.'