UW-Milwaukee Officials Fear Trump’s Election May Affect International Student Enrollment

Members of the University Committee and UW-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone are worried that Donald Trump’s victory will cause a dramatic drop in the enrollment of international students at UWM.

At a meeting in which the topic came up, one professor expressed concern that Muslim students will transfer to other universities because of the election and campus climate.

In 2016, out of 26,307 undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1,503 were international students, down from 1,612 in 2015, according to the Office of Assessment and Institutional Research. But those numbers may soon change.

The results of the 2016 election have no doubt shaken the whole world, and UW-Milwaukee is no exception. The backlash is still very apparent as anti-Trump protests sparked all over the country showing how divided our country is. At the University Committee meeting last Tuesday, one of the main focal points was trying to find a solution to the worries infecting the UW-Milwaukee campus climate.

One group especially unnerved by Trump’s win is the international students on American campuses, according to Swarnjit Arora, professor of economics at UWM. College students from other countries are coming to gain knowledge highly sought after fields, such as engineering, medicine, and communication, which is beneficial to Wisconsin and UWM.

“We are communicating separately to our international students about some of the issues and concerns. Above all, beyond everything, the clear topics really deal with post-election fall out and the future,” says Chancellor Mone. “One of the biggest issues is undocumented students and students of undocumented immigrants. We saw at one of our recruitment fairs, this is one example, last week ,normally there is 300 students at an event in Korea that a number of campuses participate in, and there were 18 students at that event.”

This potential drop would put more pressure on a university such as UWM, which prides itself on its diversity and international enrollment. With the number of new students consistently dropping in recent years, including from Wisconsin schools, the lack of interest from international students may cause a lot of problems for a university already struggling with enrollment and state budget cuts.

Committee members are making the Muslim students who are worried about the election results a main focus of concern for UWM.

“I think we are mainly concerned with climate on the campus at this time. And we are concerned that the students are already really nervous, and I’m talking about a lot of Muslim students and also talking about a lot of Indian students,” Arora said. “They feel very nervous; they are tempted to transfer to other places where they feel a lot more welcome and comfortable – universities like Madison.”

Schools like UW-Madison have a history of having a larger population of international students. The University Committee agreed that the international students have expressed they feel more comfortable at universities that have a higher population of students from their own countries as a sort of “safer in large groups” approach. But they speculate that it is not just other Wisconsin universities these students may flock to.

“They may also look at different cities completely, like Chicago has said it’s going to stay a sanctuary city. Los Angeles’s mayor said he’s not going to give any police support to rounding up people to get them out of the country because they have better things to do with their time,” John Reisel, chair of the university committee said.

Reisel thinks the change of president would mainly hurt next year’s enrollment for international students. Fall is when people will be starting to make decisions about what universities are they going to apply to. By the time President-elect Trump decides his position on immigrants, it’ll be too late for people to change university plans for next year.

“If he doesn’t end up doing much in the first six months, then that may allow them to rebound pretty quickly,” Reisel said.

Plans are being discussed about how to handle this possible drop. But that doesn’t mean that faculty aren’t worried. Possibly even more worried are the faculty that specifically deal with this group of apprehensive students. The reaction of these students and the staff comes down to one word.

“Bad,” Arora says. “It would be very bad.”

“We would lose more faculty and staff positions,” John Boyland, Ph.D of Computer Science Teacher/Researcher said. “But the way we react to this is going to control educational quality and other factors, so that much we can control.”