Just before the Trump administration announced on Thursday that it would bar international students from Harvard, staff members from the university’s International Office met with graduating seniors at the Kennedy School of Government, congratulating them on their degrees — and on surviving the chaos of recent months.
Chaos was breaking out again: Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, had notified Harvard that its permission to enroll international students was revoked.
With that, the degrees and futures of thousands of Harvard students — and an integral piece of the university’s identity and culture — were plunged into deep uncertainty.
At the Kennedy School, 59 percent of students come from outside the United States.
International students make up 40 percent of the enrollment at the T.H.
Staff from Harvard’s International Office met with graduating seniors at the Kennedy School of Government just before the Trump administration declared on Thursday that it would ban international students from the university. They congratulated them on their degrees and on making it through the turbulent past few months.
News alerts then flashed on the students’ phones just minutes after the meeting ended. The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, had informed Harvard that its authorization to accept international students had been withdrawn, and chaos was erupting once more. In doing so, thousands of Harvard students’ degrees and futures—a crucial component of the university’s identity and culture—were thrown into a state of profound uncertainty.
Karl Molden, a student from Vienna who had just finished his sophomore year, said, “There are so many students from all over the world who came to Harvard to make it a better place and to change America and their home countries for the better.”. It is now in danger of collapsing, which is heartbreaking. “.”.
Since Harvard president Alan M. M. Garber informed the Trump administration in April that the university would not budge from calls to alter its curriculum, hiring, and admissions procedures, the university has been the target of swift attacks. Harvard filed a lawsuit in Boston federal court after the government froze over $2 billion in grants. Since then, the university’s research funding has been completely cut by the administration, which has also caused budgetary disruptions and forced some severely impacted programs to rethink their goals.
When international enrollment is eliminated, a university that has seen steady growth in the number of international students—6,800, or more than a quarter of the total—would undergo a transformation. Graduate programs would be particularly hard hit.
At the Kennedy School, foreign-born students make up 59% of the student body. At the T, 40% of the student body consists of international students. H. thirty-five percent at Harvard Business School and the Chan School of Public Health.
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