At the end of this month, the Immigration and Naturalization Service will begin to tighten its restrictions on international students. All foreign students in the United States will be evaluated based on criteria including the number of credit-hours they are taking at their colleges or universities. If a student is enrolled less than fulltime, he or she may be deported.
To impose a minimum requirement on credit hours is to deprive some students of time they may need to study or — more importantly — work.
Many students go to school parttime so they can work to pay for tuition or living expenses. If a student’s home is in another country, these expenses are compounded. Not only can a student from Ohio go home for the weekends with little or no expense, he can get mom and dad to pay for his laundry and groceries while he’s there. A commuter student whose family lives in the Columbus area is likely to have even more financial support from his family. An international student, on the other hand, has to save money for plane tickets home and do his own laundry, too.
On top of that, foreign students now have to worry about taking enough credits to be allowed to stay in the country. Such obligations must make the stress of being half a world away from one’s family and homeland even more difficult.
OSU allows some exceptions to the full-time rule, such as medical exemptions or allowances for language barriers and the initial adjustment to OSU and the United States. But after a few quarters, international students are expected to produce schedules with at least 12 credits or say good-bye to their student visas.
Thousands of OSU students are parttime. Apparently, all those students are U.S. citizens. There is no reason that some students be required to take more classes than others just because they are from another country. Such a regulation reeks of discrimination.
The INS’s policy is unfair not only to the 4,342 international students at OSU’s six campuses, but also to foreign students in schools across the nation.
