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The number of international students enrolling in U.S. colleges is down 17% this fall compared with last year, according to early data from a report released this morning by the Institute of International Education. And while some big-name schools are seeing smaller declines — or none at all — public universities and lesser-known institutions are experiencing sharper drops. Because international students aren’t eligible for federal financial aid in the U.S., and typically pay full tuition, they help offset costs for American students.
But there are other long-term costs, too, Brandeis President Arthur Levine said. At his university, the share of international students in this year’s incoming class dropped from 17% to 12%. Levine believes the decline stems from policy changes — such as visa restrictions under the Trump administration — and a general climate of uncertainty. He worries that fewer international students today could mean fewer educated people living and working in the U.S. in the future.
“Given the threats that higher education faces in this country, if I lived abroad, I’m not sure I’d send my child to a school in the United States,” Levine told GBH’s Kirk Carapezza. You can find more on this report and what it means here.
Four Things to Know
1. Until last month, Ellen Mei worked for the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service as a program specialist in Boston. When the federal shutdown began she gave an interview to MSNBC and talked about how the shutdown might affect SNAP benefits. The next day Mei — also president of the union representing her co-workers — was fired.
Mei and her colleagues held a rally last week to protest her firing, along with the firing of federal workers at the Environmental Protection Agency and National Institute of Health fired after speaking publicly. “I want to continue working at USDA,” Mei said. “I haven’t thought about pursuing another job outside of that because I want to keep working.”
2. Northeastern University will pay the city of Boston $49 million over the next five years and has pledged to build more on-campus housing to reduce the number of students living off campus, city officials announced last week. The funds will support beautification projects in Roxbury’s Nubian Square and contribute to city housing programs, among other initiatives.
Like other non-profit universities, hospitals and public media companies (including GBH), Northeastern is not legally required to pay the same property taxes as other Boston businesses. Instead it participates in a program called Payment-In-Lieu-of-Taxes, or PILOT. (Here’s an overview of how PILOT works from GBH’s Greater Boston in 2016.)
3. A foot-long baby alligator found along the Charles River last week has found a temporary home with his rescuer: Joe Kenney of Abington, who runs wildlife education programs through his business, Joe’s Craz-zy Critters. The alligator, named Charles, is safe and healthy despite spending time in the cold.
MassWildlife investigators believe the alligator was likely a pet that either escaped or was released, even though keeping alligators or crocodiles as pets is illegal in Massachusetts. “An alligator isn’t designed to live in a fish tank,” Kenney told the Associated Press. “Really, ideally, it should be living out in the swamp in the southern United States.”
4. Brookline welcomed a new children’s book store this weekend: Turtle Books in Brookline Village. “Our mission statement is to build a community of readers,” said Bruce Jacobs, who owns the store with his wife, Kathy. “We explored some more complicated mission statements and decided to keep it simple.”
The couple has three adult children in their 20s and 30s and has noticed their reading habits shift over the years with the rise of social media. “We actually are guardians of a 12-year-old now, and it’s just changed,” Bruce Jacobs said. “It’s not just these individual kids, but we notice them and their friends. It’s just very different, especially with social media being so all-encompassing and taking up all their time. It makes it difficult for them to find time and the stamina to read.”
Making a statement, MIT’s football team dons extra head padding for safety
MIT’s football players have a new part of their game-day uniform this season: Guardian Caps, a soft cover that sits over their helmets. The idea is that these caps could help soften the blow when players hit their heads during games or at practice.
“And a lot of it, on the line, is you get a lot of the 'pop’ when you hit helmets — which, maybe objectively, [is] not a good thing,” Stephen Schulze, a defensive lineman and MIT senior, told GBH’s Esteban Bustillos. “But it’s part of the appeal. Everyone loves feeling that kind of contact. And with the Guardian Caps it’s a lot softer and you don’t hear it.”
Schulze studies biomechanical engineering and has done some research on the caps’ effectiveness. So far, there’s not much published about whether these caps can help lessen the impact of hits to the head (though a former MIT football player wrote his master’s thesis about them earlier this year.) The company that makes the caps says on its website that “no helmet, practice apparatus, or helmet pad can prevent or eliminate the risk of concussions or other serious head injuries while playing sports.”
MIT head coach Brian Bubna told Bustillos that the team’s leaders decided to make the caps mandatory at practices during the season last year, then expanded to require them during games, too.
“If it protects you in practice, then why all of a sudden on game day would you say, ‘Well, I want to have less protection on game day,’ when the action is probably more intense?” Bubna said. “And we’re really going live, tackling to the ground, which is something you don’t really do during the week once you get out of preseason.”
Now MIT players have two guardian caps: one for practices and one for game days.
“I think you’ll probably see in the next five years a lot more people wearing them,” Bubna said.
You can read Esteban Bustillos’ full story here.
Dig deeper:
-Local experts urge more guardrails for sports betting in wake of NBA scandal
-At the Head of the Charles, this rowing couple defies age and expectations
GBH Daily
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