Colleges weighed the dangers of reopening campuses during a pandemic with the need to generate tuition revenue, the paper suggests. The federal government threw another wrench into their fall plans when it announced that international students wouldn’t be allowed to come to the U.S. if their courses were entirely online, though it later walked back that rule to apply only to new students.
The paper uses nonresident enrollment, which includes some unauthorized immigrants, as a proxy for international students. It found schools with 7% nonresident enrollment were 19% more likely to change their reopening plans on any given day in July than colleges with 6% nonresident enrollment.
