First Things First: Kirkland Hall, What is Your Policy?
Note:
Good morning, my fellow Commodores; good morning, Kirkland Hall.
As we embark on a new academic year, we set ourselves new agendas and consider what is best for this Vanderbilt community. I have but one question: Kirkland Hall, what is your foreign policy?
Vanderbilt’s international students comprise about 9 – 12% of the student body depending on class [1]. However, I believe that Kirkland Hall has done far from its best in treating this group of fellow Commodores. I attempt to explain Vanderbilt’s history of international student policies through two aspects: economic policies and COVID policies, revealing its neglect and mistreatment of their own students. This comes from official figures & statistics as well as year of personal experience.
Economics
The status of international students’ financial aid scheme is drastically different than that of domestic students, and Vanderbilt administration has persisted in keeping it quiet and low. While Vanderbilt boasts its need-blind Opportunity Vanderbilt financial aid program, the caveat for its international students is hidden under the fine print. If you were to go to the official webpage of Opportunity Vanderbilt [2], your eyes easily can catch words and numbers such as “best”, “#1”, and “your ability to pay is not part of the admission decision”, which explains the term “need-blind financial aid” in plain English. International students’ financial aid policy-making, however, are made on a “need-aware” basis. Well, what does that mean? This is where the word game begins. If you are curious enough to click into the “international cost and finances” section, you would find a word block that says [3],
Vanderbilt University offers need-based scholarships to a limited number of international undergraduate applicants. If you indicate on your application for admission that you are seeking need-based assistance, the admission decision will be made on a need-aware basis. Applications from international citizens who apply for need-based assistance will be reviewed among all international applicants seeking need-based assistance, and will be chosen based on an evaluation of academic qualities, leadership and community engagement, financial need, and availability of resources.
In plain English it means one thing — asking for financial aid will impact your admission decision. Although Vanderbilt’s website did not spell that out, the meaning of a “need-aware” admission policy is clearly explained in Crimson Education [4], Union College [5], and Brown University [6].
Well, what does the results say? For the undergraduate population in general, 65% of students are on financial aid per official website [7]. When it comes to international students, the administration again plays you the number game: according to the official website, for international student admitted for Fall 2022, Vanderbilt “offered need-based aid and/or merit scholarships to 79 students” [8]. Well what does that mean? I’ll skip the math, but if we are assuming these statistics and 1,600 students per class and 10% international student rate, this means less than 50% of international students are on aid, but this figure exceeds 72% for domestic students. Combined with the 2023 Senior Survey [9] that more about 10% of students have annual household incomes exceeding $1,000,000 (and therefore probably will not receive any aid), it means that almost all domestic students are on aid, but only less than half of international students are on aid. This is the consequence of need-aware admissions — international students simply dare not to ask for aid for fear they will be rejected, and thus Vanderbilt does not offer them aid because the international students have already “waived their rights”. How good it is to be the athlete and the referee at the same time. In other words, for domestic students, being on aid is a guaranteed right; for international students, it is an absolute privilege.
It’s therefore sarcastically, pathetically, but understandingly saddening that my domestic classmates immediately assume that my family must be swimming in cash when I tell them that I’m not on financial aid. While I don’t mind being a Crazy Rich Asian if I get to choose, the reality of me and my family paying the full price tag for Vanderbilt’s education is a result of Kirkland Hall’s policy. And Kirkland Hall doesn’t want the majority to know the policy. I remember in the Spring Break of 2017 when my parents flew to the United States to go on a college visit road trip with me. We walked on Vanderbilt territory and we feel relieved that this university might financially support my education. My mother raised her hand during the information session to make sure that she is not dreaming. The admissions counselor was puzzled at the question and said that he is not well-informed on international students’ policy and suggested to talk afterwards. It turns out he knew; he just doesn’t want to say it in front of everyone else.
The consequence that international students are not on financial aid is also impactful. Many other financial aid programs at Vanderbilt that does not require citizenship or green-card status, such as Experience Vanderbilt fund [10] or the Adriel Beneza graduate school equity fund [11], are all contingent on the applying student being already on University financial aid. Although the intent of the design is noble, that we should focus funds on those who really need them, it hurts international students as a group that needs these funds more but are also ruled out by eligibility. Kirkland Hall essentially created its own “poverty trap”, and well-intentioned student organizations became its complicit without even knowing it.
In addition to deflecting the problem as a “rules” problem (and not discussing who made the rules), Kirkland Hall also try to “blame the victim” by making it an international students’ own problem. This is best illustrated in the 2019 Provost’s Dinner at Gillette House, where I had the opportunity to sit with the same table and asked questions to the then Provost, Dr. Susan Wente. Very plainly, I asked why can’t the international students enjoy the same policy as the domestic students. Dr. Wente dodged the question. And then I got a chance to ask another question. Very plainly I asked Dr. Wente again to answer the question. I couldn’t recall the exact words, but she said something on the lines that “we cannot offer international student need-blind aid because there are not enough endowment and donations from international alumnus. If there are enough donations, we will offer the same policy.”
I’m not sure where to begin to comment on this — by this logic, Opportunity Vanderbilt itself should never be conceptualized. When Chancellor Nick Zeppos initialized this program in 2008, there weren’t enough endowment either: in 2008 the university had less than 4 billion dollars of endowment, while it has more than 10 billion today [12]. It took one great chancellor and thousands of alumnus that were willing to follow to make this program happen, although there weren’t enough funds at the time. Opportunity Vanderbilt’s own history suggests that policymaking doesn’t happen after the silver spoon is already fed into mouth, but it’s rather a hard-fought battle with dedication and unparalleled teamwork. By phrasing it as an issue of the previous international alumnus — especially considering Vanderbilt would not have had much international students in the previous decades — the administration is not considering its role and responsibility in its own policymaking.
Closing the gap, most importantly, wouldn’t be as challenging as one can imagine. Although the current disparity between percentage of international and domestic students on financial aid is large, the actual number isn’t quite as large since the international student population is still relatively small. Again I’ll skip the math, but if Vanderbilt were to put the same percentage of international students on aid as their domestic peers, all Kirkland Hall needs to do is offer 35 additional aid packages to international students every year. That’s it. If the need-blind admissions policy were to be extended to international students and equal rights were to be achieved, it would only cost Kirkland Hall 35 more packages per year. In incoming classes of 1,600 students. The majority of Ivy League schools have the same financial aid policies regardless of citizenship, namely, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and soon Brown, which will join beginning with the Class of 2029 [13]. The other three ivies — Columbia, Penn, and Cornell, although also conducts financial aid policy based on citizenship, they all have a significantly larger undergraduate population than Vanderbilt and thus filling the gap might be more difficult [14, 15, 16]. So again, it’s really Kirkland Hall’s choice of which batch do we want ourselves to belong to. Vanderbilt claims to be cosmopolitan, diverse, and welcoming to students all around the world and that’s all good lip service; what concrete actions does Kirkland Hall have to support its claims?
COVID
This section discusses a part of Vanderbilt’s history that only a minority of the current student body have experienced. Thus, it is more important to tell it now so we do not forget how Vanderbilt treated its own international students in during the pandemic. It is, as Vanderbilt’s own propaganda book title suggested, A Year Like No Other.
When the pandemic hit, each university have to respond quickly and hopefully correctly. Therefore, one should not be completely judgmental with the present hindsight, now that we know what is exactly the right thing to do in response to COVID. Vanderbilt, however, did not only made one bad decision but multiple bad decisions against the international student community, including being anti-global education, Nashville-centric, and creating unnecessary additional financial burdens.
During the Summer of 2020, many U.S. universities actively cooperated with universities around the world so that students are not bound to the home university to receive a quality education. Many other U.S. Universities worked around the clock to struck deals with universities worldwide that summer to allow their students to study away at partner universities. For example, New York Universities’ Go Local program allowed students to study at any of the NYU campuses worldwide [17]; Cornell University offered ten “study-away” universities around the world for students [18]; Tufts University not only provided study-away option for international students, but also provided domestic students the opportunity to study at another U.S. institution [19].
Vanderbilt chose to do nothing. Well… that’s not completely accurate: Kirkland Hall suspended all 150+ study-abroad programs in Fall 2020 (and subsequently Spring 2021 [20]) and achieved study-away deals with zero international universities [21]. Students must choose Vanderbilt: it’s just a matter of in-person, remote, or leave of absence. In-person, given the situation was 2020, was extremely difficult for most international students. Leave of absence sounds like a good option, but that would mean losing the visa and student status, while the Embassy at the time is shut down as well. This means that choosing taking a leave of absence risk not being to return at Vanderbilt at all. So, international students are resorted to remote learning. Although study-abroad programs are always a Vanderbilt highlight, it is especially important during COVID because it eases stress of traveling, quarantine requirements, and time zone differences.
And here goes Vanderbilt’s second policy: regardless of where students study remotely, they must adapt to Nashville’s Central Time Zone [22].
To that I say: what a piece of garbage.
While this does not impact domestic student that much — even for the Alaska and Hawaii students, they can register for Nashville afternoon courses to adjust the time difference — this comes as a devastating blow to international students, especially those who studied remotely in East Asia. Time difference there was around 10 – 14 hours, meaning Nashville’s 8am – 5pm instructional time equals 8pm – 5am there, give or take two hours. Vanderbilt essentially asked its international students to flip their sleep rhythm and pull all nighters every single night, and thus completely detached from their local community because they would be catching up sleep during the day. Some might say one can combat this by just watching at recordings. This comes with two issues: first, this essentially reduces a $25,000-per-semester tuition to some Zoom recordings; second, some professors chose not to record their lectures at all, most notoriously the mathematics department [23]. My most vivid memory was attending a required class held at Thursday 2am – 5am (NOT pm) with no recordings. I was on my 6th cup of coffee by 3am, my body was falling apart and I am very close to fainting. The professor proceeded to divide us into discussion groups and expected us to use the next 30 minutes to discuss a reading that talks about “caring for students”. None of this would have happened with a more empathetic policy.
But for the international students who stayed, Vanderbilt took a literal toll on them too. In any other given year, staying in the on-campus accommodation throughout winter break is free of charge; all one needed to do is to sign up on OHARE and it would be enough. Not the case for the winter of 2020. Vanderbilt announced that although international students are permitted to stay over winter break, “student remaining in housing over the [winter] break will be charged a daily rate” [24]. My question is simple: WHY? In the same announcement, it made clear that most domestic students must go home for that winter break. Since it is not economic nor feasible for international students to travel back to their home country in Winter 2020 due to COVID restrictions and suspended air travels, why didn’t Vanderbilt follow precedent and provide free student housing to those who need it the most? What is so special about that winter, that they decide to monetize that winter (and thus to a specific group of students) but not any other winter? If there are real reasons behind this decisions, why aren’t they openly communicated? Again, I do not know, and Kirkland Hall never bothered to tell its students why. And, yes, it’s not “their students”, they deserve “its students”… for now.
Closing Thoughts
From a regional university to a national powerhouse, Vanderbilt’s journey for the past 150 years is nothing but epic. The next step, in my mind, is to maintain its national competitiveness and build capacity to become a global university for education, teaching, and research. While this University is ranked #13 nationwide according to U.S. News [25], its global ranking is a measly #78 [26] and plummets to #264 under a more euro-centric QS ranking system [27]. What this suggests is that Vanderbilt has done a brilliant job to its domestic students; the next step necessarily involves improving its international prestige, and that must start with policy shifts towards its own international students. Kirkland Hall perhaps would like its international graduates leave West End with good memories of this institutions, rather than mistreatment and discrimination. Positive change can start with reforming larger-scale policies like financial aid, admissions, international student composition and more systemic support, but it can also start with the small things, such as reframing training on the international student VUceptors (called IOLs), have international students represent their share of content on social medias such as official news, Instagram, and LinkedIn, or simply stop moving the International Students Scholar Services office every single year to increasingly smaller and more remote rooms around campus (don’t even get me started on this). I think at the end of the day, policies are embodiments of attitudes: how does Kirkland Hall envision its relationship to its own international student body?
Administrators, the choice is yours. I am all ears.
References
[2] https://admissions.vanderbilt.edu/affordability/opportunity-vanderbilt/
[3] https://admissions.vanderbilt.edu/affordability/international-costs-and-finances/
[4] https://www.crimsoneducation.org/uk/blog/full-ride-scholarships-international-students/
[5] https://www.union.edu/admissions/school-counselors/resources/needblind-needaware
[6] https://finaid.brown.edu/basics/financial-need-eligibility/need-blind
[7] https://www.vanderbilt.edu/about/quick-facts/
[8] https://admissions.vanderbilt.edu/affordability/international-costs-and-finances/
[9] https://vanderbilthustler.com/2023/08/21/class-of-2023-the-senior-survey/
[10] https://www.vanderbilt.edu/experience-vanderbilt/faq/
[11] https://vanderbilthustler.com/2020/01/17/vsg-introduces-adriel-bineza-graduate-school-equity-fund/
[12] https://finance.vanderbilt.edu/accounting/documents/2021_VU_Financial_Report.pdf
[13] https://www.crimsoneducation.org/uk/blog/need-blind-vs-need-aware/
[14] https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/cornell-university-2711/student-life
[15] https://www.univstats.com/colleges/university-of-pennsylvania/student-population
[16] https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/columbia-university-2707
[17] https://shanghai.nyu.edu/returntocampus2020/returning-undergraduate-students
[18] https://global.cornell.edu/about/advocacy/study-away
[20] https://vanderbilthustler.com/2020/09/28/vanderbilt-suspends-all-spring-2021-study-abroad-programs/
[21] https://www.vanderbilt.edu/healthwellness/2020/05/15/may-15-2020-fall-2020-study-abroad-suspended/
[22] https://www.vanderbilt.edu/healthwellness/2020/10/07/spring-2021-plans/
[24] https://www.vanderbilt.edu/healthwellness/2020/10/07/spring-2021-plans/
[25] https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/vanderbilt-3535
[26] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/vanderbilt-university-221999
[27] https://www.topuniversities.com/universities/vanderbilt-university