In late 2025, I was awarded (largely to my surprise) a student research award by AIRC (The Association of International Enrollment Management) for a paper based on my dissertation research fieldwork I conducted in Taipei earlier that year. The Marjorie Peace Lenn Research Award is awarded for undergraduate and graduate student projects researching international education, student mobility (migration), and international student recruitment. It’s nothing if not affirming to see the are parties who are interested in my subject matter and my findings beyond a sole advisory committee on a small campus at a single Canadian university.

I speak from obvious personal interest here, but I think conferences (academic and professional) and students alike stand to gain from opportunities such as this one. MLP awardees receive, among other benefits, a complimentary conference registration and hotel stay—making AIRC a frankly rare case of student conference participants being meaningfully compensated for their contributions rather than having to pay to contribute at such venues. It's much more often the case that student researchers seek feedback and mentorship, as well as present their before to potentially interested parties, at a sufficient expense to themselves that those who study on meager stipends or work to support themselves face significant barriers to accessing what should be fruitful academic and professional development opportunities. At industry and professional conferences, the issue is considerably magnified: Professionals and students mutually benefit from opportunities to share industry-relevant research, so hefty registration fees and the costs of travel and accommodation both limit what professionals can learn and how students practice making their insights known outside the confines of the ivory tower. As such, I thank AIRC for offering opportunities such as this one, and I hope more organizations will follow suit.

For my award speech (reproduced below), I shared a few key findings from my research and focused on the relevance of Taiwanese students’ experiences to the broader situation of international higher education, especially in the US (where AIRC is based). The transcript below is my best attempted reproduction of my award speech, as my tendency is to come in with a script and then improvise considerably. In addition to the text of the speech itself, I have further contextualized my speech with some footnotes and references, as I am wont to do.

Hello, everyone. Big crowd today—in spite of flight delays and everything. I’m glad to see it.

First of all, I’m immensely grateful for the opportunity to receive this award. I would like to thank Clay Harmon, the Marjorie Peace Lenn Award selection committee, and AIRC as a whole for the opportunity to share my research on how international students are navigating these exceptionally unpredictable times we’re living in.

I owe my gratitude to many other people as well. No social science research project would be complete without the social element, would it?

I thank Li Hsuan, my research assistant, for supplementing my fieldwork through her on-the-ground contributions and her diligence. I thank my interviewees—students, university faculty and staff, and international education consultants in Taipei—without whom this research wouldn’t have been possible.

I owe particular thanks to my colleague Morris Chen for lending her industry insights—and for suggesting we find out whether AIRC might be interested in my research. I’d say that turned out well.

I’ll also note that my fieldwork study was supported in part by grant funding from UBC. (Grant funding is a much-coveted resource among graduate students, as you might know.) The study was also supported in less material but equally important ways by my supervisor Dr. Manfred Elfstrom, my dissertation committee, my partner, my family, my cats who regularly reminded me to take breaks, and many others.

To the point, then. As I hope we all understand, students who are planning to go abroad these days have a fiendishly complex set of decisions to make, not the least as many popular destinations countries are rewriting their immigration policies with respect to international students as part of a broader turn against immigration. In many countries of origin, the calculus of pursuing another degree at home is growing more complicated, too. My field research in Taiwan earlier this year certainly demonstrates that much.(1) There’s much that’s unique about the country yet at least as much that Taiwan’s case can inform us about wider developments in the field of international higher education.

In many ways, the ground has shifted beneath the feet of recent graduates in Taiwan today. Taiwanese study exchanges with the US date back to the Cold War and have been persistent ever since. But whereas their parents moved to the US for academic and political freedom, present university students and recent graduates are facing degree inflation at home; they’re facing wages that aren’t keeping up with rising costs of living.(2, 3) Outside the semiconductor and electronics industries, many students I interviewed feel their job prospects look rather bleak. It’s not their parents’ job market, or their international education market, anymore. Not unlike students in the other former Asian Tiger economies and Japan, Taiwanese students are hitting a hard ceiling whereas their parents, at their age, were soaring. As my research assistant once put it when we were discussing her own plans to go abroad, “If I’m running away from anything, it’s the competitive attitude.” (In Taiwan, that is.)

Worse still, these recent graduates can no longer be certain that earning their next degree in the US is their best option, frankly. Look at the tuition costs here. Look at universities’ budget cuts. Look at, well, the politics. In their parents’ Cold War context, talent from allied countries was largely welcome here.(4) Now, even that’s up in the air, with the OPT program on the chopping block and H-1B visas under unprecedented attack.(5)

So, how are students navigating this unpredictability? This is mainly where my research comes in. What I found, primarily, is that students’ advisors and their sources of support are critical as they decide where or whether to go abroad. That history of transnational Taiwan-US ties means a number of parents or relatives live or have lived in the US, and they can do much to help students prepare—but they may also prefer to the US, or even a favorite state or their alma mater, over perfectly good alternatives. Meanwhile, students who lack these social resources—or who’ve become more risk averse—are increasingly paying consultants*(6)* and attending study-abroad expositions to learn what other options they have. They’re looking for answers.

Crucially, too, these advisors and supporters aren’t neutral recommenders. (I don’t think anyone is.) Agents and consultants can and sometimes do offer personalized advice, but other times, canned recommendations point students to the usual universities based on QS [Quacquarelli Symonds] and THE [Times Higher Education] rankings.(7) Even informal advisors, like friends who’ve done a semester abroad, wear certain blinders as they do their best to give advice. Ultimately, as advisors introduce some options, they foreclose on others. They support students in changing their lives, but they steer students’ futures, too.

This is where our responsibility comes in. The stakes and arguably the risks of going abroad are growing more serious. Indeed, if even Taiwanese students are reconsidering coming to the US—and I’ve talked with students who are—I take that to be a dire sign for our industry as a whole. In light of this, the international enrollment management field needs agents who are self-made experts, always learning. They need to have timely information for students. They need to keep up with rapid policy changes. They need to put students’ interests first. University staff and administrators, for their part, can do all of this and continue to stress to policymakers the value of continued exchanges for all countries involved. Ideally, universities can advocate for more rational, less disruptive immigration policies and better funding to support students, not just take what the current administration is unilaterally offering to them.(8)

I know these are incredibly challenging times for those of us who educate and serve students, too. I know just as well that there’s no international higher education without international students, no us without them.(9) So, I hope we can all take students’ concerns to heart and rise to the challenge. Thank you.

Notes:

1. In Taiwan, the choice to undertake a Master’s or other graduate programs is a fraught one. Degree inflation has seriously impacted the value (on the job market) of undergraduate degrees, and the same could become true of graduate degrees. Further, there are ongoing concerns about graduate program fees, lengths, and an apparent revolving door between academia and politics which is not conducive to careful research mentorship. Sources (in addition to my interviewees):

   1. Peng, Shi-Shu, Chung-Cheng Lin, and Hsiao-Pei Lin. 2022. “Degree inflation: Why do more college graduates pursue a master’s degree in Taiwan?” Taipei Economic Inquiry 58(1): 107-34.
   2. Taipei Times. Sept. 2, 2022. “Taiwan’s higher education in crisis.” Page 8. https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2022/09/02/2003784593.
      
      

2. See again Peng et al. 2022.
   
   

3. The soaring cost of living in Taipei especially is a well-known phenomenon among Taiwanese. For an insightful overview of the socioeconomic distress Taiwanese young adults are facing, see: Keyser-Verreault, Amélie. 2025. “Lying flat in Taiwan: Young people’s alternative life choices in a post-developmentalist era.” Critical Asian Studies 1–21. doi:10.1080/14672715.2025.2474510.
   
   

4. Taiwanese international students and scientists in the US were subject to surveillance and espionage by both the ruling Nationalist Party (KMT) and by US authorities, sometimes in concert with each other—but broadly, they were still welcome to develop their skills and contribute their talent in the US. For an in-depth history, see Wendy Cheng’s book Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism (2023, University of Washington Press).
   
   

5. The Optional Practical Training (OPT) program provides students on F-1 visas with up to 12 months’ work authorization, during or after their studies, in jobs related to their field of study. The H-1B is the primary work visa for foreign workers in the US. See this Yahoo article for an example of the recent politicization of these programs (especially the OPT) during the second Trump administration.
   
   

6. This assumes students in Taiwan are able to afford access to study-abroad consultancies. I have interviewed students who have attested to themselves or others paying (in New Taiwan Dollars) five-six figure sums, equivalent to hundreds or thousands in USD, for these consultants’ services.
   
   

7. Study-abroad consultants, university recruiters, and other professionals in the international higher education (IHE) industry have vested interests in promoting the legitimacy of these international ranking systems, which of course broadly center on Western institutional priorities and metrics for success: Brankovic, Jelena, Leopold Ringel, and Tobias Werron. 2022. “Spreading the Gospel: Legitimating University Rankings as Boundary Work.” Research Evaluation 31(4): 463–74. doi:10.1093/reseval/rvac035.
   
   

8. A productive early step would be for more higher education institutions (HEIs) to sign on to mutual defense compacts, in which institutions pool their legal and financial resources to defend each other against government-initiated lawsuits and other attacks on academic freedom. See this Forbes article for details.
   
   

9. I should be frank about the underlying issue at hand here. Per my interviews with international education consultants, and per plenty of previous research and common knowledge, inadequate funding models for HEIs in many Anglophone countries have made it a common practice for institutions to treat their international students as “cash cows,” charging them anywhere from two to five times the tuition fees they charge domestic students in order to compensate for budget shortfalls. US and Canadian universities are facing massive budget cuts if not crises due to government policies reducing the number of study permits awarded (Canada) or punitively dissuading international students from coming at all (the US). The UK and New Zealand, among others, regard international higher education as an export industry in which international students pay high fees and then, for the most part, take their degrees back home with them afterward. One hopes that to the extent which advocacy for higher education makes a comeback in these countries, international students in these countries will see substantive improvements in support and reductions in their study expenses. Advocacy for international students is morally just; if that's not enough reason to advocate, international students' tuitions are also critical to the survival of HEIs under current funding schemes.