It’s strange now, living without the fear of being kicked out of the country. This was my situation for so long that it became a sort of routine, biannual anxiety attack.
Every few months for the past decade, I would be wrought with nervousness. I knew that the life I had built here could be uprooted, my aspirations of being a filmmaker might have to be put on hold, and the work I had done establishing myself in the United States could be lost.
I wanted to be self-sufficient, in charge of my own destiny. I didn’t want for my parents to have to pay for my schooling; they were having a hard enough time just getting by.
As a Jamaican native, I came to the United States at age seventeen to study music in Chicago for my undergraduate degree. From when I stepped out of the airport at O’Hare in 2008 up until I got my green card in 2019, I lived in the United States under the F-1 Student Visa, a legal status that was contingent on me continuing schooling in the United States.
I consider myself a good student and an upstanding citizen. I did my part, obeyed the law, even graduated magna cum laude—twice. But there’s one element of schooling that made the threat of leaving the United States and returning to Jamaica real: university tuition, which in my case topped $30,000 a year.
For years, faced with this enormous cost, I heard the same thing over and over again: Get a loan. College is expensive for everyone, U.S. citizens included. Many students do get loans to pay for tuition, then spend decades paying them off.
OK, fine, I thought. I just need to go to Wells Fargo or Sallie Mae and get a loan through those channels. But, as it turns out, that’s easier said than done.
In order to get a loan from a private institution, most international students must have their student loan cosigned by a U.S. citizen or permanent resident with very good credit. Like me, most international students who come over here don’t know many people willing to put their credit on the line for someone who’s neither family nor a close friend.
In fact, according to statista.com, only .2 percent of foreign students in the United States reported that they pay tuition this way.
So a loan wasn’t an option for me. I had to somehow find a way to pay for school out of pocket, working to help pay off my tuition. I wanted to be self-sufficient, in charge of my own destiny. I didn’t want for my parents to have to pay for my schooling; they were having a hard enough time just getting by.
International students are generally not allowed to work off-campus while studying at most universities or colleges. Furthermore, I was required to enroll in a minimum of three classes, which is difficult for someone who has to work to pay off the more than $30,000 in annual tuition fees.
On-campus jobs are great and definitely do help, but the majority of them don’t pay very well. The first college I attended was Elmhurst College in Illinois in 2008. I worked a job in the media department that paid $8.50 an hour. I was able to work just two days a week without work colliding with my classes.
How did I afford tuition? My parents back home in Jamaica paid out of pocket for not only the $30,000 owed every year, but also the majority of my living expenses, and it hurt them hard financially.
It is too difficult to stay afloat as an international student in the United States of America.
International students make up 5.5 percent of the total U.S. student population but typically account for nearly 30 percent of the revenue at public universities. Nearly all of these students are in the United States on a student visa. Most are here on an F-1 visa, which is for nonimmigrants who are in the country to complete an academic course of study.
But here’s the thing: Of the 1.1 million international students who enroll every year at U.S colleges, almost 60 percent report that their primary source of funding is from personal finances or help from family. About 38 percent say they are being helped through employment or through university grants and scholarships.
Interestingly, international students contribute $45 billion to the U.S. economy every year.
At my second college, the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale in Florida, where I studied film, I didn’t work at all as the campus was only a single building and on-campus jobs were almost nonexistent. Once more, my parents paid out of pocket. Tuition here was significantly less than Elmhurst, but still enough to make their financial situation uncomfortable.
Finally, in grad school at the University of Miami, where I studied for my Master of Fine Arts in film, I worked as both a teacher’s assistant and a creative marketer for a firm. The teacher’s assistant program helped me a lot, cutting my tuition in half, but at that point my parents were so financially marred from paying off my previous two colleges, even $20,000 a year was too steep. But they helped anyway, and I was able to complete my final degree.
Without a doubt, I wish I could have helped more from my end through a full-time, well-paying job, but that wasn’t an option for me, though I did consider one pathway during my time at the University of Miami. One way for international students to work off-campus is a program called “curricular practical training.” It allows those with student visas to work off-campus jobs related to their field of study. But this program can be done only after at least one academic year of full-time study, which isn’t helpful when you’re only in year one and your tuition is due.
And what if you are able to find a way to make it to graduation after somehow coming up with the money for the two to six years this requires? Unless you have a work visa, another college lined up to attend, or got married during school, you’re going back home.
Getting a visa through work is difficult, as most companies don’t wish to sponsor international students. Going to school constantly is expensive and leaves you with more years of anxiety ahead. Getting married, well, it’s the quickest way to permanent residency but it’s contingent on meeting someone who wants to marry you in a bona fide way.
What happened to me? I got married in graduate school to the love of my life. I wasn’t seeking it. I wasn’t commissioning people to marry me to get a green card. I was planning on seeking a second curricular practical training and to work my butt off to get a work visa. But then I met my wife in 2016, during my second year of grad school, and the rest is history.
I got lucky. Very lucky. Most international students study here, work here, pay taxes here, and have aspirations beyond college in the United States, only to be told, in the end, that they have to leave. It’s a broken system that raises roadblocks for these students, and dangles the American dream in their faces before mercilessly yanking it away.