(Bloomberg) -- Harvard and the U.S. struck a deal in their dispute over visas for foreign students who take online-only classes, ending a tense standoff that could have sent thousands of students back to their home countries and left colleges scrambling to plan for the fall.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs on Tuesday announced that the U.S. had agreed with Harvard and MIT to rescind a new policy requiring the students to take at least one in-person class.
The hearing followed a separate lawsuit by 17 states states and a dozen “friend of the court” briefs filed in support of the Harvard suit from hundreds of universities and some of the country’s largest tech companies.
Harvard is conducting almost all its classes online in the fall semester, while MIT has a hybrid model. The two said in their suit that the government had failed to consider the harm to students from the new directive. They also noted the impact on businesses, pointing to the role foreign students play in American innovation, and on the U.S. gross domestic product, citing “the loss of the tens of billions of dollars that international students contribute to U.S. GDP each year.”
They acknowledged that some students could, in theory, take part in online classes from their home countries, but not without serious disruption. They cited time zone differences, unreliable or state-managed Internet and armed conflict in some of the students’ homelands.
The new policy has also stirred widespread concern at colleges that reap billions of dollars in revenue from international students each year at a time when some schools are issuing refunds over closures amid the pandemic and as public university systems see decreased state funding.
(Updates with details)
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