Colleges advise some international students to return to U.S. before Trump takes office

Lisa Desjardins:

The universities are considering two factors, that president-elect Trump campaigned on again closing the U.S. to citizens of some Muslim-majority countries and that his 2017 travel ban came during his first week, sparking a logistics nightmare for some students and faculty trying to reenter the country then.

More than a dozen universities, including Harvard, Cornell, University of Massachusetts, and the University of Southern California, are now warning students to return before January 20, that’s to say, before the first week of Trump’s new term.

Ted Mitchell is the president of the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 colleges and universities.

Ted Mitchell, President, American Council on Education: I think that there is expectation, we share it, that there will be some kind of travel ban early in the administration, maybe as early as the first week, through executive order.

And campuses are suggesting that students return early so that they won’t be wrapped up either in the travel ban specifically or in just the general chaos that we saw that happened the last time we had travel bans.