Global Policy Forum

By Diana Jean Schemo

As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for the last four years, Rasha Shaath, a Palestinian, learned Hebrew. She thrived in classes that made her examine her views and the troubles of her region from many angles. This summer, Ms. Shaath, 22, will move to her family's new home in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where she will don the abayya, the Saudis' mandatory covering for women, and look for work, probably as a reporter. Ms. Shaath frets less about the veil than about landing a newspaper job in a country where men and women cannot work together. She fears, on some level, the loss of the person she has become here.

"I worry about not having the kind of interaction that will allow me to remember what I gained in my education and use it," said Ms. Shaath, who completed a bachelor's degree in history and Middle Eastern studies.

She worries, too, that the critical reflexes she sharpened here may be misinterpreted as disloyalty back home. "That can get dangerous, if I allow myself to become too much of an outsider," Ms. Shaath said.

At campuses across the United States, foreign students like Ms. Shaath are facing commencement not only as a new beginning but also with anxiety, tension and divided loyalties. Families in home countries beckon, while graduates juggle questions that their American classmates need never consider: Will the distant, perhaps less developed, economy they left have a place for them? How will they adapt after immersion in American college life? Is it safe to go home? Are they ready?

The share of American undergraduate freshmen who are nonresident foreigners has tripled over the last 30 years, according to the annual freshman survey by the University of California at Los Angeles. The Institute of International Education estimates that students from abroad now represent 515,000 of the 14.5 million students attending institutions of higher education in the United States, an increase of nearly 5 percent over the last year alone. More than half the foreign students come from Asia; most earn degrees for careers in business, engineering and computer science.

After spending the four years of transition to early adulthood away from their countries, with finances often limiting visits back, graduates can have trouble feeling at home anywhere, said Kathy Bellows, who oversees international students and scholars at Georgetown University. Graduation from college shakes an international student's sense of identity and place, Ms. Bellows said.

Though foreigners are courted by universities eager to broaden their profiles — and for the full, out-of- state tuition they typically fork over — the welcome mat often frays when they turn to the United States' job market as graduates. In order to extend their student visas for a year of "practical experience," foreigners must get a job in their field of study, and some companies flatly refuse their résumés. The graduates who hope to settle here permanently try to gauge a prospective employer's willingness to sponsor them for a long-term work visa. As a result, such students cannot take time off to explore the United States or relax after four years of college, said Kath-Ann Gerhardt, associate dean of international students and scholars at the University of California at Davis.

"Your final year as an undergraduate can be very stressful," Ms. Gerhardt said, "but it's an additional layer of concern that international students face."

Jelena Bosanoc of Belgrade felt the constraints of her situation most keenly in early May. On the day her parents were to leave Belgrade for Budapest, the nearest American embassy that would give them a visa to attend her graduation, her father suffered a fatal stroke.

While her classmates planned extended post-graduation travels, Ms. Bosanoc, a Georgetown University senior, could not go home for her father's funeral. Her student visa would have expired in her absence, and her work visa for her new job at Goldman, Sachs was not yet done.

"I was ready to go home and beg the authorities to just let me back," Ms. Bosanoc said. "But my mom even said, `This is not what your dad would want you to do.' "

Aycan Demirhan, a graduate from Istanbul, said two things preoccupied her during her years at Virginia: her family and her immigration status. She said she felt herself a prisoner of these twin worries, particularly when a catastrophic earthquake struck Turkey two years ago.

And when Samer Saadeh, a Beirut- born Virginia senior, took his diploma in early May, he draped the Lebanese flag over his black gown so relatives in Lebanon could pick him out from the sea of graduates on the university's live Web cast.

Alexandre Venot, a 23-year-old at Georgetown who is getting his degree in finance and management, likens the prospect of returning to his family in France to a reverse acculturation, the opposite of his adaptation to American life. He is searching for a job to extend his visa, and hopes for something that will offer moral, more than monetary, satisfaction. Vaguely, he thinks it may be time to reconnect with his homeland.

"I'm a very different person from when I left my home country," Mr. Venot said. "To make myself feel better, I say I'm a citizen of the world, but I don't feel comfortable anywhere. Maybe if I go to Spain and you ask me in three years, I'll say I feel Spanish."

While some students hope to settle in the United States permanently, others plan to return home, but not yet.

Ms. Demirhan, who studied psychology and economics, estimates that she needs a decade working in this country to secure a job back home at the vice-presidential level, crucial if she hopes to influence decisions in Turkey's tradition-bound, hierarchical culture. She will start work at Credit Suisse-First Boston in New York this summer, and figures "they'll have to see something really magical in me" to sponsor her for a work visa.

Astari Daenuwy, an Indonesian student at the University of Virginia, also scoured job fairs and the Internet for an opening. Given her country's political and economic turmoil, she said, "If I go home, I can't really do anything with what I have now." Recruiters from multinational consulting firms were delighted to learn that Ms. Daenuwy, whose English is fluent and unaccented, spoke Indonesian. Once she revealed she was Indonesian, however, their interest dimmed. "But you do have friends in your major," she remembers one recruiter suggesting. "We'd love to hear from them."

Her only offer came from the nonprofit U.S.-Indonesia Society, based in Washington. Ms. Daenuwy has until fall to persuade her new bosses to sponsor her for a six-year work visa, of which the Immigration and Naturalization Service issues only 195,000 a year. Aside from the considerable paperwork sponsorship entails, it also costs an employer more than $1,000 in government fees.

For Mr. Saadeh, whose family lives in Geneva, the senior-year job hunt proved disillusioning. The friendliness and sense of inclusion that opened him up as an undergraduate fell away, with recruiters from several companies declining résumés from international students. He eventually landed a job with Dell Computer, which, with the technology sector's downturn, fell through just before graduation.

Ms. Shaath, who hopes to attend graduate school in Chicago, at first expected to feel bitter about her parents' insistence that she spend a year with them in Jeddah. When she left for college, they feared she would fall in love with her independence and never return. Now, she says she wants to go home.

"I'm attached to my family and roots," Ms. Shaath said. "I think if I stayed on for graduate school now, I'd definitely lose a part of myself."

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