WASHINGTON: US Assistant Secretary of State for Education and Cultural Cooperation Marie Royce has encouraged Pakistani students to consider the United States as their number one destination for higher education.

Addressing a webinar arranged by the Pakistan Embassy on Wednesday, she assured those who want to study in this country that the United Sates would continue to welcome students from Pakistan.

The United States, she said, was committed to enhancing educational cooperation with Pakistan and urged both sides to continue to work together to achieve greater successes.

Ambassador Asad Khan told the audience that education was “the brightest spot and the glorious chapter in the history of Pakistan-US bilateral relations”. He said that the number of Pakistani students in the US, which had reduced significantly over the past few years, had now resurged to over 8000.

Such assurances, however, did not redress the uncertainty created by the Trump administration’s decision, ann­ounced earlier this week, to ask foreign students to leave the country if their institutions were only offering online classes. America’s two best educational institutions, Harvard and MIT, have challenged the decision in a federal court.

At the embassy’s webinar, a number of students raised this issue but did not get a satisfactory answer.

The US State Department, however, has issued a statement, saying that international students who had planned to study this fall in the United States “may still have the opportunity to do so”. The statement noted that the US Department of Homeland Security had announced its plan for temporary modifications to F-1 and M-1 non-immigrant visa requirements for the fall 2020 semester.

“This will allow a mixture of both in-person and some online coursework to meet the requirements for non-immigrant student status,” the statement added.

The State Department said that the new restrictions were a “temporary accommodation” that provided “greater flexibility for non-immigrant students to continue their education in the United States, while also allowing for proper social distancing on open and operating campuses”.

The department reminded international students that they still had to obtain the appropriate visa and may still be subject to other visa processing or travel restrictions due to Covid-19.

Dr Tariq Banuri, Chairman of Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission, told the webinar that US universities and institutions had played “a significant role in helping Pakistan to strengthen its higher education domain”.

The webinar was divided into two panels — the first was devoted to Challenges and Opportunities in Educational Cooperation. Lisa Heller, a representative of the US Embassy, Islamabad, Rita Akhtar of the US Education Foundation, Dr Farhat Haq of American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and Atif Qarni, Secretary for Education, Virginia, addressed this panel.

The second panel covered the impact of Covid-19 on bilateral educational cooperation. It featured prominent educationists, including Dr Adil Najam of Boston University, Raza Rumi from Cornell, Dr Ali Khan of LUMS, Dr Furrukh Khan of LUMS and Saeed Shafqat from FC College, Lahore.

Published in Dawn, July 10th, 2020