Cancelled Flights, Visa Snags As India, China Students Try To Reach US

For those that don't opt for charter flights, the ever-changing circumstances of the pandemic make it hard to game out when fares might be most affordable.

Students from around the world are eager to study at U.S. colleges in the upcoming fall semester after the Covid-19 pandemic confined many of them to their home countries and left some attending virtual classes in the wee hours of the morning. Now, getting to campus is the hard part. In China, which accounts for a third of the roughly 1 million foreign students that flock to the U.S. in a typical academic year, the decline in available flights to American cities has been so severe that some students and their parents have resorted to lining up charter planes. Others, including from India, are caught up in visa purgatory because the State Department reduced personnel at embassies and consulates due to the pandemic. And that's to say nothing of fast-changing Covid-19 vaccine guidelines. It all adds up to tangle of challenges that has created uncertainty for students and a potential headache for schools that are looking to blunt last year's sharp drop in international enrollment and the attending financial hit.