Story by Hannah Towey
Simrit Ahuja and her family in Faridabad, India, have been saving money to pay for a top-ranked MBA program for five years. Ahuja’s dad owns a local department store chain where she works as the head of marketing. Her main responsibility: taking the 30-year-old business online, a high-stakes transition that could determine the future of the company.
A master’s in business administration would allow Ahuja to launch her career beyond the family business. Her dreams of pursuing digital marketing and social media strategy all seemed within reach when she was admitted to Kenan Flagler Business School at UNC-Chapel Hill.
She was packing her bags when she heard the news, preparing anxiously for the 18-hour flight across the globe— one, she soon learned, she would never have the chance to board.
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Throughout the years, flags from all around the world have hung in UNC Kenan Flagler’s halls, boasting the rich diversity of the business school’s international community. By 2018, nearly 1 in 4 students in Kenan Flagler’s flagship MBA program came from countries outside the U.S.
Today, just 9 percent of the Class of 2022 are international students, with a fraction of countries represented compared to past cohorts. Flags still fly above the school’s entrance, a towering brick archway that thanks to the pandemic, many students have yet to walk through.
The global diversity those flags represent changed this August, when UNC undergraduate courses moved online as hundreds of students became infected with COVID-19. For professional schools such as Kenan Flagler, the decision to remain in-person or to switch to remote instruction was left to the individual schools.
“We talked with health experts and other administrators across campus and decided to move to remote instruction in an effort to keep students, faculty and staff safe and healthy,” Associate Dean of MBA programs Brad Staats said. “When we made the decision to move to remote instruction, it was in the best interest of public health, and we considered the health and safety of all students, including international students, as the most important factor in that choice.”
Federal guidelines issued July 24, said that incoming international students who enrolled in a U.S. school after March 9, could not enter the country if their courses were 100 percent online.
UNC Kenan Flagler’s decision left Ahuja and 10 other students stuck at their homes in India, with 15 more scattered around the globe. Many had already quit their jobs, arranged housing and bought pricey plane tickets to the states.
“We quit our jobs in the largest recession in the past century,” said one international student who asked his name not be used out of fear his scholarship would be revoked. “We basically quit our jobs and committed full time to Kenan Flagler hoping that it would be in person.”
Ahuja and fellow international students quickly raised petitions calling for a hybrid program, which requires a curriculum of both in-person and online classes. An adjustment along these lines would allow them to travel to the U.S. under ICE’s federal guidelines.
Response from the school was minimal, as Staats claimed changing the program to meet hybrid regulations would put other students and staff in danger.
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Eight-thousand miles and an ocean away, remote classes began in India— a life unrecognizable from what Ahuja imagined her UNC experience would look like.
Ahuja began waking up at 3 p.m. and going to sleep around 6 a.m. in order to attend classes and events scheduled in the reverse time zone. While most classes were recorded, international students felt particularly removed from the school community, their peers and professors.
During her first group project, Ahuja struggled to keep up with her classmates as they met during the few hours she had to sleep. While other students went out for beers or met to study, Ahuja hadn’t seen her friends in India for weeks— they all ended work right as her classes began.
“Fifty percent of the content was asynchronous, which was like watching YouTube videos at home,” Ahuja said. “Which is not something I signed up for at all. I wanted to be in a class surrounded by students, getting their perspective on what we’re learning. That was the whole purpose.”
In a makeshift classroom, Ahuja completes school work at a wooden desk next to her bed. She lives with 10 family members— her house a hive of activity as younger cousins, aunts and uncles go about their day. She misses family dinner around the large table in the dining room, and instead eats her meals alone in the middle of the night.
“My routine was so bad for me,” Ahuja said. “I wasn’t able to work out in the morning. I wasn’t able to get any sunlight, I wasn’t able to get any air. And I would have done it for another year. It would have made my life terrible.”
After two weeks, Ahuja decided it wasn’t a lifestyle she could sustain, fearing that classes would remain online throughout the spring. Pleas for support went unanswered, as school town halls failed to address their students overseas.
Eventually, the mental and physical toll forced Ahuja to drop out of Kenan Flagler in September, putting her dreams on hold for the time being.
“I felt that I had no support, absolutely no support,” Ahuja said. “So that was the reason I just couldn’t do it with UNC anymore.”
The last-minute decision to move the MBA program online wasn’t the first time Ahuja and others felt overlooked by the Kenan Flagler administration.
In July, two months before MBA classes were scheduled to begin, students received an email about a development regarding the Business Analytics and Management Science major. The new concentration was announced in December as “STEM-designated,” a qualification of utmost importance to international students.
When a program receives a STEM designation, international students qualify for a two-year extension of their Optional Practical Training (OPT) visa. In short, it allows students to work in the United States for a longer period of time following graduation, and gives them more time to pay back their student loans.
“We learned that not only did UNC-Chapel Hill need to approve the change, but so did the UNC System,” Staats said. “We worked in partnership with the System to quickly submit the necessary paperwork. During this time, the UNC Board of Governors decided to freeze this process due to COVID-19 until January 2021. As a result, our STEM approval is on hold until then.”
For many incoming international students, this new opportunity was one of the primary reasons they chose Kenan Flagler over other top-25 business schools. Many fear that without an American internship or job they will not be able to pay back the loans and debt accumulated in order to pay for the MBA itself.
“They didn’t do anything about it,” Ahuja said. “They just told us that we’ll reassess in January and we’ll let you know what happens. But right now we can’t guarantee anything. So, after having paid my deposit this was what was told to me. I was completely misled.”
Staats said the MBA program has invested in additional resources for international students, namely the International Student Support Team, which was created this year. The group provides support and advice on a variety of topics, from cultural questions and career guidance to academic planning and work authorization information.
In an effort to get more attention from the school, Ahuja and several other international students compiled research comparing Kenan Flagler’s response to the pandemic to other top MBA programs. They found that the majority made internships a mandatory part of the curriculum or implemented a hybrid model of instruction in order to allow international students to travel to the U.S. and seek employment.
“What was most disappointing to me was because there were, in total, 25 of us. And it was such a small number compared to the entire class, they wouldn’t make any effort to listen to our problems or find solutions for our problems,” Ahuja said. “It was highly, highly disheartening.”
Like most schools, Kenan Flagler is in the midst of deciding its plans for the spring semester. Ahuja said her future is uncertain at best, but has returned to work at her family’s department store for now.
“My hope is if I’m not able to make the most of it, that my other friends are able to make the most of it,” Ahuja said. “I wasn’t going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to just be in a class where I don’t even get a diverse perspective. That was the whole purpose for me.”
(Photo from UNC Kenan Flagler Facebook page)
