Every city gives something to carry home with me.
Sometimes it is tangible—a postcard from a neighborhood bookstore, a photograph I know I’ll revisit years later, the memory of an unforgettable meal. More often, it is an idea. A conversation with the hotel security guard. The philosophy of an Uber driver. A mural that tells a tale.
Pittsburgh gave me bridges.
I learned that Pittsburgh has 446 of them, more than any other city in the world. They seemed to appear everywhere, arching over rivers, threading neighborhoods together, turning what would have been long detours into ordinary commutes. As a resident, I suspect, you eventually stop noticing them. But as a visitor, you realize the city is not simply decorated with bridges, it is defined by them.
I was in town for the Annual International ACAC conference, where nearly 1,500 colleagues from around the world had gathered under this year’s theme: Building Bridges. It felt perfectly chosen. International education has always liked that metaphor. We build bridges between countries. Between cultures. Between schools and universities. Between aspiration and opportunity.
It is a hopeful image.
Before the conference officially began, Miguel Sagué, an Indigenous educator, artist, spiritual leader, and board member of the Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center, welcomed us with a land acknowledgment. He spoke about the people who first called that land home and the generations that followed after they were displaced.
His remarks reminded me of a timeless human question.
What does it mean to belong?
Who gets to decide?
And what responsibility do we assume the moment we invite another person to cross into our world?
I kept thinking about those questions through meetings, receptions, casual conversations with old friends, and countless walks between meeting rooms.
I have spent more than two decades in this profession. I have worked alongside some of the most thoughtful, generous people I know. Every day they help students imagine lives that extend beyond the place where they were born. They create opportunities that would not otherwise exist. I believe deeply in this work because I have lived the life it makes possible.
Long before I became an educator, I was the student crossing that bridge.
I arrived in the United States at eighteen carrying the same things millions of international students still carry today: a suitcase, an admission letter, enormous optimism, and parents who believed education was worth sacrifices they could barely afford.
America rewarded that faith.
Everything I have built since arriving here traces back to that decision. My education. My career. My company. My family. My closest friendships. The mentors who changed the trajectory of my life.
There is no version of my story that exists without American higher education.
There is also no honest version that edits out everything else.
I remember calculating every purchase because buying lunch often meant having less money for the occasional phone call home. I remember watching classmates leave for Thanksgiving while I stayed behind on an almost empty campus, learning that homesickness has a way of becoming louder when everyone else seems to be going home. I remember reassuring my parents that everything was fine, not because it always was, but because they had already sacrificed enough. I couldn’t bear the thought that they might wonder whether sending me halfway around the world had been a mistake.
None of those memories are unusual.
Ask almost any international student and you’ll hear your own version of them echoed back. Different countries. Different languages. Different campuses. The emotions remain remarkably familiar.
Every student leaves something behind that cannot be packed into a suitcase. Family dinners. Familiar streets. Celebrations. Grandparents. Childhood friends. A language in which every joke makes sense. They arrive carrying hope, but also pressure. Pressure to succeed because the investment is too great to fail. Pressure to justify the sacrifices made on their behalf. Pressure to prove that crossing an ocean was worth it.
And none of these stories are exceptional. They are pretty ordinary ones.
Which is precisely why I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with the way international students are discussed whenever enrollment begins to decline.
The headlines arrive with predictable urgency. Universities face budget shortfalls. Research slows. Local businesses lose revenue. Domestic students may pay higher tuition. Entire academic programs are placed at risk. Governments are reminded that international students contribute billions to national economies and support hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Those statements are not false but they all answer the same question.
Why should we care if international students stop coming?
It is an understandable question but also the smallest one we could ask.
Somewhere today, an eighteen-year-old in Mumbai, Manila, São Paulo, Seoul, Nairobi, or Nanjing is trying to decide whether to leave home. They are reading those same headlines. They are listening to politicians debate immigration. They are hearing universities defend international students.
They strengthen our universities.
Our economies.
Our research.
Our workforce.
Our competitiveness.
I often wonder what they hear.
Do they hear an invitation to build a life? Or do they hear that their greatest value lies in helping someone else balance a budget?
Before they have even boarded a plane, have we already taught them that their worth will be measured in dollars before it is measured in dreams?
That question extends well beyond the United States. Britain asks it. Canada asks it. Australia asks it. Nearly every destination country eventually reaches for the same argument whenever international enrollment becomes politically inconvenient. We explain why international students matter by describing what happens to us if they stop coming.
What troubles me is that this language no longer belongs only to journalists or politicians.
It has become ours.
Those of us who work in international education have learned to defend international students by explaining their economic value because we know those arguments work. We cite the billions they contribute, the jobs they support, the research they enable, and the programs they sustain. We have become exceptionally good at proving their usefulness.
I sometimes wonder whether, somewhere along the way, usefulness became the center of the story.
We have become fluent in the language of economic contribution. We speak confidently about tuition revenue, workforce development, innovation, research productivity, and demographic decline. We know how to calculate return on investment with extraordinary precision.
We are far less practiced at talking about what is happening to the students themselves?
Where are the headlines about the student skipping meals because the exchange rate collapsed back home?
Where are the stories about the student too embarrassed to admit they cannot afford winter clothes?
Where is the conversation about loneliness so profound that birthdays are celebrated alone in residence halls while campuses empty for holidays?
Where is the discussion about homesickness that no orientation program can solve?
Where is the recognition of the anxiety carried by students whose future can hinge on a visa renewal, a policy announcement, or one bureaucratic decision beyond their control?
Where do we acknowledge the pressure of knowing that an entire family has invested years of savings in one young person’s education?
These experiences rarely appear in economic impact reports. But they shape international education every bit as much as enrollment numbers do.
The irony is difficult to ignore.
One of America’s greatest strengths has never been that it attracted talented people. Many countries have done that.
America’s unique strength is that it attracts ambition.
The students willing to leave home at eighteen are already extraordinary. They have accepted uncertainty before they have even boarded the airplane. They have said goodbye to family, language, familiarity, and certainty long before anyone hands them a diploma.
America did not create that ambition.
It attracted it.
For generations, higher education became one of America’s greatest talent strategies without ever calling itself one.
Universities became one of the nation’s greatest invitations to the world. Scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, physicians, engineers, teachers, researchers, and dreamers crossed oceans believing that opportunity would outweigh uncertainty. Some returned home carrying what they had learned. Many stayed. They built companies, laboratories, classrooms, communities, and neighborhoods. They helped build the country that had first invited them in.
As I head home, I find myself thinking less about Pittsburgh’s bridges than about what bridges actually ask of us.
A bridge isn’t remarkable because it spans a river. It is remarkable because of the promise it makes. Bridges are built because we believe that crossing matters. But crossing has always been the easiest part of the journey. The harder work begins after someone arrives. That is where trust is either rewarded or betrayed. That is where belonging is either extended or withheld. That is where a student discovers whether they were invited because they were needed, or welcomed because they were valued.
Those are not the same thing.
For much of my career, I have helped universities build those bridges, and I remain deeply proud of that work because I have watched lives transformed by crossing them, including my own. Believing in international education, however, also means expecting more from it. It means asking whether we have become so consumed by enrollment targets, rankings, market share, and economic impact that we have neglected a far more uncomfortable question:
Do international students still feel that they matter to us?
Not to our rankings, our research output, or our economies, but to us as fellow human beings. There is an important difference between measuring someone’s contribution and recognizing their humanity. One speaks to value. The other speaks to conscience.
The more I think about it, the more I realize this isn’t only a question for international education. It belongs to every employer asking someone to relocate, every community welcoming newcomers, every country asking immigrants to believe in its promise, and every institution that asks another human being to place their future in its hands.
Every invitation is a promise made before trust has been earned.
The invitation itself is only the beginning. Everything that follows determines whether the promise was honest.
Bridges are not judged on the day they are built. They are judged years later by the people who chose to trust them—by whether the journey proved worthy of the sacrifice, whether hope found something solid on the other side, and whether those who crossed would choose to make that journey again.
That is the question I carry home from Pittsburgh.
Not whether we are still capable of building bridges.
We clearly are.
The harder question is whether we are becoming the kind of people, institutions, and countries that deserve the trust required to cross them.
Because if enough people begin to wonder whether the promise was real, the bridge doesn’t collapse.
It remains exactly where it has always been.
People simply stop believing it leads somewhere worth going.
And there may be no greater failure than spending decades building extraordinary bridges while forgetting the human beings courageous enough to trust them.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
