SHOPPED AROUND
ON A LATE-SUMMER morning in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, two buses approached a low-slung building. The warehouselike facility in this Kansas City suburb was actually a branch of the University of Central Missouri, whose main campus was 40 miles away in rural Warrensburg. Nearly 90 percent of UCM students hail from Missouri. But this morning, almost all the 40 or so who hopped off the buses were from India. To get there, some had taken out loans against their parents’ homes; whole families had pooled funds to send over just one student. Wearing jeans, hoodies, and the occasional salwar kameez, they headed to computer science and information technology classes through a pair of double doors, past a looming decal of the school mascot, Mo the Mule.
It was two years ago that Poonam Gohil first rode that bus. Petite with a round face and shoulder-length black hair that swoops over her right eye, Gohil had come from Mumbai to get ahead. She’d seen Indian friends leave for the United States and secure good-paying jobs at well-known companies, and she decided to attend UCM because of the school’s relatively low cost—students can earn a master’s degree in computer science for about $15,000. It was still a big stretch, especially since Gohil’s parents had passed away when she was young, but she cobbled together scholarships, awards, and a job at a coffee shop to help pay her way.
Gohil arrived on campus as the Indian student population at UCM was skyrocketing, jumping from just 152 in 2012 to nearly 2,500 in 2015—some 17 percent of the university’s student body. The school had become a newly popular destination thanks to a little-known but fast-growing guest worker program called Optional Practical Training, which allows foreign students earning degrees from American institutions to work in their field for a year after graduation. Those with degrees in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics can stay in the United States for up
