The number of Bangladeshi students studying in higher educational institutions in the United States is increasing day by day. According to the US Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, a total of 8,598 Bangladeshi students chose to study in the US in the academic year of 2020-21. This has ranked Bangladesh 14th on the list of countries sending students to the US for study purposes. Like the previous year, a large number of students from our country have already got chance this year to study in various top-ranked US universities. Of them, many are fully-funded PhD students. However, many of these students, who are waiting for the US visa, are spending stressful time for a formality called Administrative Processing (AP).
The students, who want to study in the US universities, need to get F1 visa from the US embassy of Dhaka. If they fulfil all the requirements, they get approval by the embassy while some others are rejected. But many students are also kept on the list of AP.
The embassy takes 180 days or more for resolving the cases of AP-marked visa candidates. In this case, students are at a great risk of losing their funding as the relevant universities do not always want to wait for the students. Right now, around 300 Bangladeshi students are on the AP list of US embassy.
Staying on the AP list is extremely stressful for most students since they think that they are going to lose their hard-earned funding only because of this process. This is annoying for the US universities and professors, as well. If this goes on, top US universities may stop taking students from Bangladesh in the future. So, we sincerely hope that the US embassy will take immediate steps by reducing the number of days regarding this process and save academic career of the bright students.
Shah Karim,
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