Has Trump Dampened Demand for Student Visas?

I have written in The Hill that much of the celebration of Hamas’s October 2023 massacre of Israeli civilians took place on American college campuses by foreign students. I noted that Congress has provided DHS with powerful tools to remove noncitizen immigrants who support terrorism or incite genocide and that the Trump administration “should continue — must continue — its efforts to seek the removal of [aliens] who celebrate the killing of innocent people”.

Trump administration policies regarding foreign students, such as these removal efforts, have raised alarm bells at American colleges and universities. To take one example, Kirk Carapezza reported on May 13 for Boston’s public broadcasting site WGBH that “people who work in higher ed” say that the foreign student “pipeline may be drying up” because of “the policies of President Trump’s second administration”.

Carapezza explains that:

• Since Trump’s return to office, his administration has revoked more than a thousand student visas, often without explanation. The government has since said it will restore some international students’ status, but other student activists have been detained and even face deportation.

• [Gerardo Blanco, who heads Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education] warns Trump’s approach — combined with federal funding cuts — is putting U.S. colleges at risk of losing a generation of global talent.

What Does the Evidence Tell Us?

According to Jeffrey Young, writing on May 1 in the Hechinger Report, while “[Fanta] Aw, [the executive director of NAFSA: Association of International Educators], is hearing from college officials who say they anticipate seeing fewer international students accept than expected”, “data on college enrollment for the fall won’t begin to become available until later this spring, at the earliest”.

However, we do have some leading indicators. The U.S. State Department has just released numbers on nonimmigrant visa issuance in March 2025, which is a good place to look since Columbia University terrorism advocate Mahmoud Khalil (at least according to information provided by the White House) was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on March 8, setting off a worldwide media frenzy.

Comparing F-1 student visa issuances for March 2024 and March 2025 (not taking into account dependents who receive F-2 visas), the total number of F-1 visas issued this March fell by 5 percent from last March (from 9,654 to 9,144). However, the total number issued to nationals of Muslim-majority nations fell by 23 percent (from 1,607 to 1,240), while the total number issued to nationals of non-Muslim-majority nations fell by only 2 percent (from 8,047 to 7,904). Thus, it seems, at least at this early stage, that any arguable impact of the Trump administration’s policies on foreign student enrollment has been limited to students from Muslim-majority nations. This might reflect the fact that, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Hamas’s “roots are in the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood” and its “charter calls for establishing an Islamic Palestinian state in place of Israel”.

Keep in mind, however, that in 2023 the State Department issued 445,418 F-1 visas, an average of 37,118 a month. March is not a big F-1 visa issuance month. However, March visa issuance numbers are still the best early indicator we have of any possible dampening effect of foreign student enrollment caused by the Trump administration’s policies.

Additional useful information is available from a report — “The Global Enrolment Benchmark Survey: Jan-Mar 2025 Intake” — written by Cara Skikne, head of communications and thought leadership at Studyportals Analytics and Consulting, and released by Studyportals, NAFSA, and Oxford Test of English. The report evaluated responses to a survey conducted from March 24 to April 11, with responses received from 240 institutions of higher education in 48 countries, including 92 schools in the United States, 65 schools in 20 European countries, 21 schools in the United Kingdom, 17 schools in 11 Asian countries, 15 schools in Canada, 14 schools in Australia, and 16 schools from 13 other countries.

The report tabulated responses regarding the enrollment of foreign students starting new programs in the January-March 2025 period as compared to the same period in 2024. It found regarding (responding) U.S. schools that 2025 enrollment at the bachelor’s/undergraduate level was unchanged from 2024, while enrollment at the master’s/postgraduate level decreased by 13 percent. However, at responding Canadian schools, bachelor’s/undergraduate enrollment decreased by 33 percent and master’s/postgraduate enrollment decreased by 31 percent. Thus, it is hard to blame the modest decrease in master’s/postgraduate enrollment at U.S. schools on the policies of the Trump administration.

As to schools in other regions, in the UK, bachelor’s/undergraduate enrollment increased by 1 percent and master’s/postgraduate enrollment increased by 18 percent. In Australia, bachelor’s/undergraduate enrollment increased by 9 percent and master’s/postgraduate enrollment decreased by 13 percent. In Europe, bachelor’s/undergraduate enrollment was flat and master’s/postgraduate enrollment increased by 5 percent, and in Asian countries, bachelor’s/undergraduate enrollment increased by 5 percent and master’s/postgraduate enrollment increased by 2 percent.

Seventy percent of responding U.S. schools agreed that restrictive government policies and/or issues obtaining visas were a significant issue. However, the same was true for 93 percent of Canadian schools, 86 percent of Australian schools, and 62 percent of schools overall (with only 6 percent of Asian schools agreeing).

Should We Care?

Assuming for the sake of argument that the Trump administration’s policies have had and will have a dampening effect on foreign student enrollment, should this be a concern?

Carapezza posits that “many schools … rely[] on international students to fill classrooms and balance budgets”, Jeffrey Young states that foreign students “typically pay 2 to 3 times the tuition of domestic students”, and NAFSA asserts that “international students studying at U.S. colleges and universities contributed $43.8 billion and supported 378,175 jobs to the U.S. economy during the 2023-2024 academic year”. (Emphasis by NAFSA.)

But George Borjas of Harvard University’s Kennedy School and a senior economist at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, noted in “An Evaluation of the Foreign Student Program”, a Center for Immigration Studies report he authored, that while foreign students’ “tuition revenues — if they were to exceed the actual cost of providing the[ir] education — could be an additional source of economic gains”, “[i]t turns out … that the pricing of higher education in the United States is highly distorted in both private and public institutions, with the typical tuition payment not being sufficiently large to cover the actual cost of the education — even in the absence of financial aid.”

Terry Hartle of the American Council on Education in essence agreed, stating during a Center for Immigration Studies panel discussion on “Are Foreign Students Good for America?” that:

[I]t’s never been a particular surprise to anyone in higher education that every student, whether they’re born in the U.S., whether they’re born overseas, does not pay the full cost of their education. It does not matter whether you go to a public college or a private college. You’re going to pay a price, there will be a subsidy that somebody else is paying, and you will — the total cost of your education will be on top of that.

So, even foreign students who pay “full tuition” are being subsidized by a school’s endowment or, much more likely, American taxpayers. As Borjas concluded, “the policy implied by the narrow financial interests of the higher education sector (Recruit more foreign students!) is simply not the same as the policy that would be implied by the national interest”.

And these foreign students “paying full tuition” can have a deleterious effect on American students. Borjas also made a number of startling findings in a 2004 National Bureau for Economic Research working paper, “Do Foreign Students Crowd Out Native Students from Graduate Programs?”:

• [T]here is a strong negative correlation between increases in the number of foreign students enrolled at a particular university and the number of white native men enrolled in that university’s graduate program.

• Those educational institutions that experienced the largest increases in foreign enrollment are also the institutions that experienced the steepest drops in the enrollment of white native men. The evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that foreign students limit the opportunities available to white native men in graduate education.

Borjas explained that “The … enrollment of foreign students alters the educational opportunities available to qualified natives in two distinct ways.”

First:

[I]t may be the case that the number of slots available in a particular graduate program is fixed in the short run. The enrollment of an additional foreign student would then necessarily imply that one fewer native student would be enrolled. This is the simplest and clearest case of a crowdout effect. Even if the university were expanding and admitting more foreign and more native students, there may still be a crowdout effect in the sense that native enrollment would have risen faster if the university had not increased its supply of foreign students.

Second:

The entry of foreign students can alter the educational decisions made by native students in another, less direct, way. In particular, an increase in the number of enrolled foreign students may affect the incentives that natives have to pursue some educational programs. Suppose, for instance, that many of the foreign students enrolled in a particular program (e.g., computer science) remain in the United States after graduation. One would then expect that wages in these computer-related occupations would fall and those occupations would become relatively less attractive to natives. The foreign students may still choose to enter those low-paying jobs because their career decisions are mainly guided by the fact that the student visa is perceived as providing an entry ticket into the United States, so that they would be comparing the low U.S. wage in a computer-related occupation with the even lower wage that would be available if they remained in the source countries. In contrast, native students have many more career choices, and would shy away from applying to those educational programs where foreign students cluster. In the long run, this behavioral response would again imply that an increase in the enrollment of foreign students in a particular program would reduce the number of natives enrolled in that program.

Congress was indeed concerned about this second effect when in 1998 it temporarily increased the annual quota of H-1B temporary foreign workers in “specialty occupations” generally requiring at least a bachelor’s degree. The House Judiciary Committee explained that “It is in the nation’s interest that the quota for H–1B aliens be temporarily raised.” However, the committee emphasized that:

[T]he increase … should be of relatively brief duration. There will be a bumper crop of American college graduates skilled in computer science beginning in the summer of 2001. These students have been enticed into the field … by the brightening opportunities in this boom or bust profession. [T]he opportunities spawned by a tight labor market are bringing fresh entrants into the field. … [Any] labor shortage … should not last past the graduation dates of these students. Thus, Congress should not imperil the[ir] future careers … by expanding the H-1B quota indefinitely.

Even those American students who do enroll may be negatively affected by foreign graduate students, as Borjas noted in his CIS report:

[O]ne could plausibly argue that foreign students have lowered the quality of undergraduate education. Undergraduates often charge that the lack of English language proficiency among many foreign-born teaching assistants obstructs their understanding of the material. And a few studies provide some evidence that foreign born teaching assistants do indeed have an adverse effect on the academic achievement of U.S.-born undergraduates.

Finally, as to the risk of losing “a generation of global talent”, foreign students are not always all that talented. Norman Matloff, professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, concluded in a 2008 report for the Center for Immigration Studies — “H-1Bs: Still Not the Best and Brightest” — that “foreign students in the U.S. tend to be concentrated in the less-selective universities, and … they receive a lower percentage of research awards relative to their numbers in the student population”. In 2013, he concluded in an article for Migration Letters — “Immigration and the Tech Industry: As a Labour Shortage Remedy, for Innovation, or for Cost Savings?” — that “former [foreign computer science] students [at American universities] apply for somewhat fewer patents than do their American peers” and “are significantly less likely to be working in R&D than the Americans”. And that same year, Matloff concluded in an article for the Economic Policy Institute — “Are Foreign Students the “Best and the Brightest”?: Data and Implications for Immigration Policy” — that “In the computer science case, the former foreign students are in fact generally of significantly lower talent in many aspects than Americans of the same age, education, and so on.” (Emphasis in original.)

Conclusion

It is too early to accurately access whether Trump administration policies regarding foreign students, especially regarding student advocates for terrorism, are having a dampening effect on foreign student enrollment numbers. However, early indications are that any such effect has been limited to students from Muslim-majority nations. In any event, it is not necessarily the case that a reduction in the number of foreign students would have a negative effect on the United States. In fact, it is possible that it would have a positive effect.