The high, high cost of fewer foreign students in America

American college campuses from Tucson to Tallahassee are buzzing with the familiar routine of students getting settled in classes and dorms. One new trend, though, is emerging.

An estimated 30% to 40% fewer international students are expected on American college campuses in the fall of 2025, compared with trends in the 2024-2025 academic year, according to NAFSA: Association of International Educators – a nonprofit that focuses on international education – and JB International, a for-profit educational technology firm.

In total, an estimated 150,000 fewer international students were expected to arrive this fall, due to new visa restrictions and visa appointments being canceled at US embassies and consulates in many countries, such as India, China, Nigeria and Japan. NAFSA and JB International are expected to release updated data on international student enrollment in November 2025.

There were over 1.1 million international students – more than half of whom were from China or India – on American college campuses in the 2023-2024 academic year, according to the Institute for International Education, which monitors foreign student programs and shares the most comprehensive available recent data.

This sharp drop in international students could cost the US economy US$7 billion in the 2025-26 school year, according to estimates from NAFSA.

For every three international students in the US, one new American job is created or supported by the average $35,000 these students spend in their local communities on housing, food and transportation, and other costs.

As a senior fellow at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy in the Obama administration, I oversaw many of the student exchange programs involving multiple countries around the globe.

I foresee a major economic crisis over international students that could last for years.

A growing trend, quickly reversed

International students began coming to the US in the early 20th century, when philanthropists like the Carnegie, Rockefeller and Mott families sought out scholars from the US to go overseas.

These philanthropists helped create international fellowships and grants that later on would often be funded by the US government – like the Fulbright program, which gives money to American students to spend time and research abroad. By 1919, nonprofits like the Institute for International Education were serving as mediators between foreign students and American universities.

International student enrollment in the US has steadily risen since the end of World War II, coinciding with an emerging world that became easier and cheaper to travel across. While 26,000 foreign students came to the US in the 1949–1950 school year, that number had ballooned to 286,343 three decades later.

In the 1990s, there were more than 400,000 international students attending school in the US each year. That number continued to climb and surpassed 500,000 in the early 2000s. International student enrollment in the US first topped more than 1 million in the 2015-2016 school year.

While international students made up just 1% of the 2.4 million university and college students in the US in 1949-50, they were about 6% of the total 18.9 million students in the US in 2023-24, according to the Migration Institute, a nonpartisan research organization.

This percentage is relatively small, however, compared with the international student representation in other countries.

International students represented 38% of overall Canadian university enrollment, made up 31% of all university students in Australia and 27% of all students in the United Kingdom during the 2024-2025 school year.

Trump’s warnings to international students

Within the first 90 days of his return to office, President Donald Trump invoked the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which gives the secretary of state the authority to expel foreign students whose behavior could pose a threat to US foreign policy interests.

The administration has since revoked the visas of 6,000 foreign students, the State Department reported in August 2025.

There have also been several high-profile arrests of international students, including Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish student at Tufts University. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials arrested Ozturk in March 2025 shortly after the administration revoked her visa.

Her arrest came one year after she co-wrote an opinion piece calling for Tufts to recognize a genocide in the Gaza Strip and to divest from all companies with ties to Israel.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended Ozturk’s arrest, saying in March that the government will not give visas to people who come to the US intending to do “things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus.”

A federal judge ruled in May that there was no evidence showing Ozturk posed a credible threat to the US. She was then released from an immigration detention facility.

But her arrest coincided with the arrest of other international students in high-profile cases, like Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student and US permanent resident who was arrested after he participated in Palestinian rights protests on campus. These arrests all sent a message to foreign students: It is not as safe as it once was to come to the US.

The administration has announced other changes that will make it more difficult for foreign students to spend time in the US – like a 2025 travel ban that prohibits or restricts the entry of people from 19 countries, mostly in the Middle East and Africa.

The administration also announced in August that it plans to cap the length of time foreign students can stay in the US to four years. Currently, foreign students have a 60-day grace period to stay in the US following graduation before they must secure a work visa or another kind of authorization to legally stay in the country.

A simple math equation

New York University, Northeastern University in Boston and Columbia University hosted the largest number of international students in 2023-2024. But international students are not concentrated in just major liberal cities.

Arizona State University hosted the fourth-highest number of international students that school year, and Purdue University in Indiana and the University of North Texas are also among the 10 schools that host the most international students.

All of these schools – and others, like Kansas City colleges and universities, which are now welcoming far fewer international students than they planned to in the spring because some of the students could not get visas – will feel the financial effects of turning international students away from the US.

Doing the math, I believe that a solid argument can be made for increasing the number of foreign students coming to the US, not cutting back.

Tara Sonenshine is Edward R Murrow professor of practice in public diplomacy, Tufts University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.