America Educates the World's Best and Brightest—Then Shows Them the Door
As students grapple with an unfriendly immigration system and targeted crackdowns on campus, how long will the U.S. remain the world's top study destination?
Suguru Onda was one year away from finishing his Ph.D. at Brigham Young University (BYU) when he received potentially life-altering news. His name had appeared in a criminal records check and his visa had been revoked. He would need to return to his native Japan right away or else face deportation.
Onda had accrued a few speeding tickets during his six years of study in the United States, but that seemed an implausible reason for losing his visa. The only other explanation, his lawyer Adam Crayk told Deseret News, was a 2019 fishing offense in which members of his church group harvested more fish than his license permitted. The charge was dismissed and Onda continued his research on computer vision and machine learning.
When Donald Trump retook the presidency in January, his administration started to revoke legal status for international students it deemed "pro-Hamas." But Onda "has little to no footprint on social media, doesn't speak out about politics, and, to our knowledge, was not involved in any protests on college campuses," reported Adam Small of Utah's KSL NewsRadio.
The same day that Onda and several other international students sued over their visa revocations, the government notified BYU that Onda's legal status was restored. It was "as if it was never revoked," Crayk told KSL.
Although it backed down in this particular case after Onda fought back, as of late April the State Department had revoked the legal status of over 1,800 students at more than 280 colleges and universities, according to an Inside Higher Ed report. That includes students who participated in campus protests last year, even if their participation was nonviolent and noncriminal. Students reportedly had their legal status revoked for harmless traffic violations. With the State Department using artificial intelligence to cancel visas and offering little justification for revocations, international students are worried about doing or saying anything that might ruffle federal feathers—and unsure what, exactly, could trigger a change in their legal status.
That is making some prospective international students think twice about where they want to study. International student enrollment in U.S. postgraduate programs for the 2025–26 school year is down 13 percent, according to survey data from NAFSA: Association of International Educators. "The uncertainty that international students currently in the U.S. have experienced has had a ripple effect on prospective students and how they're looking to the U.S.," NAFSA CEO Fanta Aw told Marketplace.
The U.S. has long been the leading study destination for international talent, but the government has been threatening that advantage both by making it difficult for students to work legally in the U.S. after graduation and through more overt crackdowns on specific nationalities and universities. During the first Trump administration (before the COVID-19 pandemic hit), those policies led to an 11.4 percent drop in F-1 visa (a nonimmigrant visa for foreign students) enrollment. The second Trump administration seems dedicated to making that even worse.
These crackdowns don't just mean lost students. They mean companies that won't be founded, economic activity that won't be generated, and groundbreaking research that won't happen in the United States.
'A Major American Export'
The U.S. contains 38 of the universities in Times Higher Education's 2025 rankings of the 100 best universities in the world, and seven of the top 10. The quality of American higher education and the prospect of working in the U.S. after graduation are major reasons why this country hosts more international students than any other nation does.
Today, the U.S. hosts 1.1 million international students, who comprise about 6 percent of its total university student population. Foreign students make up far larger shares at some top-ranked universities. As of fall 2023, 44 percent of Carnegie Mellon University's undergraduate and graduate students came from abroad, according to a New York Times report. About 40 percent of undergraduates and graduate students at Columbia University, 39 percent at Johns Hopkins University, 30 percent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and 28 percent at Harvard University were international students. Cornell University, Duke University, Stanford University, and Yale University all have a student body that is one-quarter nonnative.
America's international student population has risen each year since 2000, with a few exceptions: following stricter post-9/11 visa processing, during the beginning of the first Trump administration, and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Short of government-imposed barriers and black swan events, American universities remain magnetic to international students.
"Higher education is, effectively, a major American export—and one where the foreign students consuming it do so in American communities, also spending money on housing, groceries and books there," reported The New York Times in May. International students "contributed about $43 billion to the U.S. economy during the 2023–24 academic year, most of it on tuition and housing, according to an analysis by NAFSA." That's to say nothing of the research they produce, particularly in STEM fields, where they make up nearly half of the country's master's and Ph.D. graduates.
Those benefits continue when international students stay in the country after graduating. But the U.S. has a major retention problem—much of it self-inflicted.
Just 17 percent of international students stay in the U.S. after receiving their bachelor's degrees, according to an analysis by the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), a bipartisan public policy organization. Half of master's degree recipients and one-quarter of Ph.D. recipients leave. The number of departures has been going up, per the EIG: While 96,000 international graduates left the U.S. postgraduation in 2012, 165,000 did in 2020.
Some graduates will inevitably want to go home no matter what, but likely far fewer than actually do leave. According to a 2021 survey of prospective international students by FWD.us, a pro-immigration advocacy organization, 73 percent "say they would stay in the U.S. to live and work if they were graduating from their degree program today and a visa were easily accessible to them." One-third of artificial intelligence (AI) Ph.D.s "who left the United States considered immigration highly relevant to their decision to leave," found a 2020 paper by Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Sixty percent of noncitizen AI Ph.D. holders working in the U.S. "report difficulties with the U.S. immigration system, compared to 12 percent" of noncitizen AI Ph.D. holders "working in other countries."
International students have few practical ways to stay in the U.S. long-term after graduation. The main pathway is Optional Practical Training (OPT), which lets students work in the U.S. for up to 12 months postgraduation in a field directly related to their field of study. STEM graduates are eligible for an additional 24 months of OPT. But OPT doesn't necessarily lead to a long-term work visa. Instead, "international graduates have to qualify for an existing immigration pathway (such as family sponsorship or a humanitarian claim), or find an employer who can sponsor them for a visa," notes FWD.us. Even if one of those pathways works out, "decades-long backlogs make immediate sponsorship for a green card virtually impossible for most."
This is a pressing problem, but government officials haven't treated it like one. "The number of H-1B visas available to the private sector has not grown since 2006," and "the 140,000 employment-based green cards available each year has not been adjusted since 1990," explains the EIG.
Congress has failed to update the U.S. immigration system for several decades. Employment-based measures and targeted fixes for international students were areas where it seemed real reform might be possible. In a study of the bipartisan immigration bills introduced from 2015 to 2024, the Bipartisan Policy Center found that 28 percent dealt with employment-based immigration—more than with any other category. But no reforms were enacted.
When the most commonsense, narrowly tailored measures—such as a 2022 attempt to exempt STEM Ph.D. holders from immigration caps—fail, many international graduates understandably feel uneasy about their long-term prospects in the United States.
'We're Looking Every Day'
International students' unease only deepened during the first Trump administration. Just a week in, students from the seven majority-Muslim countries targeted by Trump's so-called Muslim ban were stranded in airports and sent home as they returned to the U.S. for the spring semester. By 2019, "unexpected denials and long delays [had] become increasingly common for international students and scholars seeking visas," noted The New York Times. University officials reported that "the number of visas going through extended security checks" had "spiked."
Then a pandemic-era policy ordered international students to return to their home countries if their universities moved to fully virtual instruction. After several universities sued the administration over the plan, the government reversed course.
Surprising words from the candidate himself made it seem the second Trump administration would be friendlier to international students. "You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country, and that includes junior colleges," Trump said during a June 2024 appearance on the All-In Podcast. International students who "graduated from a top college or from a college, and they desperately wanted to stay here, they had a plan for a company, a concept, and they can't—they go back to India, they go back to China, they do the same basic company in those places. And they become multibillionaires."
He'd sounded notes common to those disturbed by his first administration's own international student policy. Unsurprisingly, Trump's campaign quickly walked those encouraging ideas back. A spokesperson emphasized that the policy would apply to the "most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America." An "aggressive vetting process" would root out any "communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters and public charges."
When Trump returned to the Oval Office, it quickly became clear the administration would apply that vetting broadly. By March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had revoked 300 visas, some belonging to students. "We're looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up," he said. "I encourage every country to do that, by the way, because I think it's crazy to invite students into your country that are coming onto your campus and destabilizing it."
Rubio was referring to the pro-Palestinian protests that took place at dozens of American universities in 2024. "Pro-Hamas thugs are no longer welcome in our great nation," he said in May. Harvard's alleged failure "to adequately address violent anti-Semitic incidents on campus" was one of the reasons the Trump administration listed when it barred foreign students from coming to the U.S. to attend the university. The State Department is obviously justified in weeding out actual terrorists and security risks, but the policy went much further than that. A March lawsuit argued that the administration conflated any pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel speech as "pro-Hamas." In the case of Rümeysa Öztürk, the government offered only an anti-Israel op-ed she had co-written as justification for her arrest.
In June, several U.S. embassies announced that student visa applicants must make their social media accounts public so that adjudicators could vet them properly. "Every visa adjudication is a national security decision," the U.S. Embassy in London said—but it didn't indicate what speech would trigger a rejection. "There is nothing stopping this or another administration from using that authority tomorrow against critics of other countries, whether they're protesting Russia's invasion of Ukraine or China's oppression of Uyghurs," warned the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
The Trump administration has also been targeting international students it deems "criminals." But like its efforts to expel "pro-Hamas" students, this search for "criminals" has been messy and excessively punitive. According to a policy brief from the American Immigration Lawyers Association, students reported losing legal status for arbitrary and nonsensical reasons. Those include "a Pennsylvania undergraduate who was issued a speeding ticket for going 70 mph in a 65-mph zone" and a "Connecticut domestic violence survivor who was arrested along with her abuser, had significant medical records documenting her injuries, and whose case was dismissed."
Just as it seems any interaction with the legal system could get a foreign student booted, no student or prospective student can be sure which social media posts will prove unacceptable to a visa adjudicator. If a student is returning to college from his home country, will a customs agent search his phone at the airport and find something objectionable? What kinds of political protest are acceptable for a temporary visa holder? Given how haphazard the government's visa revocations have been—and how much legal back-and-forth has followed—why wouldn't prospective students begin to wonder if an American education is worth the trouble?
Decline by Choice
The United States is hurting its own growth by failing to attract and retain international students.
International students contribute to the American economy by spending on tuition, housing, and other basics, certainly, but their impact goes much further. One-quarter of America's billion-dollar companies were founded by someone who first came to the country as an international student, the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) found in 2018. Those founders include Elon Musk (from South Africa), who attended the University of Pennsylvania and founded SpaceX; Adam Neumann (Israel), who attended Baruch College and founded WeWork; Vlad Tenev (Bulgaria), who attended Stanford University and founded Robinhood; and Renaud Visage (France), who attended Cornell University and founded Eventbrite.
In a study looking at the 1,500 patents issued to America's top 10 patent-producing research universities in 2011, the Partnership for a New American Economy found that more than half "boasted a foreign-born inventor who was a student, a postdoctoral researcher, or a staff researcher who was not a professor—and who are thus most likely to face major hurdles obtaining the visas needed to settle permanently in the United States." A 2005 World Bank working paper suggested "that a ten-percent increase in the number of foreign graduate students would raise patent applications by 4.7 percent, university patent grants by 5.3 percent and non-university patent grants by 6.7 percent."
Student visas play an important role in U.S. foreign policy, too. Each year, millions of young people from around the world study alongside American peers, learn from American professors, and experience American values. A large share of them come from repressive, autocratic, or corrupt countries. America's higher education system acts as a valuable soft power tool, helping to build goodwill around the world. As of 2019, more world leaders were educated in the U.S. than in any other country.
Trump has charged that "countries, some not at all friendly to the United States, pay NOTHING toward their student's education, nor do they ever intend to." But beyond their general contributions to the American economy, international students do a lot to prop up America's higher education system for native-born students. "Most foreign citizens are not eligible for federal student aid from the U.S. Department of Education," notes Federal Student Aid, an office of the Department of Education. International students might pay "two or three times as much" as an American student attending an in-state school, Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Karin Fischer told The World. "About 80% of international students pay their own way, whether from their own families or by borrowing money."
"For each additional international undergraduate student that public universities enroll, their in-state freshman enrollment increases by two, on average," found University of North Florida economist Madeline Zavodny in an NFAP policy brief. "In STEM fields, each additional PhD awarded to an international student in a STEM field is associated with an additional PhD awarded to a domestic student."
A smaller international student population could have many downstream consequences, including shuttered degree programs, less generous financial aid for American students, and lost innovation. But the Trump administration has suggested that its crackdown might go even further.
Our Loss, Their Gain
"Under President Trump's leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students," Rubio said in May. China was second only to India in how many students it sent to the U.S. last year, with over 277,000 attending American universities. The same month, the Trump administration directed consulates and embassies to stop scheduling interviews with student visa applicants as it prepared "for an expansion of required social media screening and vetting."
It's too early to say how these policies will shape American universities and international student admissions. That hasn't stopped other countries from jumping at the opportunity to attract students who were displaced or deterred from American universities.
Japan, which aims to increase its foreign student population from 337,000 to 400,000 over the next decade, has directed its universities to appeal to U.S.-based international students. "We have asked universities to consider possible support measures such as accepting international students enrolled in U.S. universities so that the students can continue their studies," education minister Toshiko Abe said in May, according to The Independent. The University of Osaka "is offering tuition fee waivers, research grants and help with travel arrangements for students and researchers at U.S. institutions," reported Reuters.
The European Union has launched "Choose Europe," an initiative that allocates 500 million euros ($580 million) from 2025 through 2027 "to make Europe a magnet for researchers." Some of that funding will go toward doctoral and postdoctoral training. "European governments have sought to bolster their universities' efforts to recruit international researchers, amid signs that an expected exodus in U.S.-based scholars is beginning," reported Times Higher Education. One such effort at Paris-Saclay University will "launch Ph.D. contracts and fund stays of various durations for American researchers."
The University of Toronto and Harvard University have formed a "pact" that "would see some Harvard students complete their studies in Canada if visa restrictions prevent them from entering the United States," reported The Guardian.
"For international students affected by the United States' student admission policy, the Education Bureau (EDB) has appealed to all universities in Hong Kong to provide facilitation measures for eligible students," said Hong Kong's education secretary, Christine Choi, in May. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology announced that international students enrolled at Harvard or with admission offers could choose to study at the Hong Kong institution instead. Trump's visa restrictions could also accelerate the trend of African students "trad[ing] prestigious academic institutions in countries like Britain and the United States for Chinese alternatives, attracted by government scholarships, affordable tuition, lower living costs and easier access to visas," reported The New York Times.
The U.S. government's rejection of international students isn't a sophisticated foreign policy play or a way to help native-born Americans. It's an own goal—an utterly self-defeating approach that will lead to a less prosperous, productive, and welcoming country.