The Trump administration’s actions attempting to deport international students and its bid to end Harvard’s international enrollment have put our international students and scholars on edge. They will scare off many of them who will now fear, with reason, that their academic career in the United States could be disrupted at any point and will have a growing chill on attracting others to the country.
These actions are surprising because they ignore the contributions of international students and scholars to our universities, communities and our country. Enrollment from abroad has doubled in the last 25 years, and according to IIE we had more than 1.1 million international students studying in the United States, accounting for 6% of the total U.S. higher education population. According to NAFSA, these students contributed more than $43 billion and supported 378,175 jobs to the U.S. economy during the 2023-2024 academic year. It is also worth emphasizing that international students have to prove that they have enough funds to study in the United States in order to get their student visas.
Furthermore, international enrollment is particularly important at this time because domestic enrollment has been declining in U.S. institutions for the last 10 years. The so-called “enrolment cliff” caused by the expected drop in the population of high school graduates is projected to begin in 2026, which will result in a smaller pool of domestic students able to enter universities.
According to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE), the number of 18-year-olds nationwide who graduate from high school each year will erode by 13%, or nearly half a million, by 2041. The impact of this drop on universities’ budgets will be huge, and many are expected to close down.
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In addition, at a time in which the Trump administration is fixated on trade deficits, it is worth noting that international students coming into the country are considered an export because they purchase an American service, education, and generate revenue for the U.S. with foreign currency. Hence, the U.S. has a surplus in the education sector because foreigners buy education at a much higher rate from the U.S. than Americans buy it from other countries. And if they do not study here, these students will have other options: Most come from India and China, and those countries are growing and strengthening their own higher education sector. And many other countries have great and more affordable universities that will welcome them.
But their value goes far beyond mere numbers and dollars. American universities attract the world’s brightest academic minds, helping universities to conduct groundbreaking research. Some of the greatest achievements in U.S. history, like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo program, would have never happened without the contribution of immigrants, many of them former international students and/or international scholars.
According to studies from the National Bureau of Economic Research and Stanford University, immigrants represent 16% of all U.S. inventors, but produced 23% of total innovation output, as measured by the number of patents, patent citations, and the value of the patents. They were responsible for a quarter of the total economic value of patents granted between 1990 and 2016, and they account for more than half of the U.S. billion-dollar start-ups in the last two decades. Immigrants also account for 38% of U.S. Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine and physics from 2000 to 2023 (Forbes).
Now this talent pipeline is at risk. Forcing them to leave and/or clamping our universities’ ability to recruit them will hinder our ability to produce cutting-edge research, and it will hurt our competitiveness and our capacity to remain at the forefront of global innovation. Moreover, international students enrich the intellectual, social and cultural life on our campuses. Finally, about 41% of international graduates, like myself, remain in the United States when we complete our degrees, contributing to the economy.
Some conservatives are making the case that as universities have grown more international, American students are losing out. But this is no zero-sum game. As we have seen, our universities need more students, not less, and even when international students receive financial support, return home, get great jobs, and make contributions to improve conditions in their own countries, they can also benefit the United States.
It is important to remember that American education is one of the most impactful ways to exert our soft power. While they are here, these students are assimilating the local culture and building relationships and networks with Americans that will be instrumental to their careers when they return home. Many of these students will promote intercultural relationships, spread American language and culture abroad, become U.S. advocates, build partnerships and businesses with U.S. companies and institutions, collaborate on research projects, invest in the U.S., fueling a global economy, and ultimately promote the U.S.’s broader national interests abroad. It is a great (and cheap) investment.
It is not an overstatement to say that these decisions from the Trump administration would destroy our universities as we know them, because they will not be the same without international students. Much is at stake.
