New International Student Enrollment Craters
By 
Killing American higher education.
International student enrollment rates at American colleges and universities fell sharply this year, driven by visa application issues as prospective students are caught up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
New international student enrollment in U.S. institutions declined by 17% in fall 2025, the largest nonpandemic decline in the last 11 years, according to new data released Monday by the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit that works to encourage foreign study. This figure, from a preliminary report covering a portion of the institutions, comes on the heels of a 7% drop in new international enrollees in the 2024-25 academic year.
More than half of the 825 U.S. higher education institutions surveyed in the fall 2025 snapshot reported a decrease in new international enrollment, according to the IIE’s Open Doors report.
“The U.S. is no longer the central place that students aspire to come to,” said Fanta Aw, CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, a nonprofit group. Aw attributed the decline to difficulties in obtaining a U.S. visa, saying the issues have made the U.S. “less competitive” on the global stage.
Explaining the value of international students is not faintly difficult; foreign students pay higher tuition than American students and thereby subsidize, rather than replace, their American counterparts. There are surely some negative social justice implications of that model (and administrators were characteristically foolish to assume that they could return to that trough indefinitely), but it has worked for both Americans and for increasing numbers of international students over the course of several decades. That the presence of foreign students improves classroom environments and the cultural environment of a school is the cherry on top; American students benefit immensely from a learning perspective when exposed to international students, and not just in fields like mine.
But foreigners are bad, eggheads are bad, and egghead foreigners are especially bad…