Politically motivated schemes by the Trump administration to attack and hinder the enrolment of international students are shortsighted and damaging not only to American colleges and universities but also to the nation’s economy.
Trump’s demand for an arbitrary 15% cap at Harvard is part of a larger effort to subjugate and extort that elite private university that probably will not hold up in the courts.
But the more important story is the State Department’s expanded and inept implementation of a visa screening process for all prospective international students seeking to enter a US college or university that now includes exploring their social media posts for Trump-world political correctness.
The new State Department’s edict requires consular officers to review applicants’ “entire online presence” and to seek “any indications of hostility towards the citizens, culture, government, institutions or founding principles of the United States” as well as advocacy for aid or support for “threats to US national security”.
Since Secretary of State Marco Rubio has used rather vague criteria to deport some international students in the US, often in surprise raids, one can imagine the fear of current or past mild criticism that this would instil.
New visa rules and Trump-era border policies also raise the possibility that an international student on a valid US visa might not be let back into the country if they travel internationally, back home or elsewhere.
Then there is the banning of students from 19 countries and, more generally, the anti-immigrant and anti-foreign student rhetoric.
Add to the mix the Trump administration’s threats to limit paths for post-graduation participation in the economy and for citizenship that motivate many talented people to travel to the US, despite often challenging circumstances.
Combined, these policy directives and rhetoric are poisoning the well of attracting and retaining global talent that has been an essential part of America’s economic competitiveness.
Economic and other costs
What are the preliminary results? A conservative estimate is an overall decline of 15% in undergraduate and graduate international student enrolment, including a drop of some 40% in new students coming to US colleges and universities.
Not only will this degrade the educational environment of US colleges and universities that purport to educate globally knowledgeable citizens, but the financial impact will be substantial.
One estimate is a loss of nearly US$7 billion to the national economy and a loss of some 60K jobs. California, the largest US destination for international students, is estimated to lose some US$1 billion in economic activity.
There are legitimate concerns about international students displacing native students in undergraduate majors or in graduate education, largely in STEM fields in highly selective universities, and some implications for socioeconomic mobility for Americans. Generally, however, the US has a labour shortage in many of these areas.
In a nation of immigrants, universities that attract and retain talented students and researchers make the US more robust, innovative and economically competitive. A rational policy would be to seek more immigrants, selectively and with some attention to regional labour needs.
We might also debate the banking on international students to help with college and university finances. Perhaps there is an overreliance on international student tuition at some institutions, but it should be noted that what partly drove that trend is the long-term disinvestment by state governments in public colleges and universities that caused them to seek other revenue sources.
Finally, some observers note that economic arguments for international students, a high percentage of whom enrol in a select number of large metropolitan regions, are not persuasive enough for many Americans.
But the reality is the negative impact will be widespread and multidimensional.
Particularly in states with declining populations, we will see an acceleration of higher education institutions closing, and the financial impact will include not just many public and private universities but also many community colleges.
Loss of trust
Imagine the trend line if Trump’s neo-national policies extend or become even more restrictive and vindictive going into the following academic year. As Nathan Greenfield writes in University World News, internationally there is a loss of trust in the US as a viable, politically stable and welcoming environment.
As noted previously, an important variable for attracting international talent is the realistic probability that those who venture for their education in the US can seek work after graduation and have a path to citizenship. Many do. That feeds into the remarkable number of start-ups launched by immigrants and other economic and social contributions.
That path is becoming uncertain as Trump and allies in Congress shift the nation increasingly toward an America first, old-school isolationist and what I call a “transnational paranoia” mindset.
In the midst of growing effort and competition for international students by our economic competitors, the US pipeline for international talent is being unnecessarily eroded.
As I have written in the past, the US higher education advantage has long been waning as the quality and marketing of non-US universities has increased. They are increasingly valued for being much less expensive and offering often safer learning environments.
What are the other geopolitical considerations?
Trump’s tariff threats to India’s economy, a nation that sends the most international students to the US, are likely to feed into a further decline in the attractiveness of America for global talent.
Then there is China, the second largest source of students. President Xi Jinping’s evolving national security state is increasingly discouraging them from pursuing studies in the US. The Chinese Communist Party has also increased restrictions on international travel — part of Xi’s Chinese Dream focused on self-reliance and concern about foreign influence.
Adding to the vibe of hostility, Marco Rubio announced plans to revoke visas for international students and researchers from China. There is also a bill in the House to simply ban all Chinese international students because their purported sole purpose is to “spy on our military, steal our intellectual property, and threaten national security”.
Whatever the merits (or lack thereof) of such opinions and policies on both sides of the Pacific, we see all the elements of a declining interest to come to the US.
There is a “competently incompetent” storyline to Trump’s policymaking – multiple battlefronts pursuing draconian and rapid dismantling and injury to major public institutions, like colleges and universities, without much thought or concern about the social and economic consequences. It is a well-organised initial barrage, with an apparent army of Department of Justice and other Trump officials seeking intervention in a growing and large collection of colleges and universities.
Trump’s visa policies and isolationist rhetoric also have implications for the ability of colleges and universities to attract faculty and talented researchers, who are usually on H1-B visas.
Already there is a bill in the House to limit these visas and purposefully restrict the number of international faculty, in part to hinder the flow of so-called “woke administrators and professors from around the world”.
What rational and ambitious academic wants to come to Trump’s America amid its vitriolic attacks on universities, on students, on faculty and on free speech?
A financial disaster in the making
One needs to place the attacks on international students, researchers and faculty within the context of Trump and the MAGA movement’s overall and dramatic attack on US higher education.
This includes the Department of Justice’s politically motivated investigations of an increasing number of major universities, vindictive efforts to rescind billions of dollars of existing research grants and the threat of massive cuts in funding to the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, NASA and other federal agencies for academic research for the coming fiscal year.
It’s a recipe for not only subjugating America’s higher education institutions but also a financial disaster for these institutions that will be challenging to recover from.
John Aubrey Douglass is a senior research fellow of public policy and higher education at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, Goldman School of Public Policy, at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. He is the lead author of Neo-Nationalism and Universities: Populists, autocrats, and the future of higher education (Johns Hopkins University Press). This article was first published on John Aubrey Douglass’ Substack platform here.