People hold up signs during the Harvard Students for Freedom rally in support of international students at the Harvard University campus in Boston on May 27.
Rick Friedman/AFP via Getty Images
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Rick Friedman/AFP via Getty Images
President Trump signed a proclamation this week suspending visas for new students from overseas who planned to attend Harvard University in the fall — a move that a judge quickly blocked for the time being.
It’s a dramatic escalation of the conflict between the White House and the country’s oldest and most elite school.
The White House says it’s taking these actions due to national security, crime and civil rights concerns.
The proclamation also calls on Secretary of State Marco Rubio to review visas issued to other foreign nationals at Harvard and whether those students “meet the criteria” laid out in the president’s action.
Trump’s recent move targets Harvard, but it’s just the latest in a string of immigration actions that have placed international students across the United States in the government’s crosshairs.
Earlier this week, the White House announced a new travel ban and other restrictions for people from 19 countries starting June 9. And just last month, the State Department announced it halted scheduling new visa interviews for foreign students.
As a result, uncertainty and fear are widespread and rising among international students hoping to attend American universities in the fall. Trump’s actions are already having an impact. Early data from education application portals show the number of prospective students searching for U.S. universities has already declined sharply.
Smaller numbers of international students coming to the U.S. for an education can create major problems for the many schools that rely on these students for tuition as well as social, cultural and academic and research contributions, according to an economist and the head of an international educators association.
“Universities understand the value of those students and their contributions culturally, socially, strength of research, all of those things,” Fanta Aw, executive director of NAFSA: Association of International Educator, told NPR. And schools are deeply concerned about the message and chilling effect that the White House’s immigration policies are having, she said.
Here’s a closer look at who these students are, where they come from and what they study.
How many students are coming to the U.S. to study?
About 75 years ago, during the 1948 to 1949 school year, U.S. institutions had a little over 25,000 international students — or roughly 1% of all enrolled students in higher education, according to the earliest available data from the Institute of International Education.
The number of students coming to America from other countries has continued to skyrocket, especially since 2006. There are now about 19 million students enrolled at U.S. colleges and close to 6% of those students, or slightly more than 1.1 million, are from another country, according to IIE data analyzing the 2023 to 2024 academic year that was collected from more than 680 colleges and universities.
Aw, with NAFSA, said several factors contribute to this massive increase.
“One is the world becoming increasingly aware of the quality of education that is offered in the United States,” she said. “Those who came generations before, when they went back home, they continued to spread the good word about the value of the U.S. education, and that has become a powerful recruitment tool.”
Many leaders and heads of states in other countries attended American schools, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and King Phillipe of Belgium, who received a master’s degree in political science at Stanford University. Tesla CEO and one of the world’s richest people, Elon Musk, who is originally from South Africa, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997.
College and university leaders also came to understand the value, financial and otherwise, that international students bring and focused more on recruiting overseas, Aw said. And finally, the rising middle class around the world can better afford an overseas education, she said.
While students come from all corners of the world to study in the U.S., data from 2023-2024 shows that about three-quarters of these students are coming from Asia. Among those, more than half are from India and China.
Here are the top 10 countries overall.
Where do these students go to school?
The Trump administration has focused sharply on Harvard, a small school that has nearly 7,000 international students from more than 140 countries. This is more than 25% of its total enrollment, according to 2024-2025 data from the school. When including all scholars and researchers, the international population at Harvard exceeds 10,000.
But for the 2023-2024 school year — the most recent year that comprehensive data is available from the IIE — Harvard doesn’t even crack the top 25 institutions hosting the most international students and hasn’t for some time.
New York University has remained one of the top, if not the top university, hosting the most international students for many years. During the 2023-2024 school year, NYU had close to 30,000 students from other countries. Coming in a regular close second is Northeastern University’s Boston campus and next is Columbia University – which like Harvard, become a target of the Trump administration’s ire.
Twelve of the top 20 higher ed institutions with the most international students are public schools. And these colleges are uniquely vulnerable to losing the social, cultural and financial contributions from these students, Startz said.
Private, Ivy League schools like Harvard or Yale could financially withstand losing their foreign population, Startz said. But “the tuition that’s brought in by international students is incredibly important” for public universities, he said.
At the University of California system, where Startz teaches, international students help offset the costs for in-state residents to attend. Tuition for foreign students is roughly triple that of non-international students, he said. And, with very few exceptions, international students are not eligible for financial aid.
Stett Holbrook, a spokesman for the University of California system, says international students and scholars are “vital members of our university community and contribute greatly to our research, teaching, patient care and public service mission.”
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is another state university that attracts a large number of international students. They made up about 25% of the school’s total student population in the 2024-2025 academic year.
“International diversity is a foundational element to Illinois’ overall excellence,” Patrick Wade, a spokesman for UIUC said. “It keeps our state and nation competitive in the global marketplace and prepares all students – including domestic students – to lead and solve problems in an interconnected world.”
Many students stay for graduate school
Schools such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford may have enough money to withstand the loss of international students’ tuition. But they may be susceptible to a different impact, since many international students are enrolled in graduate programs, Startz said.
They “play an incredibly important role for moving research forward,” he said. “These are also the people who are probably most likely to end up staying in the United States, raising their families here, contributing to high tech, often becoming entrepreneurs.”
According to NAFSA, these students contributed $43.8 billion to the U.S. economy during the 2023-2024 school year and supported more than 378,000 jobs.
And more than half of all foreign students study STEM fields at American universities.
As the State Department continues its pause on visa applications for international students, these students face the real risk of not being able to continue their education in the fall.
“This is the peak time for students to go and apply for visas to come to the United States in time for the fall semester,” NAFSA’s Aw said. “So the pause in visas can have a very detrimental effect, not just in the immediate but also it can have long-term effect.”
