Visa rollbacks hit foreign grad students – and US colleges
When nearly 2,000 students, many from abroad, received their graduate diplomas on a recent sunny afternoon at the University of New Haven in Connecticut, it might have been the last influx of graduate students of this size on campus for some time.
The school, which has increased its graduate student enrollment with popular programs in engineering, business and public health, has lost some 3,000 international graduate students over the past two years. When new international graduate students arrive this fall, they will be in the dozens rather than the hundreds.
A variety of factors helped force this major change within the school’s student body, but one thing they have in common is the policies of President Donald Trump. The administration’s goals of restricting legal immigration and fending off criticism on U.S. college campuses have combined to redefine classroom distribution across the country, experts say.
Why we wrote this
Enrollment of foreign graduate students is plummeting at U.S. schools, leaving them with gaping holes in their budgets. Experts blame restrictive visa and travel policies for dampening the generally strong demand for U.S. higher education.
DePaul University in Chicago saw an overall 30% decline in international student numbers, including a 62% drop in first-year international graduate enrollment last fall. As a result, the school laid off staff and froze salaries and hiring. Also facing a sharp decline in international graduate student enrollment, loss of federal funding and a persistent structural deficit, the University of Southern California has laid off more than 1,000 employees.
At the University of New Haven, the $35 million hole created by declining enrollment represented about 17 percent of its budget. This led the school to stop contributing to employee retirement accounts, eliminate about 10 academic programs and cut 80 jobs through attrition. Each administrative office has been reduced in size.
“Every time you have to give up such a large part of your income, you have to make adjustments,” says university president Jens Frederiksen.
A change in policy
Nationally, new international student enrollments – undergraduate and graduate – declined 17% last fall, according to the Institute of International Education and 10 partner higher education associations. Schools surveyed said issues with visa applications and travel restrictions were the main factors.
Dr. Frederiksen traveled to India – his university’s largest source of international students – in 2024 because he heard that applications were declining. Even then, before Mr. Trump’s election victory in November, U.S. consular officials appeared to be tightening visa availability. “This predates the current administration in the United States, but it was almost as if embassies were sort of preparing for a complete change in approach to international students,” says Dr. Frederiksen.
This year, the Trump administration extended the ban on entry and issuance of visas to nationals of 39 countries, including non-immigrant visas used by students. In 2025, the government revoked more than 8,000 student visas, in some cases for students who committed criminal offenses and others apparently for participating in pro-Palestinian protests. Foreign visa applicants must also now make their social media accounts public for verification.
Additionally, last year the Trump administration ended or froze billions of dollars in grants to U.S. colleges and universities. This interrupted the research often conducted by international students, leading them to look elsewhere to continue their work. And there are concerns that the administration will try to end or limit a program that allows foreign students to work in the United States for three years after graduation to gain experience and find an employer who will sponsor them for a work visa.
“We’ll see that once these students move through the pipeline, and as we continue to have fewer and fewer new students coming into the pipeline, that will have an effect,” says Rachel Banks, senior director of legislative strategy and public policy at NAFSA: Association of International Educators, a nonprofit dedicated to international education and exchange.
“Historically, the administration, particularly the State Department, has sent messages or cables to all of its consulates to say, ‘We want to make sure that students have priority in terms of appointments and processing,’” Banks says. “We didn’t see that happen last year.”
Targeted international students
Zuzana Wootson, deputy director of federal policy at the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, which advocates for immigrant students, cautions that there is a cumulative impact to having fewer international students. She says the loss of these students represents not only a loss of tuition for schools, but also a broader impact on the economy because of the money they generated through their work.
“We can’t know every student who is considering applying to the US and talk to them fully to understand why they changed their minds. However, we can make fairly educated guesses about what’s happening,” Ms Wootson says. “The bottom line is last year’s policies that targeted international students. »
Frederick Hess, a senior fellow and director of education policy studies at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, believes the Trump administration’s policies regarding international students are appropriate.
Many international students have been indoctrinated to hate the United States and develop anti-American beliefs, Mr. Hess says, referring to those who participated in protests during the war between Israel and Hamas. He says if schools handled anti-Semitism better on campus and worked with the Trump and Biden administrations to spot bad actors during the visa process, none of this would be happening.
“In many cases, policy is reactive, and what we’re seeing here is a reaction to the fact that these institutions haven’t done a better job themselves,” he adds.
Anxiety on campus
Reading headlines about foreign students being arrested and deported made Ghana’s Kim Kanor anxious. He received his master’s degree in computer science from the University of New Haven this spring. “I was worried and the situation gradually got worse.”
He says the school has supported students like him by inviting immigration lawyers to campus and making legal services available.
But his mother missed her graduation last week because her visa application was refused, although Ghana was not among the 39 countries listed. And Mr. Kanor has no plans to return home to see his family because he fears he will not be allowed to return to the United States with three years remaining on his visa.
He made good friends at school, many of whom were international students. Some of them graduated with him, and others are left with limited resources after the university reduced the departments where he studied and worked. Today, this international diversity is diminishing.
“It’s been really difficult knowing that our close-knit community here is in decline,” Kanor said.
Others on campus said they expect the change in the student population will become more visible in the fall when this large class of outgoing graduate students is replaced by what Dr. Frederiksen said may be as few as 50 to 75 international graduate students.
The impact is already being felt.
Days before graduation ceremonies, University of New Haven students packed their dorms and took photos in their black caps and gowns on the school’s green grounds.
“I noticed it because a lot of my electives were canceled,” said a Pakistani student pursuing a master’s degree in public health, who agreed to speak anonymously to avoid retaliation. Whether a student’s visa might be affected appears to depend on the geopolitical situation, which can change from week to week, the student said.
“I notice that there are fewer students in my field, and my peers from different degrees also have the same problems,” the student said.
A new normal
The University of New Haven is pivoting and there is some good news.
This fall, the school will welcome a record freshman class, as the number of undergraduates outpaces shrinking graduate programs. And it will open a branch campus in Saudi Arabia, a project already underway before graduate enrollment plummeted, which will now provide a new way to reach a pool of international students and open study abroad opportunities for students on the Connecticut campus.
Still, it will be a smaller school than it was just a few years ago. Total enrollment this fall is estimated at 6,200 to 6,500 – up from more than 9,000 in 2024, Dr. Frederiksen says.
“It’s the new normal,” he says. “I think people have kind of prepared themselves, so we need to get to this point and then see what kind of benefits we can generate in the future.”
Staff writer Ira Porter reported from Wilmington, Delaware; Photographer Alfredo Sosa and editor Chris Sherman contributed reporting from West Haven, Connecticut.
