U.S. colleges are dealing with plummeting international student enrollment, and the consequences could go far beyond shrinking tuition revenue.
International students have become less likely to pursue education in the U.S. since President Donald Trump’s return to office. The administration has introduced more restrictive anti-immigration policies, including measures that explicitly target foreign-born students, and tightened rules about post-schooling employment for international graduates.Â
Last fall, schools reported international student enrollment had dipped 17%, according to NAFSA, an education nonprofit. Declining tuition spending translated to $1.1 billion in lost revenue for universities, and almost 23,000 fewer jobs.
Those figures might just be a drop in the bucket if international students end up permanently absconding from U.S. schools. International enrollees disproportionately pursue technical degrees, including in scientific, technology, engineering, and mathematics domains, otherwise known as STEM. The skills and the professions these lead to are cornerstones to U.S. innovation and technological breakthroughs, which in turn bolster all sorts of businesses and jobs. By cutting off those foreign-born grad students and PhDs at the source, the U.S. risks gutting its own economy years down the line.
That’s the finding of a paper published Tuesday by researchers at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. If the number of transplant STEM graduates trained in the U.S. were to fall by a third over the next decade, the blow to entrepreneurship, productivity, and business dynamism would claw anywhere between $240 billion and $481 billion from the country’s GDP, the paper found.
“A major and enduring economic advantage of the United States has been its ability to recruit and educate top talent from around the world,” the authors wrote. “In practice, recruitment of high-skill STEM talent into the United States happens primarily at U.S. universities.”
The international STEM pipeline
When Trump returned to office, the administration was riding high on voter approval for its planned immigration policies. In January 2025, the president polled particularly well with his promise to clamp down on undocumented immigration. A Gallup poll at the time found Americans had more faith in Trump to deliver on his immigration platform than on any other issue he had campaigned on.
But in the 18 months since, Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown has included a constriction of legal immigration pathways, too. The administration has enacted travel bans affecting dozens of countries, tightened refugee admission requirements, and rehauled the process by which many highly skilled foreign students can come to the U.S. for school, and eventually work.
Last year, the administration ordered changes to the H-1B visa program, which allows companies to hire highly skilled and specialized workers. The overhaul required employers to shell out $100,000 for each application, up from around $5,000 previously. A federal judge struck down the order earlier this month, a decision the administration said it would appeal.
The White House did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Changes to H-1B requirements are keenly felt in America’s most innovative industries. Companies have relied on the program to hire armies of foreign-born engineers, AI researchers, and healthcare practitioners, many of whom were studying in the U.S. prior to finding work. Of the 1.2 million international students who attended U.S. schools last year, 57% were enrolled in a STEM program, according to a survey by the Institute of International Education.
Vanishing opportunities for skilled workers
The concentration of international students in STEM fields rises in tandem with their expertise. The Peterson Institute study found international arrivals make up 42.1% of STEM workers whose highest degree is a master’s, a share that rises to 49.2% for those with PhD qualifications. Between 2000 and 2023, foreign-born professionals accounted for more than 60% of all new STEM workers with a PhD.
