Nearly 20 Percent Fewer International Students Traveled to the U.S. in August
nytimes.comIt's going to be a rough time for a lot of colleges that have been using foreign students paying full price to fund their operations. Especially now that the incoming college aged population is beginning to shrink and the percentage attending college has peaked, so the domestic population probably won't be able to fill the seats at less competitive colleges.
Perhaps they should tighten their belts and reduce administrative bloat. It’s not as if American society hadn’t collectively called for this for decades while tuition has risen astronomically.
It's not administrative bloat that makes colleges so expensive. "Administrative bloat" happens when a school becomes a city. Harvard/Stanford/MIT et al. cannot go back to some time when tuition was affordable while still being the research powerhouses they are.
Bigger organizations require more overhead and those costs don't grow linearly. I'm not saying that I think all those administrators are necessary or they all make things more efficient, but at the same time many of them are in place precisely because they are running an office that does make things more efficient. You get rid of one administrator and you may end up increasing the workload on everyone else by 20%, which seems like a win on paper because you lose their budget while not giving anyone else a raise. But getting rid of them made the whole organization less efficient.
e.g. My university's IT office has a huge budget and a bunch of administrators. It makes my life as a professor easier, and it gives students a better experience. It's very easy to say that the entire IT office should be eliminated to "tighten their belts and reduce administrative bloat". Which may be true, but at the same time it exists for a reason, and getting rid of it doesn't teleport us back to the 70s when campuses didn't need an IT office.
> It’s not as if American society hadn’t collectively called for this for decades while tuition has risen astronomically.
American society has called for better education, more teaching styles, more research, more technology, more subjects and classes, more majors, delivered to more students every year. There's no way we are going back, it's just not happening, the expectations are too high at this point. We can either decide maintaining these kinds of institutions are worth it, or trade off for worse outcomes and just give up on being serious about research. Seems like that's actually what this administration wants to do, but the public decidedly does not. However the public wants to have their cake (world class research institutions) and eat it too (low tuition affordable by the general public) and that's just not going to happen.
If I’ve learned one thing from studying economics it’s that supply equals demand.
If I’ve learned another it’s that prices never go down
Can you explain in this context? Because prices do go down if supply exceed demand.
The economics concept behind this is "price stickiness".
https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/reference/what-is-price-st...
Education is weird as a product, because you're delivering the same experience to students but they each pay a different bespoke price. Sometimes schools even pay their own customers!
When a rich person sends their kid to school they get charged full sticker price. Then schools use some of that money to subsidize the educations of the other students. Given those dynamics, there's really no reason for the tuition sticker price to ever go down unless the uber-rich can't afford it anymore, because the actual price anyone pays is floating and can be whatever it needs to be for them.
The students also get wildly different outcomes based on the choices they make. And it’s not always clear what the right choices are.
You can drift, you can work hard, you can work hard on the wrong thing, you can gain work experience, meet your future colleagues and life-partners.
Theoretically yes but not when everything has perfect pricing as seems to be the case these days.
Yes, they should.
Which is a completely unrelated effort from the free money you're getting from abroad.
Unless governments institute policies that require them to "tighten their belts" they won't tighten their belts by cutting their own pay. They'll tighten belts by cutting out the least paying students, and scholarships, instead.
If this does push governments to get universities to tighten their belts, then why not have governments make them do that anyways without losing a massive chunk of export earnings, and a form of export earnings which has demonstrated positive effects many times greater than the dollars they bring in.
U.S. colleges poised to close in next decade, expert says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45171434 - September 2025
Looming 'demographic cliff': Fewer college students and fewer graduate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42634596 - January 2025
Yep. This is, of course, what's really happening, same as before. The next step is that highly educated jobs in the industry disappear, which then gives you cheap colleges with great teachers, but not much reason to study, and then we're back where we started this whole debacle in the 1990s.
Next step is expensive grifty colleges with bad teachers, as all the good teachers will flee or just not go into teaching, and nothing will be cheap because then what’s the point of the grift?
Picture Bob Jones U at Harvard scale. Or the Musk school of engineering where they teach that sensor fusion is a bad idea actually.
The loss of foreign students is already having an impact on the Boston rental market, with thousands of fewer students coming to the city this year:
“I’ve been doing real estate and technology for 30 years. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Demetrios Salpoglou, CEO of Boston Pads, told Boston.com. “It’s very acute. It’s not impacting all neighborhoods … it’s really proximity to a lot of universities that have a heavy reliance on foreign money or foreign enrollment.”
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/08/21/apartments...
I hope a similar thing is happening in Seattle's U-district.
Housing costs are by far the largest line item expense for a student. Actual tuition/books is pretty affordable [1]
Not familiar with Seattle U-distict, is it rental market? Because I hope foreign students are not impacting single family house prices.
When I was grad student rent was indeed 50% of my stipend. Tuition was covered as part of research grants. Only way to reduce expenses was to get roommates.
Having said that, mortgage is also 50% of our household income now. American dream is expensive...
All those students, along with their talent and money and connections went _somewhere_ so that’s a shame for USA.
Huge win for US high school and college students. Not so good for bloated college administrations.
Some of my favorite people to meet in college were foreign students. You get to meet diverse people and learn about the world. It's only a win if college is 20% cheaper this year. It's not.
What is the cost of "meeting diverse people" and can the average US student afford that.
Every benefit must be judged by its cost.
> What is the cost of "meeting diverse people"…
In this case, it's self-funding. International students subsidize much cheaper in-state tuition.
Now that full-tuition-paying international students are gone, the average US students will have even harder time affording that. Congratulations.
Foreign money coming in will have to be made up elsewhere. It will be made up by raising tuition on remaining students. Schools that have a small enough applicant pool will price out their applicants and close. Likely they will be replaced by for-profit grifts that are much more affordable but don't actually do anything for the students except bilk them. The largest most international most diverse most administratively bloated schools will be fine. It's the small mostly-white rural colleges that will suffer the most.
Student enrollment in the US is declining and the big problem for colleges the past few years has been a worry about not having enough students. So it's not clear why US students were struggling to get a college spot.
And if you mean them getting spots in the more prestigious institutions, well, it's not clear whether that will even happen (the few thousand international students admitted to the top universities are not the ones that are likely to decline their acceptance letters), but even if it did, well, those universities are simply not as prestigious anymore.
Attracting the best talent from anywhere in the world is a huge part of what created their prestige, and that's even before we get to how they're losing funding, and professors and researchers to other countries.
The "best talent" is a major scam. International students/alumni did not make these universities the best in the world or create that prestige.
Look at any tier 1 research university in USA and I’ll find you distinguished professors who were once international students at US universities.
Go look at a current list of people at Princeton’s IAS and count how many are former international students.
Zero sum ass mentality. Top performing international students are likely to start companies and create jobs which is great for US high school and college students.
Are top performing US students less likely to start companies and create jobs than international?
1. No evidence but imo probably. Immigrants are by their nature entrepunerial go getters, thats how they got here.
2. Top performing US students arent being crowded out by international students anyway.
What about the first US child from a family of immigrants?
What about them? Competent domestic students are not being crowded out by international students. Competent domestic workers are not being crowded out by immigrants. The opposite is happening, immigrants create new opportunities for natives out of thin air. That doesnt mean that natives dont, they both do.
Was just curious how you thought they ranked compared to the others since you had an opinion
An interesting thought. I think parents who work to instill an entrepreneurial mindset into their children are more likely to end up with entrepreneurial minded children. Whether immigrants do that Im not sure. Maybe they want their kids to have an easier/simpler life than they did
Objectively yes.
Immigrants make up 14% of the population but start more than 20% of businesses.
44% of fortune 500 companies are founded by immigrants or their children. Steve Jobs' dad was a Syrian immigrant student. Elon Musk was on F1, J1, and H1B visa.
Yes. Look at the top ten tech companies. Their founders were foreign born and in cases where they weren’t they’re children of foreign born immigrants.
Sorry I don't believe you.
Not a win if your school cuts programs because of loss of 60% of revenue that used to come from foreign students.
> All those students, along with their talent and money and connections went _somewhere_ so that’s a shame for USA.
Money? Yes.
Talent and connections? Not necessarily.
Top PhD students are still coming to America.
It’s the money-grabbing 12-month masters programs that are the problem.
Come buy a F-1 student visa for $200k! It’s the Trump silver card.
>Top PhD students are still coming to America.
They probably are, and that won't stop anytime soon. The question is how much talent is being lost now.
Well, the only astrogeologist I know chose northern Europe, and the two nuclear physicists I know are doing their thesis in Zurich despite one of them having been proposed a subject by the MIT and a Singaporean university (I think he took the better subject tbh, probably didn't have anything to do with the current immigration policies in the US).
The admin stopping some research for no reason probably got a lot of PhD students quite distrustful of the US, that could cause some of them to go back after their thesis. Top PhD often choose countries for the lab director and the thesis subject. The US lost a few lab directors in the last 6 months, and at least in therapeutic engineering this year doesn't propose a lot of new thesis subjects (less than last year it seems), but maybe they keep them for their own students.
> that’s a shame for USA billionaires
Fixed that for you. Wealth distribution is far from equitable and immigration by and large benefits the wealthy. They financially benefit from the cheap labor and are mostly immune from the downsides.
The US did great for hundreds of years with the limited immigration we had from primarily European countries. The world we live in today was built with that approach. Remains to be seen if importing from recently modernized / 3rd world countries provides any long term benefit for median Americans. We’d be much better off installing billionaires who wish to invest in the people because they feel an attachment to the people (noblesse oblige).
I can’t really see a good argument for foreigners outside of the Meiji government approach (learn from them to invest in our own) if you care about your people.
A visit to Ellis Island museum would suggest many waves of disfavored/impiverished “European” immigrants that faced significant discrimination for a generation.
Or a visit to California railroad museum documenting Japanese immigrants building railroads?
99% of those students were not any more talented than the average US citizen
It's not really talent, it's that they don't get scholarships and pay tuition in full. It was basically a subsidy program
Sorry to break it to you, but the average American is quite...let's say, average. That's why they're average, lol. Likewise, the average Chinese. That's why their school system filters out tens of millions of schoolkids from higher education and puts them in trade school early. Same goes for India, Europe, etc.
Gifted, driven kids, the kind who will leave their family and everything they've known, to cross an ocean to study in your country, are a scarce resource.
I'm not saying you shouldn't prioritize locals, but if you want competitive, world-class educational system, you should be open to foreign students and faculty helping to keep your system competitive. It's the same worldwide, whether it's in Singapore's NUS, or Oxford, or Saudi Arabia's KAUST.
But, what do I even know?
There's so few seats at these schools we could fill them with Americans and not notice a difference is my belief. We're talking about single digit acceptance rates where it's probably hard to distinguish students who apply at all.
Also I feel like it's not a good assumption that talented international students that come to top tier universities also have the same western vision of meritocracy and sharing their achievements with the globe.
Why not just stay and bring their gifts to their own country?
because the infrastructure in their home countries likely don't exist. some people are just that much smarter and need such an environment.
Or, there's risk to being in their home country where academic freedom might not really be a thing.
it's like why if you show serious promise in soccer at a young age, you go to Europe as soon as you can - you will be better developed there in a more mature environment as opposed to, say, the USA where you can only get decent coaching in a few major cities, and even then the gulf between the coaching at a top Spanish or English club versus an American one is huge. Or if you show promise in tennis at a young age, you get your ass to Florida as soon as you are able to.
Why not build the infrastructure with their smarts?
The path of least resistance is obviously to go where the infrastructure is.
Also, smarts needed to bootstrap modern infrastructure from scratch with limited resources are different than smarts needed to design a popular app, for example.
Typically smart people arent limited to specific areas of being smart. That's kind of the definition of being smart is figuring things out.
Americans built modern infrastructure with our limited 'average' brains.
Should be simple for actual smart people.
>Typically smart people arent limited to specific areas of being smart. That's kind of the definition of being smart is figuring things out.
Having worked with everyone over the course of my life from PhDs to construction workers, I'm going to have to hard disagree on this one. Just because someone is gifted in one area, does not mean their intelligence or domain expertise applies everywhere. Domain expertise is a real thing.
It's about maximizing your potential, and being in the best environment to do so. Building up that capacity might sound nice in theory, but in practice, you go where you can to get the best results possible.
there's a billion people in some countries..and none of them are smart in the vaguely defined field of building infrastructure?
They just happened to all be super smart at coding Java?
If you’re a bright kid, it’s way easier to get really good at Java then to get really good at boot strapping infrastructure with limited resources
Sources needed.
Some of them actually do that. Like when the US expelled Qian Xuesen, the founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab and he went back and built China's ballistic missile and space program. So, yep. It's happened and will continue to happen to different degrees.
this is a great thing nuclear deterrence spread around the world is great because it keeps one country from bullying the rest
I agree with you. We don't even have to imagine: the UK and US were planning preemptive nuclear strikes against the entire Soviet Union before they tested their first nuke.
Operation Dropshot and Unthinkable called for hundreds of nukes and conventional bombs to be dropped on Soviet cities to, "to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire."
All in all, I don't even have a dog in the fight, but people like Qian Xuesen won't become retarded if they're expelled from the US. If I remember correctly, something like a third of all top-tier AI researchers are Chinese. If you count all those with an immigration background, they'll be close to 50-70%. They will simply create companies and products that compete and take market share from American companies.
Are Americans - the country that votes out presidents for rising gas prices - willing to make do with a lower standard of living? Because that'd what you'll get when some the world's best innovators are no longer based in your country.
> They will simply create companies and products that compete and take market share from American companies.
Trade and innovation benefits all of mankind. A rising tide lifts all ships. Having multiple countries becoming successful instead of the US simply monopolizing talent would benefit the world.
> Glad Qian Xuesen helped China improve their missile innovation.
Nuclear Deterrence should be spread far and wide so no one bad actor can get into power and bully others.
> Having multiple countries becoming successful instead of the US simply monopolizing talent would benefit the world
In particular, it is a marginal detriment to the US. That’s why my original comment said this loss is a shame for USA.
Yup, that's what they will do now.
Which is indeed a benefit for their countries.
And is a loss for the US.
The brain drain was real and the US was the beneficiary and that may be ending soon.
Not sure what your point is? Are you happy that the US will be worse off than it was before?
I think America will be ok.
Being okay is a lot different from maintaining academic, innovative, and cultural dominance which provides a standard of living many have grown used to.
Are you saying America was a backwater nation until non-european immigrants rescued them?
Are you saying America was ok taking immigrants only as long as they were European?
That was the law up until the the Hart Cellar act of the 60's.
I'm asking about things working better when only Europeans were allowed, not the law. You were implying the former with your comment.
there's objective evidence That things were working better when only Europeans were allowed.
I don't think that website implies what you're thinking. The only significant thing that happened in 1971 is that Nixon suspended the convertibility of the dollar into gold, giving the US leeway to run unlimited deficits, paying for imports with paper.
Now, America wants to reduce its debt and curb industrial powers like the EU, Japan, China, etc. but it doesn't want to give up its exorbitant privilege that got it into the debt whole in the first place.
You can't have it both ways.
Its just data.
It could be a result of numerous causes.
My point still stands.
No, your point doesn't stand at all. It's completely baseless. You took a detailed resource referencing America's departure from a gold standard and you're twisting it to support your pet immigration policy.
Now, if you want to limit non-European immigration, it's a personal opinion and you have a right to it, but you can't make a blanket statement that, "everything worked better," or misinterpret data to say what you want.
Don't pretend you're being data-driven when you've made up your mind and now you're trying to torture the data into saying what you want.
What metrics are you measuring by?
So, while it seemed like you were trying to argue logically, it appears your argument is: I don't like non-Europeans. And you're trying to massage the data into showing your opinion is data-driven because it can't stand on its own merit.
But, feel free to change my mind with more data.
Aah racism. Cool cool cool glad you got it out there.
I think it’s pretty clear that’s not what I’m saying.
99% of stats are made up
But personal experience is not. I went to college and was friends with the foreign students. They were average.
We had 'Asian road chaos' every fall where the rich ones would show up with their new Bugattis (edit: Maseratis) having never learned how to drive the thing and much less on the open American roads where you can really let the accelerator loose. They would cause endless crashes.
One or two of poor ones would end up committing suicide in the spring when they flunked out and had spent their entire little farming family's fortune back in some austere rice farming village.
It was quite the sight to see. I want to say they were fairly normal in intelligence, relatively, but the set of incentives for them to perform were wildly different.
> had spent their entire little farming family's fortune back in some austere rice farming village.
Depends on tier of university.
At Harvard, MIT, Stanford, the asian international students are moderately rich (US$10 million+ net worth) from tech or manufacturing businesses.
Holy racism
Fwiw there’s like 1000 Bugattis in the world so you really must have gone somewhere super duper elite! Monaco perhaps?
You must've been pretty busy hanging out with a statistically significant quantity of all of them.
I was being generous when I wrote the comment. Several of the internationals left me baffled about how they got there. The liberal HN audience here clearly has an axe to grind.
That still doesn't mean your experiences generalise in any useful way, and using phrases like 'liberal HN audience' only serves to highlight your own biases.
It doesn't take a right-winger to see the tilt.
Thats the very definition of “anecdata”. (Anecdotes you mistake for representative data)
But they pay several multiples of money more to study than the average US citizen, take on no debt, and most of the time are studying for advanced technical degrees.
Most Americans are not.
If we want to have top-tier universities, and produce graduates capable of innovating and taking big risk, we need to have universities who are strong in STEM.
If we want to have universities who are strong in STEM, we need to fill up those seats because otherwise without students, there are no classes.
IDGAF where they come from, to be honest.
The average US citizen voted in Trump, so no. You can't listen to his UN speech and go "that's the man to rule my country" if you're not seriously mentally impaired.
Just on the odds this statement is almost certainly incorrect.
You have not met many average US citizens if you really think that is the case
What's your point? That education only belongs to the "talented"? Talented in what way? What good does it do to society that the "non-talented" are not educated?
Also, no source for claim.
Not OP but I infer that they're point is US colleges should primarily serve US citizens, not "talented" foreigners
why do you say that?
I can say, that 99% of those students are much less obese than the average US citizen
It's a shame that Canada also decided to shut the door on international students. The point was to ease the housing crisis (understandable) but the knock-on effect is to de-fund universities and surprisingly also public schools, which derive a great deal of revenue by charging international students.
It's colleges they they have been clamping down on, as they were bringing in absolutely massive numbers of mostly Indian students who were coming mainly to work in low-end jobs and get out of India rather than to legitimately study.
The number of graduate students being allowed in hasn't changed significantly, and undergraduate university students are also continuing to be brought in at rates similar to pre-pandemic times.
I didn’t know this. Thank you for sharing.
I'm not sure you can equate university students with the nonsense happening at diploma-mills
I don’t know if this was one of the intended outcomes, but this will probably cause some struggling college and universities to shut down.
International students raise quite a lot of money for higher-ed institutions because they pay full price without financial aid. The loss of that income is going to make a bad situation for higher-ed budgets much worse. Unless you are Harvard or Stanford (or a few other universities that are endowments with schools attached), you’re probably already in a budget crunch or eating into your endowment.
A side note, one of the founders of the college I went to has been convinced that higher-ed needs an entirely new business model in order to survive, and is founding a new school called Greenway (https://www.greenwayinstitute.org) that is trying to blend internships and co-op programs into an engineering education.
This is a huge win for the rest of the world. This won’t stop the bleeding of top talent to the US but put a significant dent in it.
Next year will be even worse.
This was the first year of Trump's new term and most of the anti-immigration executive orders happened in the last few months. By August, most international students had already accepted offers, made travel and stay plans, and likely paid some part of their tuition already, and just continued due to sunk costs and hope that things will stabilize.
However, at this point, I think a lot more people will not even apply to US schools for next year.
Education, travel for education, and housing for education were important American export sectors, before Trump nuked them.
So more spots for Americans? Doesn’t necessarily seem like a bad thing to me.
You're assuming that there weren't enough spots for Americans and that they were getting denied due to foreigners. That's not true. For Americans who want a college education and don't get one is mostly because of the cost of education, which foreign students subsidize.
This is a classic case of shooing yourself in the foot only because of a fear of the foreigner.
I thought colleges only had a limited number of slots to accept students each year. Seems like US citizens would be competing with foreign students in that case.
For most colleges the number of available slots is not constrained by some absolute limit but is instead constrained by their income available to pay for all the people and resources needed to educate these students.
Further, the most competitive universities artificially constrain acceptance rates because low acceptance rates make them more desirable.
Imagine we passed a federal law banning the children of parents who make more than $150,000 annually from attending college. Would this just mean that colleges take their same planned slots and give them to lower earning students? No. It'd be massively disruptive and change the available slots.
The flow of smart and talented people to the United States has historically been incredibly beneficial for the latter.
EDIT: further reading here: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/05/28/demand-f...
TLDR: No, probably not.
If you're prepared to pay the same fees as foreign students and get the same grades, they might be happy to have you, but more likely it'll just mean more colleges have to close - foreign students never really took places from domestic students, they subsidised them.
We are going through a similar issue in the UK where a lot of University finances have been setup to rely on being able to attract foreign - mostly Chinese and Middle Eastern - students who pay 2x-4x more than domestic students. Now those students are being pushed away or are turning away, those institutions are questioning their own viability, and are at risk of bankruptcy.
At Ivy League or Oxbridge levels, this might be an acute issue: the running costs are insane, and despite having large endowment pools of cash, those pools aren't deployable to address the problem. Donations to such funds are often earmarked to support certain seats, tenures, scholarships and so on, and can't be used for general spending and teaching costs.
For the poorer schools without endowments (think JuCos), they might not have relied much on foreign student money anyway, so might weather it better. You are just as likely to get to junior college tomorrow as you were yesterday.
A middle schooler's aspirations of MIT, Stanford, Yale, Berkley and so on might now look more likely on paper, but in truth, those colleges might not be there or not able to offer as many courses by the time they're ready to attend.
I wouldn't be totally surprised to see a couple of Ivy League and some lower tier colleges go under in the next 5 years, and for about half the Russell Group in the UK to face a similar fate.
Not sure about the economics of it in the US, but in many countries international students subsidise domestic students, because they pay full fees whereas domestic students generally do not. Back during the financial crisis lowered enrolment of international students was a factor in Irish universities having to discontinue courses, say; they just weren't economically possible without that subsidy.