The Trump administration’s recent decision to bar international students from attending Harvard University was less a policy decision than an act of war. The White House had hoped its opening salvo against the nation’s oldest university would yield the kind of immediate capitulation offered by Columbia University. When Harvard chose to fight back instead, Trump decided to hit the university where it hurts most.
The administration’s actions are illegal and were immediately stayed by a federal judge. But that won’t prevent real harm to students and higher learning.
While Harvard has a famously selective undergraduate college, most of the university’s students are in graduate or professional school, and more than a third of those older students arrive from other countries. Overall, more than a quarter of Harvard’s 25,000 students come from outside the United States, a percentage that has steadily grown over time. The proportion of Harvard’s international students has increased 38 percent since 2006.
Even if the courts continue to block this move, it will be difficult for anyone to study there knowing they might be deported or imprisoned by a hostile regime — even if they’re the future queen of Belgium. And an exodus of international students will end up harming universities far beyond Harvard, as well as American research and innovation itself.
The question looming over higher education is whether the international student ban is merely the next escalation of the Trump administration’s apocalyptic campaign against a handful of elite institutions (as seen by the administration’s announcement Tuesday that it would cancel its remaining federal contracts with Harvard) — or the beginning of a broader attempt to apply “America First” protectionist principles to one the nation’s most valuable and successful export goods: higher learning. The rapid growth of international college students in the 21st century represents exactly the kind of global cooperation the isolationists in the White House would love to destroy.
International students helped buoy American universities after the Great Recession
In recent decades, international enrollment has shaped, and in some places transformed, higher learning across the country. According to the State Department, the number of annual F-1 student visas issued to international students nearly tripled from 216,000 in 2003 to 644,000 in 2015. And while many nations sent more students to America during that time, the story of international college enrollment over the last two decades has been dominated by a single country: the People’s Republic of China.
In 1997, roughly 12,000 F-1 visas were issued to Chinese students; this was only a third of the number issued to the two biggest student senders that year, South Korea and Japan. Chinese enrollment started to accelerate in the early aughts and then exploded: 114,000 by 2010; 190,000 in 2012; and a peak of 274,000 in 2015.
The change was driven by profound social and economic shifts within China. Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution essentially shut down university enrollment for a decade. When it ended in 1976, there was a huge backlog of college students who graduated in the 1980s into the economic liberalization of Deng Xiaoping. Many of them prospered and had children — often only one — who came of age in the early 2000s. Attending an American university was a status marker and an opportunity to become a global citizen.
At the same time, many colleges were newly hungry for international enrollment. The Great Recession savaged college finances. State governments slashed funding for public universities while families had less money to pay tuition at private colleges.
Public universities offer lower prices to state residents and private schools typically discount their sticker-price tuition by more than 50 percent through grants and scholarships. But those rules only apply to Americans. Recruiting so-called full-pay international students became a key strategy for shoring up the bottom line.
Colleges weren’t always judicious in managing the influx of students from overseas. Purdue University enrolled so many Chinese students so quickly that in 2013 one of them noted that a main benefit of traveling 7,000 miles to West Lafayette, Indiana, was improving his language skills — by talking to students from other regions of China. That same year, an administrator at a second-tier private college in Philadelphia told me that the college tried to keep enrollment from any one country below a certain threshold “or else we’d have to build them a student center or something.”
While federal law prohibits colleges from paying recruiters based on the number of students they sign up, this, too, only applies within American borders. International students sometimes pay middlemen large sums to help them navigate the huge and varied global college landscape. While many are legitimate, some are prone to falsehoods and fraud.
At the same time, colleges also used the new influx of students to expand course offerings, build strong connections overseas, and diversify their academic communities. One of the great educational benefits of going to college is learning among people from different experiences and backgrounds. There has likely never been a better place to do that than an American college campus in the 21st century. The most talented international students helped drive American economic productivity and research supremacy to new heights.
F-1 visas declined sharply in 2016, in part because of an administrative change that allowed Chinese students to receive five-year visas instead of reapplying every year. But the market itself was also shifting. The Chinese government invested enormous sums to build the capacity of its own national research universities, giving students better options to stay home. Geopolitical tensions were growing, and American voters chose to elect a rabidly xenophobic president in Donald Trump. Covid radically depressed international enrollment in 2020, but even after the recovery, Chinese F-1 visas in 2023 were only a third of the 2015 peak.
Colleges managed by recruiting students from other countries to take their place. India crossed 100,000 student visa for the first time in 2022. At the turn of the century, fewer than 1,000 Vietnamese students studied in America. Today, Vietnam is our fourth-largest source of international students, more than Japan, Mexico, Germany, or Brazil. Enrollment from Ghana has quintupled in the last 10 years.
A catastrophe for American science and innovation
If the Trump administration expands its scorched-earth student visa strategy beyond Harvard, it won’t just be the liberal enclaves and snooty college towns that suffer. Communities across the country will feel the hurt, urban and rural, in red states and blue.
Some colleges might tip into bankruptcy. Others will make fewer hires and produce fewer graduates for local employers. Even before the visa ban, the government of Norway set aside money to lure away American scholars whose research has been devastated by deep Trump administration cuts to scientific research. Other countries are sure to follow.
And if international students stop coming to the US, it will be a catastrophe for American leadership in science and technology. World-class research universities are magnets for global talent. Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a worldwide center of medical breakthroughs because Harvard and its neighbor MIT attract some of the smartest people in the world, who often stay in the United States to found new companies and conduct research.
The same dynamic drives technology innovation around Stanford and UC Berkeley in Silicon Valley, and in university towns nationwide. If you or a loved one benefited from a new cancer treatment, there’s a good chance the person who saved your life came to America on the kind of student visa the Trump administration is trying to destroy. Like printing the global reserve currency or having a good relationship with Canada, getting the pick of international students is one of those incredibly valuable things that Americans won’t fully appreciate until someone is stupid enough to throw it away.
In 2021, JD Vance told a group of movement conservatives that “we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” The administration has more than made good on his word, in part because the electorate is rapidly reorganizing around education attainment, with college graduates clustering in the Democratic party and nongraduates moving to the Republican side. Trump and his minions see elite colleges and universities as enemy fortresses in the culture wars, training grounds for the opposition that must be razed and broken.
Modern colleges look like the future that MAGA forces most fear. Visitors to campus today see students from scores of global communities, speaking multiple languages and practicing different cultural traditions. Places where people from other countries are welcome, and no single race, nationality, or religion reigns supreme. People like JD Vance are so terrified by this vision that they would rather destroy America’s world-leading higher education system and terrorize hundreds of thousands of people who are in this country legally and only want to learn.
