The Trump administration’s threat to block Harvard from enrolling international students would remove more than a quarter of the university’s student body, a share large enough to rock its campus and, potentially, its tuition revenue.
The move, frozen within 24 hours on Friday by a federal judge, also highlights the risk other universities face from an administration that has shown deep hostility toward higher education. N.Y.U., Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Carnegie Mellon have even larger international student shares than Harvard does.
This metric that once reflected their international renown — and financial strength — now looks like a vulnerability.
The share of international students studying at these colleges and across the United States has been growing for the past two decades as rising incomes in countries like China and India have produced more families looking to educate their children in America.
Domestic forces have played a role, too: Public research universities in particular have turned to international students, who commonly pay full price for tuition, to help compensate for declines in state funding for education.
“We have all this debate about trade deficits with China right now,” said Gaurav Khanna, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied these shifts in higher education. “That’s a deficit in goods. But when you think of services — like higher ed services — we have a big surplus.”
Higher education is, effectively, a major American export — and one where the foreign students consuming it do so in American communities, also spending money on housing, groceries and books there. More than 1.1 million international students contributed about $43 billion to the U.S. economy during the 2023-24 academic year, most of it on tuition and housing, according to an analysis by NAFSA, a nonprofit association of international educators.
U.S. students, by contrast, often receive financial aid directly from universities or other federal programs. And at public universities, many pay lower in-state tuition. As a result, foreign students can end up contributing more than one and a half times as much as their American counterparts in tuition dollars, said Mirka Martel, head of research, evaluation and learning at the Institute of International Education.
Another way to look at this is that the higher tuition paid by international students helps subsidize lower costs for U.S. students. At some public universities, international students pay a tuition rate that’s even higher than regular out-of-state tuition.
For universities, all of this means that a decline in international students could have serious financial consequences, beyond disrupting classrooms, research and the next generation of workers in the United States. And even without threats as grave as the one Harvard now faces, colleges and universities were already bracing for a decline in international students amid the Trump administration’s cuts to federally funded research and aggressive immigration enforcement.
Emily Badger writes about cities and urban policy for The Times from Washington. She’s particularly interested in housing, transportation and inequality — and how they’re all connected.
Aatish Bhatia, a graphics editor at The Upshot, creates interactive articles that explain complex ideas in simple ways.
Steven Rich is a data reporter at The Times, using data analysis to investigate major issues and contextualize current events.
Ethan Singer reports using data for The Upshot section as a member of the 2024-25 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
The post These Are the U.S. Universities Most Dependent on International Students appeared first on New York Times.
