President Trump on Wednesday said Harvard should cap the number of international students it admits to create more spots for Americans, undercutting his administration’s argument that merit alone should guide admissions practices as it escalates its fight with the elite university.
Mr. Trump’s comments came in response to a question about the Department of Homeland Security’s recent move to revoke the school’s ability to enroll foreign students. The college immediately challenged that decision in court, and a federal judge has temporarily blocked the policy.
Still, the State Department has since halted interviews abroad with foreign citizens applying for student and exchange visas as the government expands its scrutiny of applicants’ social media posts. The shift follows efforts to crack down on universities, including Harvard, over what the administration has said is a failure to address antisemitism on campus. Mr. Trump’s has also attacked policies aimed at supporting diversity, equity and inclusion in an attempt to bring academia more in line with his views that white men and those with traditional views of gender are being discriminated against.
Harvard has so far resisted considerable pressure from the government to enact changes sought by Mr. Trump to its curriculum, hiring and admissions practices. But the government could potentially limit the number of international students allowed to study in the United States on the whole, an idea Mr. Trump alluded to on Wednesday.
Mr. Trump expressed outrage that about one-fourth of Harvard’s student body is made up of international students, up from about one-fifth in 2010, according to university data. (Mr. Trump said the figure was 31 percent this year, which appeared to be incorrect.)
“Why would a number so big? I think they should have a cap of maybe around 15 percent,” he said. “We have people want to go to Harvard and other schools, they can’t get in because we have foreign students there. But I want to make sure that the foreign students are people that can love our country.”
The White House declined to comment on whether Mr. Trump’s remarks represented a new policy. The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
For months, the Trump administration has targeted noncitizen students who have been involved in campus protests related to the war in Gaza for arrest and removal from the country. Many of those students have challenged their detention on First Amendment grounds.
Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly used the protests to target international students, connecting those complaints to his broader campaign against Harvard.
In a social media post on April 24, Mr. Trump said the university had accepted students “from all over the World that want to rip our Country apart.” In a cabinet meeting on April 30, Mr. Trump criticized Harvard and asked his team, “And students — where are these people coming from?”
“The students they have, the professors they have, the attitude they have, is not American,” Mr. Trump said.
Applications to four-year colleges increased 5 percent this year, driven mainly by Latino and Black applicants, according to Common App, the nonprofit group that streamlines the application process for more than 1,000 universities. For the first time since 2019, the rate of growth among international students trailed growth among domestic applicants.
Universities could face significant financial costs if they face new restrictions on enrolling international students, who are more likely to pay larger shares of education costs. Harvard said its application process does not consider a student’s need for financial assistance, regardless of nationality.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump continued to sow doubts about foreign students by incorrectly asserting there were open questions about who had been previously allowed into the country to study. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses automated screening programs and intelligence operations to vet all visa applications, including those for students.
“We want to know where those students come,” Mr. Trump said. “Are they troublemakers? What countries do they come? And we’re not going to — if somebody is coming from a certain country and they are 100 percent fine, which I hope most of them are, but many of them won’t be. You’re going to see some very radical people.”
In an interview this month, Linda McMahon, the education secretary, said it was time for American students to rethink whether degrees from four-year universities were necessary, save for those pursuing legal or medical professions.
She also said that the administration wanted to learn more about whether potential international students were “activists” and “going to be more involved in rabble-rousing.”
Asked whether the administration wanted to preserve more slots in college for U.S. citizens, Ms. McMahon said that “universities can determine that process.”
“We don’t want to see quotas,” Ms. McMahon said, referring to a Supreme Court case that rejected the use of affirmative in college admissions. “That was discrimination, and the Supreme Court said that is absolutely not fair. So we want to make sure that people who come in are coming in on merit.”
Michael C. Bender is a Times political correspondent covering President Trump, the Make America Great Again movement and other federal and state elections.
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