International students used to crowd Lewis University’s hallways, surrounding David Livingston, the school’s president, when he would stride through.
The campus near Chicago is quieter now, months into the Trump administration’s campaign to curb the number of international students at American schools. Visa approvals have plunged and the number of international students has fallen at colleges from coast to coast, upending business models, admissions playbooks and even course scheduling.
Few places have been as shaken as Lewis, a Catholic university of about 7,000.
Zheng Zhou, among the professors Lewis hired as enrollments from abroad surged, has seen some colleagues’ jobs vanish. The international students’ lounge has become emptier. Campus officials are answering more anxious questions than usual from the students who remain.
And although many believe that Washington will eventually loosen its policies, the timeline is so unclear that administrators are bracing for turmoil through President Trump’s term, and perhaps well beyond.
In the fall of 2024, when Mr. Trump was elected, Lewis had 1,397 international students who accounted for nearly a fifth of the university’s total enrollment. A year later, that number was down to 870. By this fall, it may drop below 500.
“We didn’t anticipate this rapid of a change, or this severe of a change,” said the provost, Christopher Sindt. Despite plenty of interest in the university’s programs from abroad, Dr. Sindt said, U.S. officials were not issuing enough visas to match the demand.
The reduction was a drastic change from years past, when the number of student visas sometimes fluctuated, but only slightly. The U.S. government’s issuances of the predominant visa for international students dropped about 36 percent year-over-year just before the fall 2025 semester, according to a New York Times analysis of State Department data.
Some countries were hit harder than others. India had a decline of roughly two-thirds from 2024 to 2025. Visas for Iranians dropped 99 percent, from 1,118 to just 13. And Nigeria saw a decline of 57 percent over that same period.
“It’s just been an awakening experience to see how fragile it can be,” Dr. Sindt said.
Lewis spent much of the last decade building an apparatus for international students. It has spent much of the last year cutting it down. With fewer students in need of instruction and support services, and a sudden budget hole of about $9 million, Lewis trimmed about 10 percent of its work force.
“If we thought it was going to be a one-year thing, we’d absorb the losses,” said Dr. Livingston, who oversees an endowment worth about $135 million, far smaller than the multibillion-dollar funds some Illinois universities control. “We don’t think it’s going to be one year.”
Last year, a proposal from the Trump administration to universities suggested that excessive reliance on international students could threaten access for Americans. The document also asserted that students who were not “properly vetted” could impose “noxious values such as antisemitism and other anti-American values” on campuses.
But Mr. Trump has sometimes waffled on his hard-line approach. Last year, he angered many in his political base when he indicated that he wanted to continue to welcome Chinese students. Actual policies have been firmer. After Trump officials proposed that schools cap the share of international students at 15 percent, the State Department began prioritizing visa applications involving schools under that threshold.
Until Mr. Trump returned to power, universities historically saw international students as boons to their campuses and communities. Many paid full tuition, easing budget strains, and enriched campus cultures as they earned degrees in fields propelling academic research. Roughly 30 years ago, the United States had about 344,000 international students. Except for a period around the pandemic, it has had more than 1 million since the 2015-16 academic year, according to the Institute of International Education, though the explosive growth softened during Mr. Trump’s first term.
Some American schools that are among the leading destinations for international students, such as Columbia and the University of California system, have been top targets for Trump administration scrutiny. But international students also routinely enroll at schools that attract little attention from Washington — places like Lewis, which is based in the Chicago suburb of Romeoville, and public universities like Wright State and Central Missouri.
Soon after Dr. Livingston became Lewis’s president in 2016, officials developed a strategy to entice students from around the world. The university then had an international enrollment of 162. But Lewis leaders saw the push as an extension of the school’s values that would also hedge against potential enrollment declines among domestic students.
Dr. Sindt said international students had not taken slots that would have otherwise gone to Americans because Lewis, which typically admits more than 70 percent of applicants, simply expanded the number of seats.
Lewis officials had foreseen other hazards, like currency swings. They had not foreseen a far-reaching effort by Washington to cut international enrollments drastically. So they poured in resources, deploying recruiters around the world.
They found people like Mark Tabasan, a graduate student from the Philippines, who said he first learned about Lewis at a university fair in the Manila area and felt drawn to its Catholic roots and its proximity to Chicago. Leanne Peter, who is from India, and like Mr. Tabasan, works in the university’s international students operation, said Lewis’s “homely feel” had attracted her as she scouted places for an American master’s degree.
“Their values kind of aligned with mine,” Ms. Peter said, adding that the university had been deeply welcoming once she arrived. That was, in part, because of a hiring spree to accommodate Lewis’s 604 percent rise in international enrollment between 2016 and 2022.
In 2022, Dr. Zhou joined the faculty of the business analytics program — a unit that was particularly attractive to students from abroad. For years after, Dr. Zhou recalled, there was more talk of expansion. Now Dr. Zhou’s program has shriveled. Only one of his classes this semester is at capacity; the others have single-digit enrollments.
“The whole class atmosphere has been changed significantly,” said Dr. Zhou, an international student himself decades ago.
For the students still at Lewis, worries have replaced peers. Angie Rodriguez, the university’s director of international student and global scholar services, said her office heard from nervous students far more frequently.
“They’re afraid that things can change at any moment,” said Ms. Rodriguez, who has worked with international students for roughly two decades. She added, “In my entire career, it’s been pretty stable in terms of what students can expect when they’re here, and now with so much rapid change going on, they’re anxious.”
Ms. Peter said she wondered if the federal government would shift policies again, and what that might mean for her future.
“That’s not just me,” she said, “that’s every student.”
Still, Dr. Livingston said he had no regrets about how much Lewis had done to bring students to America, even if, for now, industry officials expect more than usual to study in Britain and Australia. Lewis is looking ahead, considering where recruiters could make inroads for the future, betting that the United States will eventually prove more open.
“We don’t control the gateway,” Dr. Livingston said, “but I think our belief is, over time, it’s such a good thing for the globe to have people that interact with each other, understand each other, learn in each other’s cultures.”
Steven Rich contributed reporting.
Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
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