Molly Chen had a dream: earn a law degree from a US university and pass the bar exam there.

After completing her bachelor’s degree in law from Macau University of Science and Technology in China, she was highly motivated to pursue her American dream by applying to nearly a dozen schools for her master's.

Eight of them offered her admission, and she decided to pick Washington University, St. Louis, which offered her a lot of scholarship. Her excitement turned to frustration after she could not get a visa interview date for weeks.

Classes began in August, and as of October, Chen still could not secure a visa interview date, much to the consternation of her parents, who had urged her to give up on applying to the US and consider the UK, Australia, or the Netherlands instead.

“I just wanted to pass the bar exam in the United States. I never expected that even after receiving offers, I still could not get a visa slot,” Chen said.

She stopped checking in the middle of September after about two months since she was expected to resume.

“If I arrived in late September or October, other students would already have their social circles, and their relationships with professors would already be deeper. The gap was too big,” she said.

Chen is among the international students who could not travel to the U.S. this fall, with the overall enrolment of international students on American campuses — including students who started in prior years — declining by 1% from last academic year, according to the Institute of International Education’s (IIE) Open Doors reports and the Fall 2025 snapshot report .

New enrollments, a subset of total enrollments, decreased by 17% for international students studying at their college or university for the first time.

Approximately 57% of institutions surveyed report a decrease in new international enrollment, 14% indicate stable numbers, and 29% note an increase.

The decline is occurring as the Trump administration sought to curb the enrollment of college students through delayed visa processing, travel bans or restrictions for 19 countries, deportation of international students for pro-Palestinian speech, and heightened vetting of student visa applicants.

Among U.S. institutions reporting declines in new enrollments, colleges and universities cite multiple contributing factors, including 96 percent citing visa application concerns and 68 percent citing travel restrictions, according to the report.

Even as they accounted for only 6 percent of the student population in the U.S., international students contributed about $43 billion to the U.S.economy and supported 355,736 jobs last year. This is expected to fall by $1.1 billion, according to NAFSA: Association of International Educators, a nonprofit dedicated to international education.

The economic burden of losing international students, some of whom he said pay about triple the amount of tuition as in-state students, would be felt by colleges across the U.S., with a handful of blue states being the most vulnerable to sudden drops, Dick Startz, a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said.

“International students have to buy pizza and beer, and that contributes a lot to the local economies and often to small businesses. If they don't come, that's going to be lost,” he said.

“Although international students make up a minority of U.S. college enrollment, their disproportionate financial contribution, especially through higher tuition payments, means that visa restrictions or enrollment declines pose a significant threat to many institutions’ budgets,” Startz, who analyzes trends in higher education, said.

He noted that colleges most vulnerable to international enrollment drops tend to be small, private institutions affiliated with a Christian church.

The United States has the highest number of international students of any country, with about 1.3 million doctoral, master’s, bachelor’s, and associate students, according to government data.

Over 70 percent of them are from Asia, the majority from India and China. This year, the number of Asian students arriving in the U.S. in August fell by 24 percent — the lowest August numbers on record outside of the pandemic.

Nearly one in three U.S. international students is Indian, but the number has been declining. This fall, it dropped by an additional 44 percent as a result of prolonged delays in processing student visas.

Like Chen from China, Nishita Jagati from India was preparing to enroll in a student exchange program in the U.S. this year when the visa application portal was suspended. She waited and hoped the visa restriction would be loosened after a while, but it went on for months. So she stopped waiting.

“I don’t think I can take on the kind of pressure that comes with being in the U.S. After hearing about the restrictions and waiting for visa appointments to reopen, I changed my mind and started exploring alternatives,” she said.

Her experience mirrors a growing frustration among prospective international students who are mired by delayed visa appointments, sudden policy changes, and increased scrutiny during interviews, causing some to look elsewhere to further their studies.

This was the case of Klein Hu, another student from China. After completing his master's program at Columbia University, he wanted to continue his doctoral studies at a university in the U.S. He applied to several institutions, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Syracuse University, and Boston University. However, some of the schools told him that they no longer had stable funding available for international students.

Cresfallen, he decided to return home. It was then that he saw a post from some universities in Hong Kong that was wooing talented students rejected by US schools. He got in despite applying late.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong offered him a joint PhD program in computational social science and communication and media at the University of Hong Kong (HKU).

“I didn’t want to waste another year and wait again. Hong Kong is also closer to my hometown and more convenient than flying 19-20 hours from New York every time,” he said. Yet he has not given up on coming to the U.S. for a future postdoc program.

This desire shown by international students to be trained in an American school, despite the constraints, is part of how the U.S. builds soft power, Startz said, noting that there’s a long list of world leaders with an American college education.

“It's not a dollar and cents thing, but it's going to be a shame if we start to lose that,” he said.

He noted that the tech industry is reliant on international graduates, as they are “much more likely to come out entrepreneurial and start new businesses.”

This was corroborated by Roger Cone, a professor of molecular and integrative physiology at the University of Michigan, who said, “You get 20 times the improvement if you're recruiting from the best and brightest eight billion people in the world as against from 300 million in the U.S.”

He said there are particular concerns in the STEM fields that a drop in international students will create a huge knowledge deficit.

“That will simply make us less competitive,” he said, adding that this plays into the hands of other countries like China.

Since the Trump administration reined in the number of foreign students coming to the U.S., some universities in Europe and Asia have seized the moment to woo top talent into their programs. Cone said he, too, got an advertisement from a top Indian University looking for visiting professors.

“I'm sure that countries that are advancing their high-tech and STEM fields are looking at this as an opportunity. Even Europe has announced a variety of funding schemes to try to recruit U.S scientists to Europe,” he said.

Universities such as the University of British Columbia , Vancouver, and Korea University , Seoul, announced a temporary transfer program for students and researchers affected by U.S.restrictions and extended the deadline for certain graduate programs starting next year.

Others like Western University , London, Max Planck Society, Germany, University of Paris-Saclay, Orsay, are offering improved funding targeted at current and prospective students of U.S.universities.