This story was updated on Nov. 20, 2025.

At Edmonds College, just north of Seattle, new international student enrollment is down 25% this fall. At Bellevue College, also outside of Seattle, it’s down 36%. DePaul University, in Chicago, reported a 62% drop in new graduate students enrolling from abroad. And a few hours away, at Eastern Illinois University, the total number of international students has dropped by half. 

Nationally, new international student enrollment fell 17% for the fall semester, according to data out Monday from the Institute of International Education.

“That is the largest decline that we’ve seen outside of the pandemic in a single year,” said Clay Harmon, executive director at AIRC: The Association of International Enrollment Management.

The reasons for the decline have a lot to do with policies coming out of the White House, according to experts and college officials who work closely with international students. 

“This administration has taken concrete steps to make it more difficult to study in the United States, and they have also taken less concrete steps that kind of generate an atmosphere of uncertainty about studying in the U.S.,” Harmon said. “At this point, my analysis would be that the majority of the decline that we see in enrollment is likely due to the concrete actions that the administration has taken.”

Those include a nearly month-long global pause in visa appointments in late spring, followed by enhanced vetting of applicants and their social media presence, as well as the travel ban on 19 countries that went into effect over the summer. 

The steep decline in international enrollment is a big deal — for colleges and universities, the communities where they’re located, and the economy more broadly. 

More than a million international students enrolled at colleges and universities for the 2024-2025 school year, contributing nearly $43 billion to the U.S. economy and supporting about 355,000 jobs, according to data from NAFSA: Association of International Educators and JB International. 

Many of those jobs are at colleges where Harmon said, “student tuition is usually a large majority of their income or revenue for the year.”

International students are a key source of revenue for universities because they tend to pay more than American students — they’re required to enroll full-time to qualify for a visa, they pay out-of-state tuition at public colleges and universities, and they are not eligible for federal financial aid, so frequently end up paying full tuition. 

“In some of those schools, that international tuition revenue is actually baked into the cake, and it's part of their core fiscal calculations for a year,” Harmon said. “And if that is the case, then that school may be quite dependent on that international enrollment to keep the lights on.” 

Small, specialized colleges, Christian colleges, and regional universities that have high international enrollment are likely to be disproportionately affected if the decline continues, according to Dick Startz, a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Some are facing other financial pressures and have already announced hiring freezes and layoffs, Startz said, “and so the loss of international students is going to seriously contribute to that.”

It is still early for most schools to know how significant or sustained the drop will be. At Edmonds College, in Lynwood, Washington, where new international enrollment is down 25% this fall, international enrollment overall, including returning students, is only down 4%. 

Edmonds College President Amit Singh said he is worried about that decline. But, “if things do turn around and we start picking up again, like winter term, spring term, summer term, then we'll be okay,” he said.

If, instead, international enrollment continues to decline — as the number of new applications for January indicates it likely will — “then it becomes more concerning,” he said.

A sustained drop in new international enrollment like the one Edmonds has seen this fall could mean a loss of a million dollars for the college, which Singh said is enough to support at least 15 jobs on campus. 

Some colleges and universities, including DePaul and Eastern Illinois, have already announced budget cuts and layoffs this fall, citing the decline in international enrollment as a factor. (Neither agreed to comment for this story.)

Fanta Aw, CEO and executive director of NAFSA, expects more schools are likely to follow if international enrollment doesn’t rebound. 

“The job implications are tremendous,” she said. “Universities will have to make the difficult decisions of perhaps cutting some programs, perhaps even looking at furloughs of faculty and staff based on budget shortfalls. Those are some of the decisions that certainly institutions will find themselves having to make.”

Just this fall, the U.S. economy has lost $1.1 billion and nearly 23,000 jobs because of the drop in enrollment, according to NAFSA’s projections.

“For every three international students, one U.S. job is created and supported,” Aw said. “And that's in many sectors — education, health insurance, telecommunications, transportation, retail, and the like.”

Fewer international students paying tuition and buying groceries, pizza, and books adds up — for colleges, and for towns that revolve around them.

“If there are less international students and if universities, as a result, shrink, we also know that in most places, universities are the largest employers in the places that they're in,” Aw said. “That will have implications for the local economy.”

If a small city or town loses a significant number of university jobs and a significant number of students, businesses in town could lose a significant portion of their business. 

“Suppose you're running the pizza joint next to the university and a bunch of students disappear, you're going to have to lay people off or close real quick,” said Dick Startz at UCSB. “And a lot of the businesses that serve students, these aren't rich people. This is somebody running a real small business. And if business disappears, there's not much they can do about that.”

It is still early for most schools to know how significant or sustained the drop will be, but Aw is concerned. 

“2026 is really going to be the litmus test for us, right? Because then people would have had an entire year to make the decision about, am I going to apply to U.S. universities or not?” she said. “And we always said that if we saw decline in the fall of 2025 that 2026 would be significantly worse, unless there was really course correction.”

Correction (Nov. 20, 2025): An earlier version of this story said that international students pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities, not out-of-state tuition.