Last month’s Open Doors survey of US colleges and universities presented a worrying picture for those of us committed to the internationalisation of US higher education.
The survey, administered by the Institute of International Education (IIE), revealed that, after three years of growth, US universities recruited fewer overseas students in 2024-25 than in the previous year, by about 5 per cent. Given President Trump’s re-election, that figure could be much worse next year.
Scientific and scholarly communities in America are inherently transnational. Charles William Eliot, the transformative 19th-century president of Harvard University, was appointed after two years of studying European universities and schools. That inspired his vision of how universities could drive economic and social development and led to the transformation of a previously parochial institution into a globally renowned university – part of the wider seismic transformations that led to the global pre-eminence of American universities.
That pre-eminence depends on recruiting faculty, researchers and students from around the world, encouraging cross-national exchanges and collaborations. Many US colleges and universities have explicit strategies to internationalise further.
However, just as the German universities admired by Eliot and other reformers eventually lost their standing to more innovative institutions in the US and elsewhere, American universities could similarly be replaced if the many challenges they currently face are not addressed.
Those challenges include declining domestic enrolments, rising costs, decreasing appreciation of the value of a college education by employers and high school graduates, diminished perceived value of the contributions universities make to society and the emergence of disruptive forms of skills development. Even the best-endowed institutions face existential challenges from new cultural and political norms promoted by demagogues who devalue expert knowledge and perceive “elites” as the “enemy within”.
Compounding these challenges are the threats to internationalisation posed by Trump’s incoming administration.
International students represent about 5.9 per cent of all students in American higher education, to whose financial and impact models they are essential. Notably, as domestic enrolments have declined, international enrolments have been increasing, reaching an all-time high of more than 1.1 million in 2023-24.
Although the president-elect did not specifically address international student enrolment during the campaign, we can anticipate his policies based on his first presidency and on Project 2025, the blueprint for government action prepared by the Heritage Foundation.
Campus resources on internationalisation in higher education
International student enrolment declined between 2018 and 2021, most dramatically between 2020 and 2021, when it dropped by 45.6 per cent. The Covid-19 pandemic was one major cause, but others included delays in processing student visas, a more than doubling of denial rates for the H-1B visas used by most international graduates entering the US labour force and processing delays in the Optional Practical Training programme, which allows international graduates to temporarily work in the US in their fields of study.
At a campaign event in June, somewhat contrary to his anti-immigration platform, Donald Trump proclaimed that foreign students who graduate from US colleges should automatically receive green cards, making them permanent residents. But Project 2025 proposes to reduce H-1B issuances again. And while it does not specifically address international enrolment, it reflects a broader isolationist stance.
Higher education institutions should therefore be proactively strategising – for both the near and medium terms – around scenarios in which international enrolments decline considerably. They should expect delays in processing visas and employ longer waiting lists in anticipation of growing numbers of students not enrolling after being accepted.
Institutions should also explore whether their international strategies can be maintained by “unbundling” certain components. For example, to maintain revenue streams, they should examine new programmes and delivery methods, such as non-degree and online offerings.
Nor should they overlook offshore programmes. Established campuses or other sites overseas might serve as platforms for offering new programmes, as may existing international partnerships. Preserving the benefits of interactions with peers from other countries might also require students to be offered more study-abroad experiences.
International academic exchanges, crucial to scientific discovery, might rely more on international meetings or virtual collaborations, rather than bringing partners to the US. And in fields heavily reliant on global talent, it may be necessary to offshore some research labs.
This could perhaps be done in partnership with US industry. Many US technology and biotech firms already have facilities in multiple countries. If they face greater constraints on recruiting globally, they might move critical operations to countries with fewer restrictions – including those considered strategic competitors with the US.
Many nations would welcome the opportunity to host research parks for US universities and corporations, seeing them as avenues of rapid knowledge transfer into their own universities and industries.
Even as they develop such strategies, US universities, academic organisations and industries should continue to make a public case for why domestic higher education needs to be a cosmopolitan enterprise. And they should work with state and national legislators to address barriers to ongoing internationalisation – using the power of evidence to help policymakers understand the damage that a reversal will cause not just to universities but to the nation.
It might be prudent, however, to expect little sympathy and less support from the public or the federal government in a time marked by disdain for knowledge, expertise, cosmopolitan values and universities themselves.
Fernando M. Reimers is the Ford Foundation professor of the practice of international education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Education, the International Academy of Education and the Council on Foreign Relations.
