Harrison Keller was starting only his second year as president of the University of North Texas last fall when he was abruptly confronted with a big problem.
Enrollment was down. And the source of the crisis made it much worse: In the wake of Trump administration moves to deny and revoke visas, deport international students and impose travel bans, 2,800 students from abroad who the university expected to show up had stayed away.
Full-tuition-paying international students — especially graduate students, who Keller said bring $20,000 to $25,000 each to his bottom line — are critical to balancing the budget, underwriting services and keeping costs lower for their domestic classmates.
The loss of so many of them pushed the university $45 million into the red, Keller said, forcing it to eliminate 71 academic programs. And a continuing decline in the number of international students will mean a hit of another $47 million in lost revenue in the next academic year, according to university budget projections. (Keller said he expects the loss to be closer to $25 million thanks to ongoing spending cuts.)
“I picked a hell of a time to become a college president,” he said.
And the problem isn’t letting up. New federal figures show that international enrollment is continuing to fall, with the number of student arrivals down by 5 percent in March, almost 8 percent in April and 1 percent in May, compared to the same months last year. That’s on top of a drop of nearly 22 percent in the number who arrived last summer versus the summer before.
“It leaves a really big hole in the budget, which has to get filled one way or another, either by increasing tuition or cutting services,” said Dick Startz, a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara — where, he noted, international students pay more than three times what California students do, and subsidize financial aid for their American classmates.
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Many American students and their families may not have realized how important full-tuition-paying international students are to university finances, said Domenico Ferraro, an associate professor of economics at Arizona State University who has studied this.
“Unfortunately, I think that many people don’t have a clear perception of what international students contribute” financially, Ferraro said.
Now the consequences are becoming clear.
Nationwide, international students make up 6 percent of enrollment but account for 12 percent of revenue at colleges and universities, research conducted at Princeton University found — and at institutions particularly dependent on them, more than 30 percent. Those figures are from 2016, before international student numbers rose even more, meaning the revenue impact is likely higher now.
The money from international students has kept tuition and fees lower for domestic students while enabling higher spending on services, the Princeton study found. It also concluded that, contrary to assertions by critics, international students aren’t crowding out American ones. This, too, has become even more true since the period covered by the study, as fewer U.S. high school graduates choose to go to college, leaving seats in classrooms empty.
“We have a great opportunity, which we’re engaged in blowing,” Startz said of the potential for international students to close both those enrollment and financial gaps.
Instead, Moody’s bond-rating agency warns, the ongoing drop in the number of international students is causing “significant financial stress” and creating a credit risk for universities and colleges — especially the 15 percent with the largest international enrollments.
“It definitely hurts. There’s no question,” said Ruth Johnston, vice president of the consulting arm of the National Association of College and University Business Officers. “You’re not bringing revenue in, and there are so few revenue sources for higher education in the first place.”
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Since January of 2024, there have been more than 300 instances of universities and colleges eliminating programs, closing departments and laying off faculty and staff, according to the tracking database CollegeCuts. A growing number of schools cite international enrollment declines among the triggers. Many have also announced tuition increases.
Northwestern University said a projected international enrollment drop was among the reasons it eliminated 425 positions, froze hiring and put off building projects, for example. The University of Southern California cut nearly 1,000 jobs, including some for academic advisers, after listing expected declines in the number of international students — applications from whom fell 23 percent at USC — among its financial problems.
DePaul University laid off 114 employees after its number of students from abroad fell 30 percent overall, and international graduate student enrollment by two-thirds. Falling international graduate student enrollment was also given as a cause of budget cuts and buyouts at Boston University, and declining international enrollment in general for a rare budget deficit at Syracuse University and deficits and layoffs at New York’s New School, the University of Texas at Arlington, Niagara College and the Stevens Institute of Technology.
Among other universities that cited international enrollment drops as a factor behind deficits, budget cuts and layoffs: the University of Michigan School of Public Health, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Eastern Illinois University, The College of Wooster and Kent State University. And the president of the California College of the Arts blamed Trump administration pressure on international students for worsening an enrollment decline and budget deficit so bad that the college will close.
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Most of these institutions have also raised tuition — Syracuse by nearly 4 percent, for the upcoming academic year, to a total cost of attendance of about $96,000 for students living on campus, for example; Northwestern by 3.5 percent, also to $96,000; USC by about 3 percent, to $103,162; and The New School by 3.5 percent, to a total cost of about $93,000.
With international education having become as much a political as economic issue, none of these universities responded to repeated requests for comment, including about how much of the tuition increases could be attributed to the drop in the number of international students.
Universities with large proportions of international students
These are among U.S. universities and colleges with the biggest percentages of international students.
| Institution | Percent international |
| Longy School of Music of Bard College | 77 |
| Brigham Young University-Hawaii | 48 |
| New England Conservatory of Music | 39 |
| Manhattan School of Music | 37 |
| American Academy of Dramatic Arts-New York | 34 |
| The New School | 34 |
| Rhode Island School of Design | 33 |
| School of the Art Institute of Chicago | 30 |
| Niagara College | 30 |
| Berklee College of Music | 29 |
| University of the Ozarks | 28 |
| California Institute of the Arts | 28 |
| San Francisco Conservatory of Music | 28 |
| Babson College | 28 |
| University of Detroit Mercy | 27 |
| New York University | 27 |
| Pratt Institute | 27 |
| The Juilliard School | 26 |
| Missouri Valley College | 24 |
| Oberlin College | 24 |
| DePauw University | 23 |
| Boston University | 22 |
| Mount Holyoke College | 22 |
| Bard College | 22 |
| Florida Institute of Technology | 21 |
| College of the Atlantic | 21 |
| University of Chicago | 20 |
| Illinois Institute of Technology | 20 |
| Knox College | 20 |
| Johns Hopkins University | 20 |
| Brandeis University | 20 |
| Columbia University | 20 |
| University of Rochester | 20 |
| Carnegie Mellon University | 20 |
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, nonresident students. Percentages are from 2024, the most recent year for which the figures are available
Johnston points out that most universities are trying to avoid tuition hikes at a time when surveys show that two-thirds of Americans think a four-year degree is no longer worth the cost.
“A lot of it is because there are issues around perceived value of higher education,” she said. “We know there’s a concern about that.”
That leaves institutions to cut spending by eliminating majors, departments and employees, said Ferraro, of Arizona State.
“If you can’t increase the revenues from tuition, there is not much left other than cutting spending,” he said.
Universities’ vulnerability to the decline in the number of international students is a problem partly of their own making. As domestic enrollment has fallen — down by about 2 million students since 2010 — colleges and universities increasingly recruited from abroad. The number of international students in the United States rose during that period by more than 60 percent, to nearly 1.2 million, according to the Institute of International Education.
Increasing their numbers of international students was also many universities’ response to financial pressures. For every 10 percent cut in state appropriations for public research universities, for example, those universities recruited 16 percent more international students, research by scholars at the University of Michigan and elsewhere found.
The strategy wasn’t only about filling seats. It was to keep money coming in at a time when American families were chafing at the cost of higher education and demanding more financial aid. As colleges gave deeper discounts to domestic undergraduates, the proportion being charged the full listed price fell to 16 percent, while more than 80 percent of their international classmates paid the full tuition. Several institutions actually charge international students higher tuition than even out-of-state domestic ones, or add fees for them ranging from $874 to $5,218 a year, according to the American Council on Education, the principal association of U.S. colleges and universities.
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Yet even as colleges and universities grew more dependent on this money — and before the Trump-era crackdowns — threats emerged to the continued supply of students from abroad. There was more competition from other countries, and the U.S. share of the market for international students began to fall.
A dramatic example of what’s beginning to happen in the United States is well under way in Canada, where the number of international students is down by 73 percent since the government set a limit on them in 2024 in response to anti-immigration sentiment and complaints that international students in some cities were driving up housing costs.
Before then, more than a fifth of students at Canadian two- and four-year colleges and universities were coming from other countries, a proportion that had grown as government funding for higher education fell. International undergraduates pay almost six times as much as their Canadian classmates in tuition, according to the government agency Statistics Canada.
“Institutions were making net surpluses off these international students and using it to sustain services for domestic students,” said Alex Usher, president of the Canadian consulting firm Higher Education Strategy Associates, or HESA.
Three-quarters of tuition revenue in Ontario, the most populous province, came from international students, HESA estimated. Now that the international student numbers have plummeted, Ontario universities will have lost $1.5 billion in income by the end of this year, in U.S. dollars, according to the Council of Ontario Universities, resulting in significant cuts to programs and services. Sixty percent of universities and colleges in Canada were planning budget cuts, a survey found. At least one, the Manitoba Institute of Trades and Technology, blamed declining international student numbers for forcing it to close.
Tuition fees in Canada haven’t gone up, Usher said. But while domestic students “aren’t necessarily paying more, they’re getting less.”
In the United States, declining international enrollment only worsens the many other financial problems faced by universities and colleges, Ferraro said.
“If you don’t compensate for this with international students,” he said, “the future of higher education is going to be a bunch of empty buildings.”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected] or jpm.82 on Signal.
This story about international students was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Additional reporting by Liz Willen. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.
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