Trump Admin Targets International College Students

The revocation of SEVP certification and the pause in visa interviews are pieces of a larger legal struggle between Harvard and the White House as the university seeks to fight back against what it claims are violations of its constitutional rights. Also on Tuesday, the General Services Administration directed federal agencies to cancel $100 million worth of vendor contracts with Harvard, terminating the last remaining federal money going directly to the university. But the moves against international students, while focused on the United States’ oldest university for now, could have much broader effects on America’s system of higher education.

Last week, the attention of both the Trump administration and the press was focused on Cambridge, Massachusetts. “This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a Thursday press release announcing that the university would no longer be able to enroll foreign students. She alleged that some foreign students had participated in antisemitic protests, and that others trained by Harvard had allegedly helped facilitate the Chinese government’s genocide of its Uyghur minority.

If allowed to go through, the change in status would have drastic effects on Harvard. Nearly 7,000 international students attend the university—including both undergraduate and graduate programs—making up roughly a quarter of its total student population. They are part of a decades-long trend of increasing foreign enrollment in U.S. universities: More than 1.1 million foreign students study at the undergraduate and graduate levels in the U.S., according to the Institute of International Education’s 2024 report, constituting 6 percent of the total U.S. higher education population—an all-time high.

“This revocation is a blatant violation of the First Amendment, the Due Process Clause, and the Administrative Procedure Act,” Harvard’s attorneys wrote in their legal challenge filed a day after the order. “It is the latest act by the government in clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to reject the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students.” U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs paused the administration’s sanctions, pending the lawsuit, later that same day.

Legal experts who spoke to TMD say that Harvard’s challenge rests on firm legal grounds. “I would say that Harvard is going to win its lawsuit on both procedural and substantive grounds,” Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired immigration law professor at Cornell University, told TMD. Procedurally, he noted that the federal government had failed to provide Harvard sufficient notice to appeal the decision, a requirement of federal law, and also failed to provide sufficient evidence for its claims. Substantively, Yale-Loehr pointed out that by specifically targeting Harvard and seeking to exert control over its curriculum, the White House was likely violating the First Amendment right to academic freedom and free expression, along with the privacy rights of international students.

The administration’s proposed remedies for Harvard’s alleged violations of civil rights law (rejected almost immediately by the school) were outlined in an April letter from the Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. The reforms demanded by the government—which also stretched the bounds of legality, according to many First Amendment lawyers—included outside audits of curricular material and hiring practices, reports on disciplinary action taken against international students, and wide-ranging changes to disciplinary procedures.

While the government can take action against a broad range of university activities to enforce compliance with the 1987 Civil Rights Restoration Act, the task force’s reforms are unlikely to pass legal muster, said Adam Goldstein, the vice president of strategic initiatives at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, especially those that threaten to violate other constitutional rights. “You can’t censor your way out of censorship,” he said.

Even if Harvard is likely to win in court, significant damage and uncertainty can be inflicted in the meantime, as the Niskanen Center’s Gilbert Guerra notes in a piece for our website today: 

The effects extend beyond potential academic disruption. Students report canceling travel plans, losing internship opportunities, and experiencing severe anxiety about their future ability to stay in the country. The timing of the order is also particularly challenging, as most deadlines for transferring to a different university passed in March, leaving few options for students if the revocation takes effect.

The move also threatens hundreds of recent Harvard graduates on Optional Practical Training (OPT), a program that allows international students to work in the U.S. for varying lengths of time depending on their level of education and field of study (STEM OPT grants a two-year extension to standard OPT). According to an estimate by Cecilia Esterline at the Niskanen Center, roughly 2,000 recent Harvard graduates would lose their legal work status under this order, potentially ending their careers at American companies and research institutions for good.

But the State Department’s pause of visa interviews will likely have effects far beyond Harvard. “It’s the absolute worst timing,” said Yale-Loehr, pointing out that foreign students can only apply for a student visa after receiving an acceptance letter from and making a deposit to a U.S. university. The deadline to accept an offer of admission was May 1, meaning that relatively few students have had the chance to apply for and undergo an interview with consular officials. Uncertain of when they can apply for a visa, or even whether foreign students will be allowed to enroll in their chosen university, some will undoubtedly accept offers from other countries, he noted.

A decline in foreign enrollment would certainly hurt American universities’ budgets, but it won’t be Harvard or other Ivy League institutions that feel the effects the most. “For public research universities, this is a particularly important source of income,” Gaurav Khanna, a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, who studies the economics of higher education and international students, told TMD. After the 2008 financial crisis, he noted, many public universities faced steep budget cuts. Top-ranked “Public Ivies,” such as the University of Michigan, could draw on a wealthy donor base and attract out-of-state students paying higher tuition to make up the shortfall. 

But schools with slightly less prestigious reputations, such as Michigan State, instead turned to wealthy international students from countries like China and India, who were quite willing to pay far more tuition than in-state students, in effect subsidizing them. So while many of the universities with the highest percentage of international students are private schools, the list of schools with foreign students contributing large shares of their operating budget includes many more state schools, as well as larger private universities.

These schools generally have much lower per-student endowments than elite, wealthy private schools like Harvard. In 2022, for instance, the per-student endowment of University of California, Davis was roughly $17,000. That of Northeastern University, a large private school in Boston, stood at around $40,000. Harvard’s was more than $2 million.

The result, Khanna told TMD, is that wealthy schools like Harvard were among those best-equipped to weather a probable decline in international students. “There isn’t a lot of slack in the revenue streams for the public universities,” he said.

International enrollment in U.S. institutions was already declining even before the Trump administration’s most recent moves, with funding cuts, political uncertainty, and the revocation of visas already having an effect. Data from the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System, a government monitoring service, shows that between March 2024 and March 2025, the number of international students in the U.S. declined by 11.33 percent. New survey data released earlier this month also showed that the number of enrollments in postgraduate programs, which international students are most likely to enter, has declined by 13 percent year over year.

The White House has sent mixed signals on whether it welcomes these trends. Last June, then-candidate Donald Trump said that he supported automatically granting green cards to students who graduate from U.S. universities. But he has also accused universities of allowing “radicalized lunatics” into the country through international enrollment, and his administration has conducted wide-ranging investigations into the political activities of foreign students. 

With the U.S. becoming less hospitable to foreign students, other countries are looking to fill the vacuum. As Semafor noted over the weekend, at least three universities in Hong Kong have begun reaching out to international students accepted or enrolled at Harvard in an effort to woo them away amid the uncertainty. European universities have also sought to recruit scientific talent from U.S. universities, offering more reliable sources of funding and less political pressure. Germany’s new minister of culture, Wolfram Weimer, has suggested creating an “exile campus” in his country. “To students from Harvard and other American universities, I say: You are more than welcome in Germany.”

It remains to be seen how successful efforts like these will be. But international students in the U.S., or those considering coming here, are facing unprecedented legal uncertainty. No matter the legal merits of the White House’s actions, the rapid shifts in policy will make American universities, not least Harvard, less and less attractive as a destination for foreign students. “Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard,” wrote Harvard’s lawyers in their lawsuit. That, in fact, may be the White House’s aim.

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Do you think American universities currently enroll too many international students? What is the purpose of the higher education system?