Suddenly Colleges With Big Foreign Student Populations Face Existential Risk

Forbes

03-04-2025

Despite alarming headlines about the targeting of foreign students and reports of student visa denials, Nariman Farvardin, the Iranian-born president of the STEM-focused Stevens Institute of Technology, remains surprisingly optimistic, despite the fact that two thirds of his 6,000 graduate students typically come from abroad.
'It's possible that some students who are thinking of applying to the United States in general from other countries may think twice. They might think that the environment is less friendly, but I don't want to speculate at this point,' says Farvardin, who has led Stevens since 2011. 'If you look at our spring numbers, the numbers are astonishingly encouraging.' Stevens admits graduate students twice a year, and enrollment numbers for this spring, whose applications were due in November before Trump's election victory, went up 35%, according to Farvardin. The application cycle for fall 2025 hasn't yet closed, but so far, applications are also up 35%. While interest by country has varied over time—applications from India have flattened out, but applications are up from students in China, Ghana and Nigeria—the volume of international applicants hasn't dwindled, even during the last Trump administration.
Because Stevens's Hoboken, New Jersey campus, with a total population of about 10,000, sits just across the Hudson River from midtown Manhattan and is renowned for internships and job placements, Farvardin's institution may continue to attract enough international STEM students to fill its classrooms. But other small schools, especially those that are tuition dependent and struggle financially each year, may be crippled if foreign student enrollment falls. In fact, Forbes contacted more than 22 colleges where foreign students made up more than 25% of their enrollment, and only four were willing to talk to us for this story, perhaps afraid of drawing attention to their plight.
'To say that institutions are extraordinarily anxious is an understatement,' says Angel Pérez, CEO of the National Association for College and Admissions Counseling. 'Students are seeing international students being arrested on college campuses and having threats against them around being deported. This is terrifying young people who had a dream of coming to study in the United States.'
For many decades, U.S. colleges have offered unparalleled education and research opportunities to students all over the world. During the 2023-24 academic year, 1.1 million international students attended college stateside—an all-time high. Foreign students are great customers for America's large, fragmented higher education market. The vast majority of the nearly 4,000 degree-granting colleges in the U.S. are tuition-dependent. Private colleges discount their stated tuition prices heavily, by an average 52%, according to the latest tuition discounting study from the National Association of College and University Business Officers. It's an open secret that a small proportion of enrolled students actually pay the full listed tuition price without the aid of 'merit' scholarships. Oftentimes the full-price or near full-price payers are the international students, who are not eligible for federal assistance and rarely get financial aid from colleges themselves.
'You get more net tuition from the international students than you get from the domestic students. So if [international students] are 5% to 40% of enrollment, they're probably 10% to 50% of the revenue,' says Larry Ladd, a higher education governance and business consultant with the Association of Governing Boards.
A significant number of schools would be especially vulnerable if international student enrollment takes a nosedive. The 34 institutions, listed below, fill at least 20% of their student body with foreign students, and rely on tuition and fees to make up at least half of their operating revenues. Hult International Business School in Boston, one of five worldwide Hult campuses, enrolls just over 3,300 students, and 70% come from outside the United States. The prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, renowned for its studio art programs, enrolls about 2,700 students, 38% of whom are international.
At Menlo College in Atherton, California, a quarter of the 875 undergraduates come from outside the U.S., primarily from China, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. So far this year's application numbers are in line with last year's, but officials are keeping a close eye on potential changes. 'Because Menlo's total student population is relatively small, under 1,000, even minor fluctuations in international enrollment can be noticeable,' says Tess Rewick, executive director of marketing and communications at Menlo. 'While there have been shifts in the top source countries in recent years, the overall percentage of international students has remained steady.' Menlo, which had a $3.8 million operating deficit in fiscal 2023 and relies on tuition for 63% of its revenues, scored a C- on Forbes' financial grades ranking this year. The college has a miniscule endowment of $54 million, or $25,000 per student according to federal data, and if forced, could only cover its expenses for three months using its existing expendable assets.
'Over the past few years, we have heard concerns from parents and applicants regarding school shootings in the U.S. and general concerns about student safety,' says John Enright, vice director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, where 60%—or more than 365—of its 626 undergraduate and graduate students come from outside the United States. The institute, which scored a B financial grade, has experienced a decline in international student applications over the past three years, particularly from China. 'We do not believe it helps,' says Enright about Trump's rhetoric, in obvious understatement.
'The decline of international students is a fact and we need to find solutions to continue teaching,' says Mikhail Brodsky, president of the tiny Lincoln University in downtown Oakland, California. Nearly all of the university's 318 graduate students come from outside the U.S.—primarily from India, Nigeria, Nepal and Thailand—and so do a third of the 271 undergraduates. Since the beginning of Trump's first term, Lincoln has seen its international student body shrink, putting the university on increasingly unstable ground. Applications from China have dropped precipitously, and applications from Russia, where Brodsky is from, have all but dried up entirely. 'It's clear that getting U.S. visas is becoming more difficult, so people don't want to spend money and time on applications,' he says.
At its current enrollment, Lincoln is already operating in a deficit, according to the most recently available federal data. It has no endowment to support itself long-term. In 2023, the university sold its flagship building in downtown Oakland for $6.1 million in a lease-back deal to the education consultancy New University LLC. At the time, Brodsky said capital from the sale would help the university grow its enrollment, which had declined from a high of about 800 students in 2016 to 470 in 2023. 'The decline started in 2017, when a lot of visa applications were rejected, so international recruiters wasted time and money not receiving commissions because students could not get visas and come to study in the U.S.,' he says. As enrollment declines, so does tuition revenue, which makes up 43% of the university's annual core revenues (other revenue comes primarily from donations and partnership programs, per Brodsky).
He is considering opening branch campuses abroad or creating online education options as a way to reach more students outside of the United States. When international student enrollment declined after the September 11th attacks, a number of colleges—including American University, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgetown University and New York University—established campuses outside the U.S.
Colleges could try to make up for an international student enrollment shortfall by recruiting more students from the United States, but there's already so few to go around. The number of college-age domestic students is beginning to decline, putting the squeeze on any institution struggling with enrollment. Even the most sought-after schools like Columbia University that have more applicants than they could ever accept could see a temporary impact if international student enrollment drops off, Pérez predicts. Forty percent of Columbia's 37,954 graduate and undergraduate students are international. 'Those are institutions that most students would just die to get into,' he says, 'and what I'm hearing is that there are parents who are starting to wonder, 'Should I send my child to an institution that is under attack by the Trump administration? Is that setting my child up for success?''
Shaun Carver, CEO of the International House at the University of California-Berkeley, a residential community that houses around 600 undergraduates, graduate students and faculty members, and brings in about $14 million in annual revenue, mostly from rents and student fees, is already seeing the hesitancy of foreign students to travel stateside. Applications to the house for the upcoming academic year are down 20% to 25%. 'People are just waiting to see if they're going to be comfortable coming to the United States to study, and all the changes that are happening certainly don't make international students feel more welcome,' he says. Berkeley's I-House is just one of seven located in the United States serving universities including Columbia, the University of Chicago and and the University of California-San Diego.
Given that most students sent in their applications for the 2025-26 academic year before Trump took office, changes to international enrollment numbers aren't yet clear, says Pérez. The coming month or so will be a telling as colleges release their admissions decisions and students decide where to place their deposits for the upcoming fall. A handful of countries, including Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, have issued travel advisories to the United States, primarily warning their residents about border detentions, civil unrest, gun violence and unpredictable enforcement of immigration policies. During a recent board meeting, a colleague from Australia alerted Pérez to a new travel advisory: 'She said, 'if this continues, I will not be able to travel because my institution won't pay for me to be here, and also we'll not be sending students to the United States to study.'