As Trump pushes international students away, Asian schools scoop them up

Straits Times

19 hours ago

Yonsei University campus in Seoul, South Korea. The country wants to have 300,000 international students by 2027.
SEOUL – For Mr Jess Concepcion, a microbiology student from the Philippines, obtaining a doctorate from a university in the United States had been a dream. It was where most of his academic mentors had studied and done research, and he wanted to follow in their footsteps.
But when the United States, under President Donald Trump, started pausing visa interviews during peak season this spring, threatening to deport international students for political speech and slashing funding for academic research, he quickly changed plans. Applications for doctoral programmes take years and have to be tailored to specific schools, so he is aiming for programmes in Switzerland and Singapore instead.
'That uncertainty made me stop in my tracks and choose another country,' Mr Concepcion, 24, said. 'Immigration policy is quite restrictive, and I'm on a different side of the world. So living in that kind of instability that far away isn't healthy for me.'
It's a quandary facing many young people around the world. According to the United Nations, 6.9 million people studied outside their home country in 2022. The United States has long attracted the most foreign students, 1.1 million in the 2023-24 academic year.
It's too soon to know whether more foreign students will choose not to attend US schools. But warning signs abound.
Major international education search platforms, including IDP and Keystone Education Group, have detected a marked decline in student interest in American programmes. Among academic administrators polled by the Institute for International Education this spring, more than usual reported drops in international applications for the coming year.
These are not the first signs that American higher education is losing its dominant position. For years, countries in Asia have been strengthening their universities and marketing them to students around the world. With more appealing alternatives, the Trump administration's hostile stance may hasten the decline in US higher education preeminence.
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'We're shifting from a world in which there were only a few primary target destination countries to a much more multipolar world,' said Mr Clay Harmon, the executive director of the Association of International Enrollment Management, which represents recruitment agencies.
'It's all adding up to this narrative that 'maybe that's not the right destination for me after all',' he said. 'And there are a whole bunch of other countries that are eager to take my money instead.'
Jess Concepcion, a microbiology student from the Philippines, at Korea University campus in Seoul on Aug 2.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
Asia steps up
For decades, in the English-speaking world, Oxford and Cambridge in Britain, the Ivy League in the United States, and other name-brand universities in Australia and Canada tended to top application checklists.
Gradually, schools in China, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore started showing up in annual rankings of the top universities – with lower price tags. Governments dispatched representatives to college fairs and set goals for the number of students they wanted to bring in every year.
So when Mr Trump, soon after starting his second term, began pushing international students away, Asian nations started welcoming students who couldn't continue their studies at American schools.
Take South Korea, where Mr Concepcion went for his master's degree after winning a scholarship from the South Korean government that covered living expenses and tuition. He added a year of mandatory language study and enrolled at Korea University in Seoul, where his programme starts in earnest this fall.
In the spring, Korea University was among several institutions to offer relief measures as the US government began cancelling some student visas and terminating funding programmes. Another South Korean school, Yonsei University, will open rolling admissions for undergraduate transfers year round starting in 2026 and is planning a customised visiting programme for students whose coursework is interrupted in the United States.
Mr Trump has added urgency to such plans, but this effort has been underway in Asia for decades.
South Korea has for years sent students to other countries, while attracting few from overseas. In the early 2000s, leaders started to think of that imbalance as a kind of trade deficit and set out to boost their international recruitment. They took guidance from a similar effort in Japan, which had about 337,000 foreign students in 2024 and is aiming for 400,000 by 2033.
South Korea's latest target was set in 2023: 300,000 international students by 2027. For 2026, Seoul was named the top city for international students in the closely followed Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings.
Early on, the South Korean government's work was intended to buoy flagging schools in smaller towns, where low birthrates and emigration to larger cities have shrunk classes of high school graduates. Foreign students are also not subject to tuition caps that apply to domestic students, creating a new revenue stream to keep universities afloat.
Ms Shin Mee-kyung, the director of educational globalisation for South Korea's Ministry of Education, said that at first those foreign students were generally expected to return home after their studies. More recently, officials have started to see foreign students as an answer to the nation's labour shortage as well. Seoul established a support centre to help foreign students get jobs, and visa policies have been loosened to help them work after graduation.
'Now we are very interested in how we help them decide to stay here,' she said.
For 2026, Seoul was named the top city for international students in the closely followed Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings.
PHOTO: TINA HSU/NYTIMES
There are about 70,000 students in South Korea from China and 50,000 from Vietnam. Myanmar and Nepal send thousands each year. For South Korean companies, the students offer an opportunity: potential hires who could help expand the business into their home countries, or manage overseas factories.
Hyundai, for example, makes many of its cars in Vietnam and is trying to sell them in Singapore. Mr Kyle Guadana is a Singaporean student studying at Yonsei University, where he leads the Foreign Student Union. He said Hyundai, among other companies, had reached out directly.
'They are looking for foreigners who will be able to work with them,' Mr Gaudana, 24, said. 'They are specifically targeting South-east Asian students, because they are trying to expand their bases here.'
The recruiting drive has had some complications, however. To hit its targets, the government has accepted a wider range of language proficiency tests and lowered the minimum bank balance required to obtain a visa. It has also increased the number of hours students can work in a week. Some students have used university enrollment primarily as a way to earn money in South Korea, which is not otherwise easy to do.
But the larger challenge may be making sure that those who come primarily to study are able to work in South Korea when they graduate – and that they want to stay.
Ms Keity Rose Mendes, 21, grew up in Mozambique and received the same scholarship granted to Mr Concepcion, studying industrial engineering at Seoul National University. She chose South Korea for its safety and because she wanted to learn about its manufacturing techniques. But after three years of classes, she felt that collaboration wasn't valued and that foreign students weren't well integrated.
'A lot of them, especially non-Asian international students, just want to finish their studies and leave,' said Ms Mendes, who is the president of the school's International Student Association. 'I wish that the same effort that they're putting into bringing international students, they also tried to put into creating facilities to maintain them here.'
Ms Keity Rose Mendes, who is studying industrial engineering at Seoul National University, chose South Korea for its safety.
PHOTO: TINA HSU/NYTIMES
Hedging their bets
For millions of students deciding where to study, the United States is still the leading destination. Degrees from top American universities command societal respect – and lucrative job offers – in countries like South Korea.
But even that shine has been dulled by new obstacles since Trump took office, said Mr Pierre Huguet, the CEO of the global admissions consulting firm H&C Education.
'Many saw the US as offering more freedom and an escape from rigid social pressures in Korea,' he said. 'Now they fear visa revocations, invasive online presence reviews and a chilled campus climate, which is the opposite of what they were hoping for.'
Mr Huguet said his clients were focusing on Britain and Australia. The number of South Korean students studying abroad overall has been dropping as the country's own universities climb the rankings.
And the United States isn't the only developed country to push back against international students. Canada and Australia limited international student visas in 2024, while Britain raised visa fees and was contemplating shortening postgraduate work visas.
'No country is being extremely welcoming at this stage,' said Mr Yash Sharma, who runs an admissions consultancy called Longshore Education focused on the market in India. 'Everywhere in the English-speaking world there is anti-immigration sentiment going around.' NYTIMES