The recent immigration policies implemented by the Trump administration are creating significant challenges for small college towns across the United States. The administration’s rapid response to campus protests against Israel’s military actions in Gaza has deepened a climate of fear among international students. Now, they live under constant threat of arrest and deportation. Universities are already facing an international student enrollment crisis. This decrease is not only important to their fiscal well-being, it’s key to the economic stability of communities that border them.
Purdue University, for example, announced that almost a quarter of its students were international matriculants in 2024. These students bring in a fair amount of money to the local economy, as they pay the full cost of tuition and board. The university serves as the region’s largest employer. It sustains more than 10,000 jobs due in no small part to the size and positive impact of our international student population. Each international student attending a four-year degree program at Purdue generates about $200,000 in net revenue. This collaborative impact has an equally positive effect on the university and local businesses.
At the same time, one of Ohio’s best-known universities, Miami University, has suffered a jaw-dropping drop in its international student numbers. In addition, the university had 2,895 students from around the world come through its doors in the fall of 2019. The majority of them originated in China, Vietnam, and India. That number dropped drastically to only 750 in recent years. The bottom line hits hard. International students at Miami typically pay more than $65,000 per student for tuition, fees, housing, and food. The university’s, the local businesses’, and the local workers’ potential loss of these students would be worth an estimated $140 million.
The University of Illinois — Urbana-Champaign has been hard hit too. A noteworthy third of its student population is made up of international students, giving it the highest share of any major public research university in the country. The decline mirrors a broader trend. Enrollments of Chinese students at Miami University dropped just as precipitously. It dropped from 2,000-3,000 to a mere 300 or 400.
The crisis extends beyond individual institutions. Florida’s economy would lose out on an estimated $243 million given this drop in international enrollment. In like fashion, Ohio is now slated to gain nearly $200 million, Kentucky about $45 million and Iowa close to $43 million.
Perhaps the most frightening figure is the recent cancellation of approximately 6,000 student visas this year alone. Some students have recently had their visas revoked for infractions as innocuous as speeding, chronicling the precarious conditions that many of these individuals live under.
International students add value by enriching American college campuses and communities and making them more dynamic. Through festivals and cultural celebrations, they introduce energy and diversity that opens local populations to new global perspectives. Tara Sonenshine, a leading academic and former top USIA official, issued a powerful denunciation of the embarrassment. She cautioned that a complete visa shutdown for international students, combined with demographic changes in America and decreasing college enrollment, would create perfect storm chaos. This perfect storm may jeopardize the very existence of small schools that rely on a wide-ranging assortment of students to fill their classrooms.
Doug Elliott, a local community member, highlighted another impact of declining enrollments: “We have a lot of homes that were converted into student housing. That’s typical for small college towns like us.” This sudden economic shift would transfer billions of dollars less housing supply to residents, exacerbating the economic downturn and straining local economies.
Sonenshine stressed the economic importance of international students at every higher education institution. And so we naturally have this perception that the only places that foreign students would go are these multinational, big Ivy League schools, in these giant cities. An important truth is found in a recent report from the Brookings Institution. Every college and university large or small, rural or urban, benefits financially from the presence of international students.
As modest private colleges continue to wrestle with these double digit declines in incoming students and the resulting financial devastation, many find themselves at a crossroads. This fall, we fear an unprecedented 150,000-plus plummet in international students to U.S. colleges and universities. This 40% decline would fundamentally transform the face of higher education in America.