When a recruiter for the University of Massachusetts Boston set off on an international trip this fall, the itinerary did not include the usual stops in China, India, and Vietnam, countries that generate most of the school’s international students. Instead, she wound her way through Greece and the Middle East — Jordan, Kuwait, UAE, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, and three cities in Saudi Arabia.
The trip marked a strategic shift for the school, which is casting a wider net for international applicants as the traditional pathways of students from abroad are fractured by the White House.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has pressured colleges to enroll fewer international students, restricted travel from 19 countries, and targeted international students involved in campus protests. A pause on visa screenings in May — one that experts say has not been fully lifted in India — thinned the stream of students and researchers from around the world applying to US universities. Now some warn that international students, feeling unwelcome, may eschew the United States altogether in the future.
For this school year, applications from abroad to UMass Boston — which were mostly submitted before the mass of policy changes — actually increased. Yet this fall around 250 fewer foreign students arrived on campus, a 17 percent decrease from 2024.
“What does this look like next year?” said John Drew, vice president of enrollment at UMass Boston. “We’re asking ourselves the same.”
Right now, the answer is unclear. New federal data shows that the number of active student visas in the United States decreased by less than 1 percent this fall, but some schools are seeing a sharper downturn than others. A clearer picture may come together Monday when the Institute of International Education releases its annual survey of 800-some colleges nationwide.
Many elite colleges have emerged largely unscathed; Northeastern, Harvard, and Boston College, for instance, reported slight or no declines in foreign students. But some public universities, which generally educate fewer international students overall, are facing larger relative declines: Fitchburg State saw around 40 fewer foreign students this fall. The Massachusetts College of Art and Design is down to 76 international students from 96 a year ago. And while UMass Amherst saw a modest 5 percent decline in international students, to 4,304, UMass Boston’s figures dropped by more than one-sixth, from 1,481 last year to 1,227 now.
One key factor is how competitive a college is for admissions, said Gerardo Blanco, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, which researches foreign higher education around the world. Schools with the “luxury of a wait list” can admit another applicant in place of an accepted international student if they face visa trouble, he added. Not everyone has that option.
“The division that I see is not so much about whether a college is public and private, but more along the lines of selectivity,” Blanco said. “The kind of attacks we have seen in 2025 towards international students are certainly a new dynamic and, in many ways, unprecedented.”
It raises questions for the future of colleges that rely on international students for tuition, research, and a cultural exchange of ideas on campus.
As early as 2011, UMass Boston decided that recruiting more full-pay students from outside of Massachusetts would help bolster its finances. As the school faced criticisms of poor financial management, and deficits that at one point were estimated to be $30 million, the growth of international students became a reliable constant.
A cohort of fewer than 1,000 foreign students in 2010 doubled over the decade to 1,619 in 2020. It aided UMass Boston in its rise up the college rankings and allowed the university to continue enrolling most of its students from inside the state, Blanco said.
At UMass Boston, international students pay more than twice as much to attend as Massachusetts residents do, roughly $40,000 in tuition and fees, compared with about $17,000 in-state. That, the school says, has helped to offset reduced state funding for higher ed over the last two decades.
“People think the investments in higher education would mirror the blue-state values” in Massachusetts, Blanco said. “But Massachusetts, in terms of the funding of higher education, is among the bottom in the whole country.”
With its broad set of programs, strong graduation and job outcomes, and attractive location, UMass Boston had “huge appeal globally,” said Tom Dretler, chief executive of the international student advising service Shorelight Education.
The organization has partnered with UMass Boston, Amherst, and online programs in the past to help recruit international students.
This year, UMass Boston became a top-tier research university, admitted its largest class of in-state students ever, and finished the year with a surplus — factors that should only increase its appeal abroad. Drew, the enrollment administrator, said the university will keep aiming to diversify its international student population and preparing applicants for longer wait times for visas.
But for foreign students, and the schools that have come to rely on them, much is up in the air. Federal officials said in May that they would “aggressively revoke” Chinese students’ visas, but that did not happen. Just on Monday, President Trump told Fox News that he sees the value of international students and the “trillions of dollars” they bring in, only to float the idea of additional restrictions later in the week.
And the back and forth is taking a toll. At Fitchburg State, where vice president of enrollment Pam McCaffrey called international students a “vital part” of the 6,100-student campus, their numbers have fallen sharply, from 271 in 2023 to 148 this year.
“Our international population could sense a change in the opportunities to study abroad in the United States,” she said. “I don’t want to put words in their mouths. But overall, they were aware that the situation that would allow them to study abroad may not be the same.”
Still, interest in attending US universities is stubbornly resilient, in part, Dretler said, because Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia — other major players in international education — have each slowed their own admissions. International applications to US colleges are up 75 percent for the next year, outside of India and Pakistan, according to an index analysis of around 100 institutions.
”If the US is back on," Dretler said, “this is where students want to go.”
Diti Kohli can be reached at diti.kohli@globe.com. Follow her @ditikohli_.