Out of the roughly 6 million students worldwide studying abroad, the United States currently hosts more than 1 million. “And higher education in America is considered No. 1 in the world,” said Dr. Mary Landon Darden, president of Higher Education Innovation, LLC, and a Baylor University alumna. “We’re the top of the food chain. Our higher education system, as a rule, is excellent, especially as we have so much diversity of institutions.”
International students represent approximately six percent of all university enrollment and contribute between $40 billion and $50 billion to the U.S. economy annually.
At the start of the new White House administration in January 2025, there were whispers about changes that might affect education in America, either directly or indirectly. In April, 280 colleges and universities reported that more than 1,800 international students had their legal status changed by the U.S. Department of State. In June, President Donald Trump signed a proclamation that fully or partially restricted people from 19 countries. Two months later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that over 6,000 international student visas had been revoked for overstays and law violations.
In fall 2024, Baylor welcomed 895 international students from more than 100 countries, representing less than five percent of its student population. On April 14, 2025, Baylor announced that three of its students had had their immigration status terminated in the government’s SEVIS database. International students from other Texas schools, including Texas A&M University, Rice University, UT San Antonio, and UT Rio Grande Valley, found themselves in the same predicament.
Then, in early April, Baylor’s International Student and Scholar Services sent a travel advisory email to all international students across campus, expressing concerns for students heading home for the summer due to potential complications in returning to the U.S. in August.
“My role at Baylor is the senior international officer, and much of my work involves student mobility, including the study abroad programming,” said Dr. Eduardo Contreras, Vice Provost for Global Engagement. “We also support international students both to get to the United States and to provide them with the resources they need to thrive and succeed when they’re on campus. We spent a lot of time this summer responding to federal regulations that impact international students coming to the U.S.”
On August 18, the first day of Welcome Week at Baylor, President Trump proposed new ruling to limit international students to fixed periods of entry. The four-year limit is still under discussion, but the National Center for Education Statistics notes that the median time to complete a bachelor’s degree is four years and four months. The National Science Foundation reports a median of five years and eight months for completing a Ph.D.
“We have a really extraordinary staff at Baylor who know the regulations backwards and forwards,” Contreras said. “We consult with professionals who know how to decipher and respond to new regulations, even when there’s a significant amount of ambiguity. We have contacts in the higher education community and the international education community, legal experts, and, of course, our internal general counsel.
“We set out a strategy in three parts,” he continued. “We would learn about the incoming information, decipher it, and then communicate it in a way that’s holistic, so our students and scholars who might be affected can understand it all from their perspective.”
From May 27 through June 18, visa approvals were suspended while current applicants were investigated for their personal social media history. When the application process resumed, it was significantly slower, and many international students missed the start of the fall classes. On August 6, the Associated Press reported that lines for U.S. visa interviews in China were so long that some applicants were giving up. The U.S. remained their first choice, but institutions elsewhere were recognizing opportunities, and applicants said they were considering destinations they might have otherwise overlooked. Student visa applications in the United Kingdom were up 29 percent in 2025.
“And then there was a backlog for booking visa appointments, and this was a critical time,” Contreras said. “We already have late arrival policies to help international undergraduate and graduate students, but there were some who were impacted and have had to defer to another semester. We haven’t changed our recruitment strategy for international students, but we do provide more information early and encourage students to apply for visas as soon as possible. We also emphasize the type of care and welcoming environment they can expect when they hopefully arrive on campus. It’s more work for our staff, but I don’t foresee a financial burden. The leadership support from our president, Dr. Livingstone, and provost, Dr. Brickhouse, for our international students has been unprecedented for us here on campus.
“The good news is that we actually have more international students coming on campus this year than we did last year,” he continued.
That’s certainly great news for Baylor this year, but many predict a less optimistic forecast for the 2026–2027 school year. In July, an analysis carried out by NAFSA: Association of International Educators and JB International predicted a potential 30 to 40 percent decline in new international student enrollment, an outcome they predicted “would deprive local economies of $7 billion in spending and more than 60,000 jobs.”
On June 5, President Trump was quoted as saying, “We have people who want to go to Harvard and other schools, they can’t get in because we have foreign students there.”
“No, I do not believe that,” Darden said. “Very few colleges and universities in this country are at maximum enrollment. In fact, enrollment has been on a steady decline. There’s plenty of room at good schools for good students. Also, keep in mind that these international students are paying full tuition. That means they are in many ways subsidizing the lower fees paid by national students who get tuition breaks and scholarships.”
On Baylor’s campus, there are the Global Ambassadors — volunteer students who support international students — who do everything from helping them purchase supplies from local stores to supporting those feeling homesick. Contreras noted, “They’ve been all-hands-on-deck this year.”
Baylor’s International Student and Scholar Service and Global Gateway Program understand the unique needs of international students and can help them navigate the various academic and cultural gaps of life on an American university campus.
However, despite the support that leadership and faculty can provide to international students, the rhetoric and legal pronouncements from the current administration may be interpreted by some as creating an unfriendly atmosphere for international students.
“We don’t need to be demonizing international students — that’s ridiculous,” Darden said. “Besides that, we need to think about the development of all countries in this world, not just our own. We need to share a little. Access to higher education in the U.S. can really turn things around for them. It’s a big game changer.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow have both indicated that they do not want to encourage international students to remain and work in the U.S. after completing their coursework. This was compounded in mid-September when the Trump administration imposed a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa applications, payable by U.S. companies seeking to hire someone from overseas.
“American universities benefit from the intellectual and cultural wealth that our international students and scholars bring, and the United States benefits from that international knowledge and talent in professional spaces beyond higher education,” Contreras said. “I am highly sympathetic to having opportunities for American-born folks in the professional sphere. That’s hugely important. But I also think it’s beneficial to have a diverse array of folks who are working within the United States who are from other nations.
“For the majority of our students who are American-born, to think that they’re going to live in a world that is exclusively American, to think that they’re going to work in a world that is specifically about what happens within our 50 states, is not really fair to them because working across cultures is a healthy and relevant way to operate in a world that’s highly interconnected and beautifully international.”
