Category: Trump administration

Immigration enforcement is driving away early childhood educators

by Jackie Mader, The Hechinger Report
December 10, 2025

Close to 40,000 foreign-born child care workers have been driven out of the profession in the wake of the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation and detainment efforts, according to a new study by the Better Life Lab at the think tank New America. That represents about 12 percent of the foreign-born child care workforce.

Child care workers with at least a two-year college degree are most likely to be leaving the workforce, as well as workers who are from Mexico, a demographic targeted by ICE, or those who work in center-based care, the left-leaning think tank found. The disruption has worsened an already deep shortage of child care staffers, threatening the stability of the industry and in turn is contributing to tens of thousands of U.S.-born mothers dropping out of the labor market because they don’t have reliable child care.

In addition to workers facing detainment or deportation, many people are staying home to avoid situations where they may encounter Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the report found. Agents are detaining people who have not traditionally been the focus of ICE actions, including those following legal pathways like asylum seekers and green card applicants. Child care centers were once considered “sensitive locations” exempt from ICE enforcement, but the White House rescinded that in January. In at least one example, a child care worker was detained while arriving for work at a child care program.

“What’s different now is the ferocity of the enforcement,” said Chris Herbst, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs and one of the authors of the report, in an interview with The Hechinger Report. “ICE is arresting far more people, the number of deportations has risen dramatically,” he added. “People are scared out of their minds.”

Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.

America has long relied on immigrants to fill hard-to-staff caregiving positions and enable parents to work. Across the country, around 1 in 5 child care workers is an immigrant. In Florida and New York, immigrants account for nearly 40 percent of the child care workforce. One study that compared native-born and immigrant child care workers found that nearly 64 percent of immigrants had a two- or four-year college degree, compared to 53 percent of native-born workers. The study also noted that immigrant workers are more likely than native-born workers to have child development associate credentials and to invest in professional development activities.

Overall, the child care industry supports more than $152 billion in economic activity.

In Wisconsin, Elaine, the director of a child care center, said her program has benefited greatly from a Ukrainian immigrant who has been teaching there for two years, ever since arriving in the United States as part of a humanitarian parole program. (The Hechinger Report is not using Elaine’s last name or the city where her child care center is located because she fears action by immigration enforcement.) Elaine’s center has experienced a teacher shortage for the past 13 years, and the immigrant, who has a college degree and past experience in social services, has been a steady presence for the children there.

“She’s their consistent person. She spends more time than a lot of the parents do with the children during their waking hours,” Elaine said. “She’s there for them, she’s loving, she provides that support, that connection, that security that young children need.”

In January, the Trump administration suspended the Uniting for Ukraine program, which allowed Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion to live and work in the United States for two years. While the program later opened up a process to apply for an extension, Elaine’s employee has encountered delays, like many others.

The teacher’s parole expired this month. Under the law, she is now supposed to return to Ukraine, where her home city in southeast Ukraine is still under attack by Russian forces.

Elaine fears what will happen if the center loses her. “As a business, we need her. We need a teacher we can count on,” Elaine said. “For our teachers’ mental health, to have her leave and knowing where she would go would be really difficult.”

Elaine has decided to allow the employee to keep working, and is appealing to state lawmakers to help extend her stay. Several parents have also joined in the effort, writing letters to Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin telling her how much their children love the teacher — and how important she is to the local economy. One factor in granting an extension is that the person offers a “significant public benefit” to the country.

The authors of the new report found immigrants are not the only caregivers affected by ICE enforcement this year. There has also been a drop in U.S.-born child care workers in the industry, especially among Hispanic and less-educated caregivers. This could be the result of a “climate of fear and confusion” surrounding enforcement activity, according to the report, as well as a “perceived pattern of profiling or discriminatory enforcement practices.”

“These deportations have been sold under the theory that they are going to be a boon for U.S.-born workers once we sort of unclog the labor market by removing large numbers of undocumented immigrants,” Herbst said. “We’re finding at least in the child care industry, and at least in the short run, that appears not to be the case.” Some foreign-born and U.S.-born workers have different skills and do not seem to be competing for the same caregiving jobs, he added.

Not all workers are leaving the caregiving industry altogether. Some immigrants are shifting to work as nannies or au pairs, Herbst said, “finding refuge” in private homes where they are less likely to come into contact with state child care regulators or be part of formal wage systems. (Already, an estimated 142,000 undocumented immigrants work as nannies and personal care or home health aides nationwide.) That contact with regulators and other authorities may be a reason why center-based early childhood educators are leaving the field in greater proportions now, Herbst said.

These findings come at the end of a difficult year for the child care workforce, which has long been in crisis due to dismally low pay and challenging work conditions. More than half of child care providers surveyed this year by the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford University reported experiencing difficulty affording food, the highest rate since the survey started collecting data on provider hunger in 2021. Other recent reports have found child care providers are at a higher risk for clinical depression, and in some cities an increasing number are taking on part-time jobs to make ends meet.

Across the country this year, early childhood providers have seen drops in enrollment as families pull their children out of schools and programs to avoid ICE. Child care centers are losing money and finding that some staff members are too scared to come to work or have lost work authorization after the administration ended certain refugee programs. Many child care workers have taken on additional roles driving children to and from care, collecting emergency numbers and plans for children in their care in case parents are detained and dropping off food for families too scared to leave their homes.

This story about immigration enforcement was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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December 10, 2025

Trump’s attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admission

by Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report
December 4, 2025

Brown University, one of the most selective institutions in America, attracted nearly 50,000 applicants who vied for just 1,700 freshman seats last year.

The university accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female prospects, even though, like some other schools, it got nearly twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for male students to get in — 7 percent of male applicants were admitted, compared to 4.4 percent of female applicants, university data show.

The Trump administration’s policies may soon end that advantage that has been enjoyed by men, admissions and higher education experts say.

While much of the president’s recent scrutiny of college admissions practices has focused on race, these experts say his ban on diversity, equity and inclusion is likely to hit another underrepresented group of applicants: men, and particularly white men — the largest subset of male college applicants.

“This drips with irony,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, or ACE, the nation’s largest association of universities and colleges, who said he expects that colleges and universities are ending consideration of gender in admission. “The idea of males, including white males, being at the short end of the stick all of a sudden would be a truly ironic outcome.”

Related: Interested in more news about colleges and universities? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

For years universities and colleges have been trying to keep the number of men and women on campuses evened out at a time when growing numbers of men have been choosing not to go to college. Some schools have tried to attract more men by adding football and other sports, promoting forestry and hunting programs and launching entrepreneurship competitions.

Nationwide, the number of women on campuses has surpassed the number of men for more than four decades, with nearly 40 percent more women than men enrolled in higher education, federal data show.

Efforts to admit applicants at higher rates based on gender are legal under a loophole in federal anti-discrimination law, one that’s used to keep the genders balanced on campuses.

But the Trump administration has consistently included gender among the characteristics it says it does not want schools to consider for admissions or hiring, along with race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity or religious associations. The White House has so far largely not succeeded in its campaign to press a handful of elite schools to agree to the terms and sign a wide-ranging Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education in exchange for priority consideration for federal funding.

“The racial parts have gotten a lot more attention, but I know from having spoken with practitioners who work in college admissions, they have read very clearly that it says ‘race and gender,’” in the administration’s pronouncements about ending preferences in admission, said Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center.

“What I think they don’t understand is that taking away the ability of colleges and universities to balance the gender composition of their incoming classes will ultimately have an impact on the college enrollment rates of white males,” Harper said. “It is likely to impact them the most, as a matter of fact.”

At some private colleges, male applicants are more likely to get in

School	% of males admitted	% of females admitted
Brown University	7.0	4.4
University of Chicago	5.6	3.7
Yale University	4.6	3.4
University of Miami	22.5	16.5
Middlebury College	12.2	9.6
Baylor University	56.8	47.9
Pomona College	7.6	6.7
Tulane University	14.9	13.4
Vassar College	20.4	17.6

_{SOURCE: Hechinger Report calculations from universities’ Common Data Sets}

Agreements that the administration has reached with Brown, Columbia and Northwestern universities to settle allegations of antisemitism discrimination also include language about gender.

In a statement announcing the Brown deal in July, Education Secretary Linda McMahon promised that “aspiring students will be judged solely on their merits, not their race or sex.”

Asked if that meant male applicants would no longer be admitted at higher rates than female applicants — which has helped Brown keep its undergraduate enrollment at almost exactly 50-50, even with twice as many female applicants — spokesman Brian Clark said, “We have made no changes to our admissions practices in this regard.”

The Trump administration has also vowed to make all higher education institutions submit details about the students they admit, including their gender, to find out whether they’re “discriminating against hard working American” prospective students, McMahon said in another statement.

Spokespeople for the Department of Education did not respond to questions about whether advantages in admission based on gender will be scrutinized in the same way as purported advantages based on race.

Universities are looking at the administration’s edicts “and they’re saying, ‘Well, we’d rather be cautious than stick our neck out’” by continuing to give advantages to male applicants, said ACE’s Mitchell, who was undersecretary of education under President Barack Obama. “I think we will see people dropping gender preferences, even though it is still within the law.”

Colleges that have been accepting men at higher rates are trying to avoid a marketing problem they fear will happen if their campuses become too female, said Madeleine Rhyneer, who headed admissions offices at four private universities and colleges and is now vice president of consulting services and dean of enrollment management for the education consulting firm EAB. Colleges worry, “Will men look at that and think, ‘That’s essentially a women’s college, and I don’t want to go there’?”

“For the Browns and Columbias and highly selective and very competitive institutions, it is a problem,” Rhyneer said. “They want to create what feels like a balanced climate.”

The results of ending this practice could be dramatic, experts predict. In 2023, the most recent year for which the figure is available, 817,035 more women than men applied to universities and colleges, federal data show. Boys also have lower mean scores on the SAT in reading and writing, score lower overall on the ACT and have lower grade point averages in high school.

“If we were going to eliminate preferences for men, the undergraduate population would skew to 65 percent female overnight,” Mitchell said.

Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the right-leaning think-tank the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out that similar predictions were made after the 2023 Supreme Court decision effectively ending affirmative action based on race.

At the time, he said, colleges spoke “in apocalyptic terms of the implications for the racial composition of student bodies.” But the number of Black and Hispanic students enrolled at universities and colleges the next year rose, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Then, said Hess, “there was a lot of, ‘Never mind.’”

The country’s top 50 private colleges and universities have 2 percentage points more male undergraduates than the top 50 flagship public universities, which do not consider gender in admission, according to research by Princeton economist Zachary Bleemer. He said this suggests that at least some are putting a thumb on the scale for male applicants.

Columbia took 3 percent of women applicants last year and 4 percent of men. At the University of Chicago, 5.6 percent of male applicants were accepted last year, compared to 3.7 percent of female applicants. The ratio at the University of Miami was 22.5 percent to 16.5 percent; and at Vassar College, 20.4 percent to 17.6 percent.

Besides Brown, none of these universities would respond when asked if they will continue to accept higher percentages of men than women, Neither would others that do it, including Yale, Baylor and Tulane universities and Pomona College.

Private institutions are allowed to consider gender in admission under Title IX, the federal law otherwise banning discrimination by universities and colleges that get federal funding. That’s due to a loophole dating from when the law was passed, in 1971.

At the time, the gender ratio was exactly reversed, and men outnumbered women on campuses by nearly three to two. One of the universities’ congressional allies, Rep. John Erlenborn, R-Illinois, successfully amended the measure to let private colleges and universities continue to consider gender in admission.

Erlenborn said at the time that forcing colleges to stop considering gender would be “one more giant step toward involvement by the federal government in the internal affairs of institutions of higher education.”

There’s little ambiguity for admissions offices now, said USC’s Harper.

“It says here, in writing, ‘no discrimination on the basis of race and gender,’” he noted. “It says that explicitly.”

Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected] or jpm.82 on Signal.

This story about men in college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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December 4, 2025

Child care workers are building a network of resistance against Immigration and Customs Enforcement

This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission.

The mother was just arriving to pick up her girls at their elementary school in Chicago when someone with a bullhorn at the nearby shopping center let everyone know: ICE is here.

The white van screeched to a halt right next to where she was parked, and three Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents piled out. They said something in English that she couldn’t decipher, then arrested her on the spot. Her family later said they never asked about her documentation.

She was only able to get one phone call out before she was taken away. “The girls,” was all she said to her sister. Her daughters, a third grader and a fourth grader, were still waiting for her inside the school.

Luckily, the girls’ child care provider had prepared for this very moment.

Sandra had been taking care of the girls since they were babies, and now watched them after school. She’d been encouraging the family to get American passports for the kids and signed documents detailing their wishes should the mother be detained.

When Sandra got the call that day in September, she headed straight to the school to pick up the girls.

Since President Donald Trump won a second term, Sandra has been prepping the 10 families at her home-based day care, including some who lack permanent legal status, for the possibility that they may be detained. (The 19th is only using Sandra’s first name and not naming the mother to protect their identities.)

She’s worked with families to get temporary guardianship papers sorted and put a plan in place in case they were detained and their kids were left behind. She even had a psychologist come and speak to the families about the events that had been unfolding across the country to help the children understand that there are certain situations their parents can’t control, and give them the opportunity to talk through their fears that, one day, mamá and papá might not be there to pick them up.

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And for two elementary school kids, that day did come. Sandra met them outside the school.

“When they saw me, they knew something wasn’t right,” Sandra said in Spanish. “Are we never going to see our mom again?” they asked.

For all her planning, she was speechless.

“One prepares for these things, but still doesn’t have the words on what to say,” Sandra said.

Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.

After that day, Sandra worked with the mother’s sister to get the girls situated to fly to Texas, where their mother, who had full custody of them, was being detained, and then eventually to Mexico. She hasn’t heard from them in over a month. The girls were born in the United States and know nothing of Mexico.

“I think about them in a strange country,” Sandra said. “‘Who is going to care for them like I do?’ Now with this situation I get sad because I think they are the ones who are going to suffer.”

In this year of immigration raids, child care providers have stepped up to keep families unified amid incredible uncertainty. Some are agreeing to be temporary guardians for kids should something happen to their parents. The workers themselves are also under threat — 1 in 5 child care workers are immigrant women, most of them Latinas, who are also having to prepare in case they are detained, particularly while children are in their care. Already, child care workers across the country have been detained and deported.

“The immigration and the child care movements, they are one in the same now,” said Anali Alegria, the director of federal advocacy and media relations at the Child Care for Every Family Network, a national child care advocacy group. “Child care is not just something that keeps the economy going, while it does. It’s also really integral to people’s community and family lives. And so when you’re destabilizing it, you’re also destabilizing something much more fundamental and very tender to that child and that family’s life.”

A loose network of resistance has emerged, with detailed protection plans, ICE lookout patrols, and Signal or Whatsapp chats. Home-based providers like Sandra have been especially involved in that effort because their work often means their lives are even more intertwined with the families they care for.

“All the families we have in our program, I consider them family. We arrive in this country and we don’t have family, and when we get support, advice or the simple act of caring for kids, as child care providers we are essential in many of these families — even more in these times,” said Sandra, who has been caring for children in the United States for 25 years. All the families she cares for are Latinx, 70 percent without permanent legal status.

Related: 1 in 5 child care workers is an immigrant. Trump’s deportations and raids have many terrified

According to advocacy groups, child care providers are increasingly being asked to look after kids in case they are detained, typically because they are the only trusted person the family knows with U.S. citizenship or legal permanent residence. Parents are asking child care workers to be emergency contacts, short-term guardians and, in some cases, even long-term guardians.

“We heard this under the first Trump administration, and we’re hearing it much more now. It’s not so much a matter of if, but when, right now, and it used to be the other way around,” said Wendy Cervantes, the director of immigration and immigrant families at the Center for Law and Social Policy, an anti-poverty nonprofit. “It adds just additional stress and trauma because they deeply care about these kids. Many of them have kids of their own and obviously have modest incomes, so as much as they want to say, ‘yes’, they can’t in some cases.”

The question was posed to Claudia Pellecer a couple weeks ago. A home-based child care provider in Chicago for 17 years, Pellecer cares for numerous Latinx families, at least one of whom doesn’t have permanent legal status.

In October, one of those moms was due to appear before ICE for a regular check-in as part of her ongoing asylum case. But she knew that many have been detained at those appointments this year.

The mother asked Pellecer to be her 1-year-old son’s legal guardian should she be taken away.

“I couldn’t say no because I am human, I am a mother,” Pellecer said.

Claudia Pellecer, who runs a small daycare for young children out of her home, stands for a portrait outside her house. Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th

They got to work getting the baby a passport and filling out the necessary guardianship paperwork. Pellecer kept the originals and copies. The mother closed her bank account, cleaned out her apartment and prepped two bags, one for her and one for the baby. If the mother was deported, Pellecer would fly with him to meet her in Ecuador, they agreed.

The day of the appointment, she dropped the baby off with Pellecer and set the final plan. Her appointment was at 1 p.m. “If at 6 p.m. you haven’t heard from me, that means I was detained,” she told Pellecer, who cried and wished her luck.

At the appointment, the judge asked her three sets of questions:

“Why are you here?”

“Are you working? Do you have a family?”

“Do you have proof of what happened to you in your country?”

Related: Child care centers were off limit to immigration authorities. How that’s changed

Claudia Pellecer plays games with children in the living room of her home daycare, where she cares for up to eight young children a day. Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th

The judge agreed to let her stay and told her to continue working. The mother won’t have a court date again until 2027.

“We learned our lesson,” Pellecer said. “We had to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”

But their relief was short-lived. Recent events in Chicago have sent child care workers and families into panic, as the people who have tried to keep families together are now being targeted.

Resistance networks have sprung up rapidly in Chicago in recent weeks after a child care worker was followed to Spanish immersion day care Rayito de Sol on the city’s North Side and arrested in front of children and other teachers. The arrest was caught on camera and has sparked demonstrations across the city.

Erin Horetski, whose son, Harrison, was cared for by the worker who was arrested at Rayito de Sol in early November, said parents there had been worried ICE might one day target them because the center specifically hired Spanish-speaking staff.

The morning of the arrest, parents were texting each other once they heard ICE was in the shopping center where the day care is located.

Children crawl on a colorful rug while playing educational games at Claudia Pellecer’s home daycare. Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th

Her husband was just arriving to drop off their boys as ICE was leaving. The first thing out of his mouth when he called her: “They took Miss Diana.”

Agents entered the school without a warrant to arrest infant class teacher Diana Patricia Santillana Galeano, an immigrant from Colombia. DHS said part of the reason for her arrest was because she helped bring her two teenage children across the southern U.S. border this year. “Facilitating human smuggling is a crime,” DHS said. Santillana Galeano fled Colombia fearing for her safety in 2023, filed for asylum and was given a work permit through November 2029, according to court documents. She has no known criminal record. After her arrest, a federal judge ruled that her detention without access to a bond hearing was illegal and she was released November 12.

Horetski said the incident, the first known ICE arrest inside a day care, has spurred the community to action. A GoFundMe account set up by Horetski to support Santillana Galeano, has raised more than $150,000.

Horetski said what’s been lost in the story of what happened at Rayito is the humanity of the person at the center of it, someone she said was “like a second mother” to her son.

“At the end of the day, she was a person and a friend and a mother and provider to our kids — I think we need to remember that,” Horetski said.

Related: They crossed the border for better schools. Now, some families are leaving the US

Now, the parents are the ones coming together to put in place a safety plan for the teachers, most of whom have continued to come to the school and care for their children.

They are working on establishing a safe passage patrol, setting up parents with whistles at the front of the school to stand guard during arrival and dismissal time to ensure teachers can come and go to their cars or to public transit safely. Parents are also establishing escorts for teachers who may need a ride to work or someone to accompany them on the bus or the train. A meal train set up by the parents is helping to send food to the teachers through Thanksgiving, and two local restaurants have pitched in with discounts. Some of the parents are also lawyers who are considering setting up a legal clinic to ensure workers know their rights, Horetski said.

A young child watches an educational TV show in the living room of Claudia Pellecer’s home daycare in Chicago. Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th

Figuring out how to come together to support teachers and the children who now have questions about safety is something that “continues to circle in all of our minds and brains,” Horeski said. “It’s hard to not have the answers or know how to best move forward. We’re in such uncharted territory that you’re like, ‘Where do you go from here?’ So we’re kind of paving that because this is the first time that something like this has happened.”

Prep is top of mind now for organizers including at the Service Employees International Union, where Sandra and Pellecer are members, who are convening emergency child care worker trainings to set up procedures, such as posted signs that say ICE cannot enter without a warrant, showing them what the warrants must include to be binding, helping them set a designated person to speak to ICE should they enter and talking to their families to offer support.

Cervantes has been doing this work since Trump’s first term, when it was clear immigration was going to be a key focus for the president. This year has been different, though. Child care centers were previously protected under a “sensitive locations” directive that advised ICE to not conduct enforcement in places like schools and day cares. But Trump removed that protection on his first day in office this year, signaling a more aggressive approach to ICE enforcement was coming.

Cervantes and her team are currently in the midst of a research project about child care workers across the country, conversations that are also illuminating for them just how dire the situation has become for providers.

“We are asking providers to make protocols for what is basically a man-made disaster,” she said. “They shouldn’t have to worry about protecting children and staff from the government.”

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December 3, 2025
Fewer New International Students Enroll at U.S. Colleges Amid Trump Restrictions – The 74

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New international students enrolling at U.S. colleges declined sharply this fall, a concerning development for universities that rely on those students for research, tuition revenue and the diversity they bring to campus culture. It could, however, create more space for U.S. residents at those campuses.

Enrollments of new international students were down 17% compared to fall 2024, according to a report released Monday by the Institute of International Education, which surveyed more than 800 colleges about their fall 2025 enrollments. The institute, a nonprofit organization based in New York, publishes an annual report that examines the enrollment of international students.

The fall data was not broken down by state, so the scale of decline in California is unclear. At USC, which enrolls more international students than any other California college, overall enrollment of international students is down 3% this fall, according to a campus spokesperson. That includes returning and first-time students, so the drop could be much higher for new arrivals. USC this fall enrolls about 12,000 international students, or 26% of its total student population, according to the college. About half of those students are from China.

The declines come amid a changing landscape for international students under the Trump administration, which has delayed visa processing, created travel restrictions and pressured some campuses to recruit and admit fewer students from other countries. The colleges surveyed this fall by the institute cited visa application concerns and travel restrictions as top factors in the decline.

“We are confronting major headwinds with what I would say are poor policy decisions that the administration is taking. And that is creating a climate for international students that signals that you’re not welcome here,” said Fanta Aw, CEO of NAFSA, a nonprofit for international education and exchange.

President Donald Trump has said that he wants to lower the number of international students at U.S. colleges to leave more room at those campuses for U.S. students. “It’s too much because we have Americans that want to go there and to other places, and they can’t go there,” he said earlier this year, referencing the number of international students at Harvard and other universities.

For the full 2024-25 academic year, new international student enrollments were down by 7%, driven by a 15% drop among new international graduate students, compared to 2023-24. However, the number of new undergraduates was up by 5%. Trump took office in January, just before the start of the spring semester at most colleges.

In the U.S., students from India were the largest group of international students, accounting for 30.8% of all international students, followed by students from China, with 22.6% of enrollments.

In the 2024-25 academic year in California, the largest share of international students were from China, and they made up 35.4% of enrollments, followed by students from India at 20.9%. Overall enrollment of international students in California was down 1.1% in 2024-25.

USC enrolled the most international students of any California university, followed by four University of California campuses: Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Diego and Irvine. According to the report, the total number of enrolled international students were: 12,020 at Berkeley, 10,769 at UCLA, 10,545 at San Diego, and 7,638 at Irvine.

Across the state, international students make up about 7% of enrollments at four-year colleges, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. They make up a large share of graduate students, accounting for 31% of graduate students at UC campuses, 15% at private nonprofit universities, and 12% at California State University campuses.

Freya Vijay, 20, a third-year student from Canada studying business administration at USC, said she always planned to come to the United States for college.

“In terms of business and just the economy, you have Wall Street, you have New York, Chicago, L.A., and San Francisco, all these big cities that dominate what’s going on in the world,” she said. “So immediately, in terms of opportunity, my mind was set on the States.”

In addition to visa and travel restrictions, the Trump administration has directly requested — or threatened, as some have called it — California campuses to limit enrollments of international students. The administration’s compact offer to USC last month would have forced the university to cap international enrollment at 15% for undergraduates and limit enrollment from any one country to 5%.

USC has since rejected the compact, which also would have required the university to make a number of other changes, including committing to “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”

Separately, in a settlement proposal to UCLA, the Trump administration calls on the campus to ensure that “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment” are not admitted. UCLA is still in negotiations with the administration and has not yet reached a deal. The Trump administration has charged the campus with antisemitism and civil rights violations.

Even amid the turmoil, experts say they expect California universities to continue recruiting international students. Julie Posselt, a professor of education at USC’s Rossier School of Education, noted that at research universities, much of the research is being carried out by international graduate students.

“Especially in STEM fields, international students are really central to the research functions of universities,” Posselt said. “Enrolling international students is not optional. It is absolutely a part of the fabric of what makes universities great.”

On top of that, colleges have financial incentives to enroll international students. That’s especially true at UC campuses, which charge international students and students from other states much higher rates of tuition than California residents. In the 2026-27 academic year, new international and out-of-state undergraduates at UC will pay nearly $52,000 in tuition, more than triple what in-state students will be charged. Nonresidents in graduate programs also generally pay higher rates than residents.

Facing pressure from the state Legislature to make more room for California residents, UC in 2017 passed a policy to cap nonresident enrollment at 18%, with a higher percentage allowed for campuses that were already above that mark. But the system still gets significant tuition revenue from nonresidents, including international students, which UC says supports the system’s core operations and helps to lower the cost of attendance for California residents.

In a Nov. 10 interview with Fox News, Trump seemed to acknowledge the importance of international students, saying colleges might “go out of business” without them.

“You don’t want to cut half of the people, half of the students from all over the world that are coming into our country — destroy our entire university and college system — I don’t want to do that,” he said.

International students also bring diverse perspectives and “a richness to the campus culture,” said Stett Holbrook, a spokesperson for the University of California system. “That’s something we really appreciate and try to cultivate.”

At USC, the presence of international students from more than 130 countries means there are “innumerable opportunities at USC to encounter different perspectives” and “experience new cultures,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

Vijay, the USC student from Canada, said she regularly boasts about USC to friends, adding that she hopes attending remains an option for other international students.

“I always think it’s just such a great opportunity and that no international student should ever take it for granted,” she said. “I wish other internationals could experience it.”

This story was originally published on EdSource.

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November 28, 2025
Trump vows to “permanently pause” migration from “third world countries”

The President made the statement in a Thanksgiving post on Truth Social, in which he said the measures would allow the “US system to fully recover”, while vowing to remove anyone who is not an “asset” to the country.

Trump said he would end all federal benefits and subsidies to “noncitizens” in the US and deport any foreign national deemed a security risk or deemed to be “non-compatible with Western Civilisation”.

His remarks follow the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington DC on November 26, one of whom died the following day. The suspect in the shooting is an Afghan national who is said to have arrived in the US in September 2021.

Officials say the accused came to the country legally, under a program that offered immigration protections to Afghanistan nationals who worked with US forces and feared retribution from the Taliban.

No details of Trump’s immigration suspension plan or what would be considered a “third world” country have been released, and the State Department did not immediately respond to The PIE News’ request for comment.

Trump previously said after Wednesday’s shooting that the attack constituted an “act of terror”, and vowed to remove people “from any country who doesn’t belong here”.

Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation

Donald Trump, US President

As announced by USCIS director Joseph Edlow on Thursday: “Effective immediately, processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols.”

In June 2025, the Trump administration imposed an all-out travel ban on 12 nations including Afghanistan, and a partial ban on a further seven, barring the entry of international scholars and students. Only Afghan nationals holding Special Immigration Visas were among the few exceptions to the policy.

Those holding valid visas before the ban was announced were allowed to remain in the US, and in 2024/25 there were a total of 712 Afghan students studying at US institutions, according to Open Doors data.

The countries currently impacted by the ban are Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, whose nationals are obstructed from all types of travel to the US including immigrant and nonimmigrant visas.

Nationals of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela are subject to partial restrictions.

“Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation”, Trump continued on Truth Social.

His presidency has seen a widespread crackdown on immigration, including the revocation of 80,000 non-immigrant visas, 10% of which were for international students.

The administration’s arrests, detentions and attempted deportations of international students for their pro-Palestinian advocacy have drawn widespread condemnation from within the US and globally, with a court ruling them illegal last month.

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November 28, 2025
It will take patience and courage to fix K-12 education without the Department of Education

by John Katzman, The Hechinger Report
November 19, 2025

The Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education this week provides a rare opportunity to rethink our current top-down approach to school governance.

We should jump on it. It’s not sexy to talk about governance, but we can’t fix K-12 education until we do so, no matter how we feel about the latest changes.

Since the Department of Education opened in 1980, we’ve doubled per-pupil spending, and now spend about twice as much per student as does the average country in the European Union. Yet despite that funding — and the reforms, reports and technologies introduced over the past 45 years — U.S. students consistently underperform on international benchmarks. And people are opting out: 22 percent of U.S. district students are now chronically absent, while record numbers of families are opting out of those schools, choosing charters, private schools and homeschooling.

Most federal and state reform approaches have been focused on curricular standards and have accomplished little. The many billions spent on the Common Core standards coincided with — or triggered — a 13-year decline in academic performance. The underlying principles of the standards movement — that every student should learn the same things at the same time, that we know what those things are and that they don’t change over time — have made our schools even less compelling while narrowing instruction to what gets tested.

Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.

We need to address the real problem: how federal, state and district rules combine to create a dense fog of regulations and directives that often conflict or constrain one another. Educators are losing a rigged game: It’s not that they’re doing the wrong things, it’s that governance makes them unresponsive, bureaucratic, ineffective and paralyzed — can you name an industry that spends less on research and development?

Fixing governance won’t be simple, but it shouldn’t take more than 13 years to do it: three years to design a better system of state governance and 10 more to thoroughly test and debug it.

I would start by bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, ideally at a new “Center for K-12 Governance” at a university’s school of education or school of public policy, and give them three years to think through a comprehensive set of state laws and regulations to manage schools.

The center would convene experts from inside and outside of education, in small groups focused on topics including labor, funding, data, evaluation, transportation, construction, athletics, counseling, technology, curricula and connections to higher education and the workforce. Its frameworks would address various educational and funding alternatives currently in use, including independent, charter and parochial schools, home schooling and Education Savings Accounts, all of which speak to the role of parents in making choices about their children’s education.

Each group would start with the questions and not the answers, and there are hundreds of really interesting questions to be considered: What are the various goals of our K-12 schools and how do we authentically measure schools against them? What choices do we give parents, and what information might help them make the right decisions for their kids? How do we allow for new approaches to attract, support and pay great teachers and administrators? How does money follow each student? What data do we collect and how do we use it?

After careful consideration, the center would hand its proposed statutes to a governor committed to running a long-term pilot to fully test the model. He or she would create a small alternative department of education, which would oversee a few hundred volunteer schools matched to a control group of similar schools running under the state’s legacy regime; both groups would include schools with a range of demographic and performance profiles. The two systems could run side by side for up to a decade.

Related: Schools confront a new reality: They can’t count on federal money

Each year, the state would assess the two departments’ performance against metrics like graduation and college-completion rates, teacher retention, income trajectories, civic participation, student and parent satisfaction, and, yes, NAEP scores. Under intense scrutiny by interested parties, both groups would be free to tweak their playbooks and evaluate solutions against a range of real-world outcomes. Once definitive longitudinal data comes in, the state would shutter one department and move the governance of its schools over to the other, perhaps launching a new test with an even better system.

This all may seem like a lot of work, but it’s a patient approach to a root problem. Schools remain the nation’s most local public square; they determine income mobility, civic health and democratic resilience. If we fail to rewire the system now to support them properly, we guarantee their continued decline, to the detriment of students and society. Instead of celebrating students, teachers and principals who succeed despite the odds, we should address why we made those odds so steep.

That’s why we should use this moment to draft and test something audacious, and give the next Supreme Court a happier education case to decide: how to retire a legacy system that finally lost a fair fight.

John Katzman has founded and run three large ed tech companies: The Princeton Review, 2U and Noodle. He has worked closely with many large school districts and has served on the boards of NAPCS and NAIS.

Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].

This story about fixing K-12 education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

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November 19, 2025
Students face dropout risk in Trump cuts – Campus Review

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November 19, 2025
Can gifted testing spot potential in young children?

by Sarah Carr, The Hechinger Report
November 13, 2025

In New Orleans, a few hundred dollars could once help a family buy a “gifted” designation for their preschooler.

As an education reporter for the city’s Times-Picayune newspaper several years ago, I discovered that there was a two-tiered system for determining whether 3-year-olds met that mark, which, in New Orleans, entitled them to gifted-only prekindergarten programs at a few of the city’s most highly sought-after public schools.

Families could sit on a lengthy waitlist and have their children tested at the district central office for free. Or they could pay the money for the private test. In 2008, the year that I wrote about the issue, only a few of the more than 100 children tested at the central office were deemed gifted; but dozens of privately tested kiddos — nearly all of them tested by the same psychologist for $300 — met the benchmark.

Since working on that story, I’ve been interested in the use of intelligence testing for high-stakes decisions about educational access and opportunity — and the ways that money, insider knowledge and privilege can manipulate that process.

But I knew less about what the research shows about a broader question: Should gifted-only programming for the youngest students exist at all and, if so, what form should it take? When New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announced in October that he would end long-standing gifted programming for kindergartners (while preserving it for the older grades), I reached out to some leading researchers in search of answers to those questions. Read the story.

More on gifted education

Hechinger reporter Jill Barshay, who covers education research, has written several stories about different facets of gifted education, which she captured in a column earlier this month.

In 2020, The Hechinger Report and NBC News produced a three-part series on the ways that gifted education has maintained segregation in American schools and efforts to diversify gifted classes.

More early childhood news

Federal immigration agents pulled an infant teacher out of her classroom at a Chicago child care, pinning her arms behind her — and traumatizing the families who witnessed the incident, report Molly DeVore and Mack Liederman for Block Club Chicago.

Growing numbers of child care workers are running for elected office, hoping to work directly on behalf of change and more support for a sector that desperately needs it, writes Rebecca Gale for The 74.

Colorado voters approved two sales tax levies to support child care providers and families with young children, reports Ann Schimke with Chalkbeat Colorado.

Research quick take

Contrary to perception, there’s little evidence that an increased academic focus in the early elementary years disadvantages boys, write researchers in a new working paper published by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute. The researchers, Megan Kuhfeld and Margaret Burchinal, examined growth in reading and math test scores for a sample of 12 million students at 22,000 schools between 2016 and 2025. They found that boys are surpassing girls in math by the end of elementary school, and that girls maintain an advantage in reading through fifth grade.

This story about gifted testing was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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November 13, 2025
Advocates warn of risks to higher ed data if Education Department is shuttered

by Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report
November 10, 2025

Even with the government shut down, lots of people are thinking about how to reimagine federal education research. Public comments on how to reform the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Education Department’s research and statistics arm, were due on Oct. 15. A total of 434 suggestions were submitted, but no one can read them because the department isn’t allowed to post them publicly until the government reopens. (We know the number because the comment entry page has an automatic counter.)

A complex numbers game

There’s broad agreement across the political spectrum that federal education statistics are essential. Even many critics of the Department of Education want its data collection efforts to survive — just somewhere else. Some have suggested moving the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to another agency, such as the Commerce Department, where the U.S. Census Bureau is housed.

But Diane Cheng, vice president of policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonprofit organization that advocates for increasing college access and improving graduation rates, warns that shifting NCES risks the quality and usefulness of higher education data. Any move would have to be done carefully, planning for future interagency coordination, she said.

“Many of the federal data collections combine data from different sources within ED,” Cheng said, referring to the Education Department. “It has worked well to have everyone within the same agency.”

Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

She points to the College Scorecard, the website that lets families compare colleges by cost, student loan debt, graduation rates, and post-college earnings. It merges several data sources, including the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), run by NCES, and the National Student Loan Data System, housed in the Office of Federal Student Aid. Several other higher ed data collections on student aid and students’ pathways through college also merge data collected at the statistical unit with student aid figures. Splitting those across different agencies could make such collaboration far more difficult.

“If those data are split across multiple federal agencies,” Cheng said, “there would likely be more bureaucratic hurdles required to combine the data.”

Information sharing across federal agencies is notoriously cumbersome, the very problem that led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11.

Hiring and $4.5 million in fresh research grants

Even as the Trump administration publicly insists it intends to shutter the Department of Education, it is quietly rebuilding small parts of it behind the scenes.

In September, the department posted eight new jobs to replace fired staff who oversaw the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the biennial test of American students’ achievement. In November, it advertised four more openings for statisticians inside the Federal Student Aid Office. Still, nothing is expected to be quick or smooth. The government shutdown stalled hiring for the NAEP jobs, and now a new Trump administration directive to form hiring committees by Nov. 17 to approve and fill open positions may further delay these hires.

At the same time, the demolition continues. Less than two weeks after the Oct. 1 government shutdown, 466 additional Education Department employees were terminated — on top of the roughly 2,000 lost since March 2025 through firings and voluntary departures. (The department employed about 4,000 at the start of the Trump administration.) A federal judge temporarily blocked these latest layoffs on Oct. 15.

Related: Education Department takes a preliminary step toward revamping its research and statistics arm

There are also other small new signs of life. On Sept. 30 — just before the shutdown — the department quietly awarded nine new research and development grants totaling $4.5 million. The grants, listed on the department’s website, are part of a new initiative called, “From Seedlings to Scale Grants Program” (S2S), launched by the Biden administration in August 2024 to test whether the Defense Department’s DARPA-style innovation model could work in education. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, invests in new technologies for national security. Its most celebrated project became the basis for the internet.

Each new project, mostly focused on AI-driven personalized learning, received $500,000 to produce early evidence of effectiveness. Recipients include universities, research organizations and ed tech firms. Projects that show promise could be eligible for future funding to scale up with more students.

According to a person familiar with the program who spoke on background, the nine projects had been selected before President Donald Trump took office, but the formal awards were delayed amid the department’s upheaval. The Institute of Education Sciences — which lost roughly 90 percent of its staff — was one of the hardest hit divisions.

Granted, $4.5 million is a rounding error compared with IES’s official annual budget of $800 million. Still, these are believed to be the first new federal education research grants of the Trump era and a faint signal that Washington may not be abandoning education innovation altogether.

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

This story about risks to federal education data was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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November 10, 2025
Trump administration cuts canceled this college student’s career start in politics

This story was produced in partnership with Teen Vogue and reprinted with permission.

Christopher Cade wants to be president someday. His inspiration largely comes from family members, who have been involved in local politics and activism since long before he was born. But policies from the Trump administration and the Ohio Legislature are complicating his college experience — and his plans to become a politician.

Cade is a student at Ohio State University double-majoring in public policy analysis and political science with a focus on American political theory. He recalls his maternal grandmother, Maude Hill — who had a large hand in raising him — talking to him about her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. She also worked at Columbus, Ohio-based affordable housing development nonprofit, Homeport, and has gone to Capitol Hill to speak with the state delegation multiple times. His dad is the senior vice president of the housing choice voucher program at the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority, and his older brother has a degree in political science and is interested in social justice advocacy work, Cade said. Last fall, his first on campus, Cade began applying to opportunities to bolster his resume for a future career in politics.

The now 19-year-old secured an internship with the U.S. Department of Transportation and a work-study job on campus in the university’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion. But the federal opportunity was scrapped when the Trump administration imposed a hiring freeze and budget cuts. His campus job ended when the university announced it would “sunset” the diversity office in response to federal and state anti-diversity, equity and inclusion orders and actions, according to Cade.

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The work-study position was with the university’s Bell National Resource Center on the African American Male, which was founded to support Black men to stay in college. It’s a cause he was excited about.

“I would help order food or speak with students or do interviews,” said Cade. “I developed a good 20 different programs for the next year.”

In February, when the university announced it was closing the office, “I was like, ‘Well, so six months of work just for no reason,’” he said.

OSU President Ted Carter released a statement on Feb. 27 saying the closure of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion was a response to both state and federal actions regarding DEI in public education. The move eliminated 17 staff positions, not including student roles, the university said. Programming and services provided by the Office of Student Life’s Center for Belonging and Social Change were also scrapped.

The change came before the Trump administration’s initial deadline for complying with a memo that threatened to cut funding for public colleges and universities, as well as K-12 schools, that offer DEI programs and initiatives. In March, the administration announced that OSU was one of roughly 50 universities under federal investigation for allegedly discriminating against white and Asian students in graduate admissions. Additionally, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed legislation in March banning DEI programs in the state’s public colleges and universities. The legislation went into effect in June.

Before the DEI office closed, Cade said, “I felt so heard and seen.” He’d attended a private, predominantly white, Catholic high school, he said. “It was not a place that supported me culturally and helped me understand more about who I am and my Blackness,” he recalled. At the university, though, “the programming we had throughout the year [was] about how to change the narrative on who a Black man is and what it means when you go out here and interact with people.

“And then for them to close down all these programs, that essentially told me that I wasn’t cared about.”

After the February announcement, students pushed back, organizing protests and a sit-in at the student union. But eventually, those efforts quieted.

Cade says students felt like there was a “cloud of darkness” hanging over them. But he also thought of his Office of Diversity and Inclusion coworkers, some of whom had spent decades working there, helping students. In particular he thought of his former colleague Chila Thomas, who celebrated her fifth anniversary last year as the executive director of the Young Scholars Program. That program, which helps low-income aspiring first-generation college students get to and through college, was one of several of the office’s programs that will continue. The day after Carter’s announcement, she and others in the office spent time giving students space to talk through their feelings, despite the uncertainties surrounding their own employment, Cade said.

Related: A case study of what’s ahead with Trump DEI crackdowns: Utah has already cut public college DEI initiatives

Since the university crackdown on DEI, Cade said he’s experienced more discomfort on campus, even outright racism. He says he was approached by a white person who said, “I’m so glad they’re getting rid of DEI” and spit on his shoe and used a racial slur.

“I don’t know how that could ever be acceptable to anyone, but that was [when] a flip switched in my head,” Cade said. “I couldn’t sit down and be sad and silent. I had to stand up and make change.”

In March, he traveled with other students to Washington, D.C., as part of the Undergraduate Student Government’s Governmental Relations Committee. They met with Ohio Rep. Troy Balderson and an aide, along with staffers from the offices of fellow Ohio lawmakers Sen. Bernie Moreno and Rep. Joyce Beatty, to discuss college affordability, DEI policies and the federal hiring freeze. Cade says he described how he was affected by the U.S. Department of Transportation canceling his internship.

In Carter’s announcement, he stated that all student employees would be “offered alternative jobs at the university,” but Cade said during a meeting with Office of Diversity and Inclusion student employees, an OSU dean clarified that they would have to apply for new opportunities. With the policy changes meaning there were fewer work-study roles and more students in need of jobs, Cade saw the market as increasingly competitive, and he began to job hunt elsewhere. This summer he secured work with the Ohio Department of Transportation as a communications and policy intern. In October he began an intake assistant role in the Office of Civil Rights Compliance at the university. (Ohio State Director of Media and PR Chris Booker told Teen Vogue that the school could not comment on the experiences of individual students but that “all student employees and graduate associates impacted by these program changes were offered the opportunity to pursue transitioning into alternative positions at the university, as well as support in navigating that change.”)

Although he was drawn to OSU for the John Glenn College of Public Affairs’ master’s program, Cade says he might have reconsidered schools had he known that the university would bend to lawmakers’ anti-DEI efforts. While he’s concerned about how education-related legislation and policies may continue to affect his college experience, he worries most about some of his peers. College is already so hard to navigate for so many young people, said Cade. “And this is just another thing that says, ‘Oh yeah, this isn’t for me.’”

This story was published in partnership with Teen Vogue.

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November 10, 2025