Tag: U.S

  • Over 1 Million Digital Badges on Offer in the U.S.

    Over 1 Million Digital Badges on Offer in the U.S.

    The number of unique credentials available in the U.S. has hit a whopping 1.8 million, with digital badges making up more than a million of those offerings, according to the latest report from Credential Engine.

    The report, released Tuesday, is the fifth in a series tracking the ever-growing variety of credentials and providers cropping up across the country. Much has changed since the last “Counting Credentials” report came out in 2022. Credential Engine, a nonprofit dedicated to charting the credentialing landscape, improved its data collection and analysis strategies to remove duplicate programs from data samples and include more badge programs, allowing for more accurate counts and estimates, the new report noted.

    Researchers found that 134,491 credential providers—including colleges and universities, online course providers, nonacademic organizations, industry associations, and state governments—are producing 1,850,034 credentials, up from the 1,076,358 they counted in 2022. The report also found that education institutions, federal and state governments, and employers spend $2.34 trillion annually on these programs.

    Credential Engine identified 1,022,028 badges and 486,352 certificates among the total. Degrees, by comparison, made up a smaller fraction of the credentials tallied this year: 264,099 programs. The number of secondary school diplomas and occupational licenses followed behind at 52,948 and 14,331, respectively. Certifications, which require an exam and tend to expire, reached 6,892. And the organization found 3,384 microcredentials, defined by the report as any program offered by a massive open online course provider that embraces the label.

    Scott Cheney, CEO of Credential Engine, said the standout finding to him is “there’s a lot of digital badging being done,” a trend he finds “really exciting.” He believes digital badges, which recognize specific skills and achievements for display online, allow workers to better showcase their learning at a more granular level. For example, badges, whether offered by academic or nonacademic providers, can recognize skill sets ranging from emotional intelligence to mastery of a coding language, or even completion of a class or work project.

    Badges are “being used to recognize smaller and smaller learning activity and skill attainment,” Cheney said. “We’re really seeing a moment when we’re able to actually count all learning,” which helps job applicants “tell their story.”

    He said the digital format not only makes it easier for learners to keep track of everything they’ve achieved but also simplifies sharing that information with employers.

    A companion report, released with the credential count, suggests innovations like digital wallets and learning and employment records, which can house collections of digital credentials, are making badges more shareable and verifiable for employers.

    “The technology is there,” Cheney said.

    He also believes the ascent of skills-based hiring is driving the trend. More than half of states have adopted policies to encourage hiring according to skills, not degrees, and a slew of employers have embraced the approach. He’d like to see more employers with these goals use digital credentials to assess what candidates bring to the table.

    Because of these recent developments, “all of a sudden, we need ways to actually unpack the skills that you have in a traditional degree or certificate or certification” and to offer ways to learn and prove mastery of “a single skill,” he said.

    Though the report doesn’t delve into it, he noted that traditional higher education institutions are increasingly interested in offering nondegree credentials, which he believes is “healthy for them and their relationship with their students” as demand for such programs ramps up.

    But Cheney also understands colleges’ trepidation about entering a nondegree credential landscape that’s crowded, “very chaotic” and “difficult to navigate.” He acknowledged that some academics have healthy concerns about the quality of proliferating nondegree credentials as nonacademic credential providers grow their offerings at fast clip. The trend “does cry out for … a greater need to have reliable outcome data and impact data,” he said. Members of the committee engaged in the negotiated rule-making process for Workforce Pell, a new federal financial aid option for short-term job training programs, are wrestling with such questions about how to ensure credentials’ quality this week.

    Nondegree credentials aren’t “going to be right for every institution, and that’s OK, too,” Cheney said. “We need some that are still going to be very traditional … because the economy needs that as well.” At the same time, higher ed institutions “need to recognize where the marketplace is, where the zeitgeist is in the country and what employers need and what students are calling out for.”

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  • Harvard Prof to Leave U.S. After Immigration Arrest

    Harvard Prof to Leave U.S. After Immigration Arrest

    At the time of his initial arrest, Gouvea said he was hunting rats.

    APCortizasJr/iStock/Getty Images

    Immigration authorities arrested Carlos Portugal Gouvea, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, on Wednesday after his J-1 visa was revoked for shooting a BB gun outside of a Boston-area synagogue Oct. 2, the day of Yom Kippur. Gouvea agreed to voluntarily leave the United States rather than be deported. 

    The Department of State revoked Gouvea’s visa Oct. 16, and a month later, Gouvea accepted a plea deal “on the charge of illegal use of the air rifle while his other charges for disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, and vandalizing property were dismissed,” the Department of Homeland Security wrote in a news release. 

    Gouvea shot the pellet gun outside Temple Beth Zion in Brookline, Mass., just a few miles south of the Harvard campus, The New York Times reported. Private security guards for the synagogue heard a loud noise outside, and the temple was put in a lockdown. When a guard saw Gouvea behind a tree and attempted to arrest him, they engaged in a brief physical struggle and then Gouvea fled, the Times reported. He was later arrested by Brookline police. Gouvea fired two total shots, one of which police later discovered had shattered a car window. Harvard officials put Gouvea on administrative leave shortly after his October arrest.

    In its news release, the Department of Homeland Security called the act an “anti-Semitic shooting incident,” a characterization federal officials have maintained since the incident. 

    “It is a privilege to work and study in the United States, not a right. There is no room in the United States for brazen, violent acts of anti-Semitism like this. They are an affront to our core principals as a country and an unacceptable threat against law-abiding American citizens,” Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at DHS, said in a statement. “We are under zero obligation to admit foreigners who commit these inexplicably reprehensible acts or to let them stay here. Secretary Noem has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and commit anti-American and anti-Semitic violence and terrorism should think again. You are not welcome here.” 

    At the time of his initial arrest, Gouvea said he was “hunting rats.” He was not charged with a hate crime by local police, and leaders from Temple Beth Zion told the Times they did not believe the shooting was motivated by bias. 

    “From what we were initially told by police, the individual was unaware that he lived next to, and was shooting his BB gun next to, a synagogue, or that it was a religious holiday,” Benjamin Maron, the synagogue’s executive director, and Larry Kraus, its president, wrote in the statement to the Times. “It is potentially dangerous to use a BB gun in such a populated spot, but it does not appear to have been fueled by antisemitism.”

    A lawyer for Gouvea also told the Times in October that the matter was “a total misunderstanding of an entirely innocent situation.”

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  • Fewer New International Students Enroll at U.S. Colleges Amid Trump Restrictions – The 74

    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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  • Higher Education and Its Complicity in U.S. Empire

    Higher Education and Its Complicity in U.S. Empire

    For more than a century, U.S. higher education has been intertwined with American empire. Universities have served as ideological partners, intelligence hubs, policy workshops, and training grounds for the managers of U.S. global power. When Washington supports authoritarian allies, fuels regional conflicts, or looks away during humanitarian disasters, the academy rarely stands apart. Instead, it aligns itself—through silence, research partnerships, and selective outrage—with the priorities of the federal government and the corporations that profit from U.S. foreign policy.

    Recent U.S. actions in Venezuela, Ukraine, Yemen, South Sudan, and Palestine reveal how deeply embedded this pattern has become.

    In Venezuela, the United States pursued years of sanctions, covert pressure, and diplomatic isolation as part of a regime-change strategy. Throughout this period, universities repeated a narrow range of policy narratives promoted by the State Department and U.S.-aligned think tanks. Panels and conferences elevated experts connected to defense contractors, oil interests, and government-funded NGOs, while the humanitarian consequences of sanctions and the legality of U.S. interference were often ignored. The atmosphere of academic neutrality masked a clear alignment with Washington’s objectives.

    Universities also showed a troubling degree of complicity during Russia’s assault on Ukraine, a war marked by the systematic killing of civilians, mass displacement, and the kidnapping and forced transfer of Ukrainian children into Russia. Even after international human rights organizations and war-crimes investigators documented atrocities, some U.S. institutions maintained partnerships with Russian universities aligned with the Kremlin, accepted visiting scholars linked to state propaganda outlets, or avoided direct condemnation of Putin’s actions for fear of disrupting scientific or financial relationships. In certain cases, academic centers framed the invasion as a “complex geopolitical dispute” rather than a brutal, unilateral attack on a sovereign population, allowing Russian narratives about NATO, Western “provocation,” or Ukrainian illegitimacy to seep into public programming. While some campuses cut ties, others hesitated, revealing how financial incentives, research networks, and institutional caution can blunt moral clarity even in the face of internationally verified crimes against civilians and children.

    Higher education’s relationship with the Gulf states adds another dimension to this complicity. As Saudi Arabia waged a catastrophic war in Yemen—with U.S. weapons, logistical support, and diplomatic protection—American universities deepened their financial partnerships with Saudi and Emirati institutions. Engineering programs, medical schools, cybersecurity labs, and energy research centers accepted major gifts and expanded joint research agreements. Few leaders questioned these ties, even as human rights groups documented atrocities in Yemen or as the UAE’s role in proxy conflicts, including episodes in South Sudan, came into sharper focus. Protecting revenue streams took precedence over confronting abuses committed by powerful allies.

    Nowhere is the failure of higher education more visible than in its response to Israel’s assault on Gaza. As civilian deaths soared and international human rights organizations sounded alarms about the scale and intent of the military campaign, most universities responded with repression rather than reflection. Administrators disciplined student protesters, sanctioned faculty for political speech, and issued public statements carefully aligned with prevailing U.S. political positions. Research partnerships with Israeli institutions linked to defense industries persisted without scrutiny. Universities that once examined apartheid with clarity struggled to acknowledge parallels when the subject was Palestine. Donor sensitivities, political pressures, and fear of congressional retaliation overwhelmed any commitment to moral consistency or academic freedom.

    The same institutional behavior is likely if U.S. policy shifts in East Asia. Should Washington move toward accommodating the People’s Republic of China’s ambitions regarding Taiwan—whether through diplomatic recalibration or reduced willingness to intervene—universities will likely adapt quickly. The history of U.S.-China normalization in the 1970s showed how fast higher education can reorient itself when geopolitical winds change. Partnerships, narratives, and research agendas would shift to align with new federal signals, demonstrating again that universities follow the imperatives of state power more readily than they challenge them.

    The deeper issue is structural. U.S. higher education relies on federal research funding, defense and intelligence partnerships, corporate relationships, overseas investment programs, and philanthropic networks shaped by geopolitical interests. Endowments are tied to global markets that profit from conflict. Study-abroad and academic exchange programs depend on diplomatic priorities. Administrators understand that openly challenging U.S. foreign policy—from Venezuela to Ukraine, from Yemen to Gaza—can threaten institutional stability and funding. Silence or selective engagement becomes the safest administrative posture.

    If the academy hopes to reclaim its integrity, it must learn to confront rather than replicate state power. That requires transparency about foreign funding and defense contracts, protection for dissenting scholars and students, genuine engagement with global South perspectives, and ethical evaluation of partnerships with authoritarian governments. Universities cannot prevent wars, but they can refuse to serve as intellectual and financial enablers of violence.

    Until such changes occur, higher education will remain entangled in the machinery of U.S. empire, complicit not through passivity but through the routine normalization of policies that inflict suffering around the world.

     
    Sources

    Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; U.S. Congressional Research Service; Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft; Brown University’s Costs of War Project; Washington Post and New York Times reporting on U.S. sanctions and foreign policy; Investigations by the Associated Press, Reuters, and Al Jazeera on Yemen, Gaza, Venezuela, and South Sudan; HEI archives and independent higher education researchers.

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  • How U.S. Higher Education Helped Create Nick Fuentes

    How U.S. Higher Education Helped Create Nick Fuentes

    In the aftermath of each new outrage involving Nick Fuentes, pundits scramble to explain how a 20-something suburban Catholic kid became one of the most influential white supremacists in America. Many insist Fuentes is an anomaly, a glitch, a fringe figure who somehow slipped through the cracks of democracy and decency. But this narrative is both comforting and false.

    Fuentes is not an anomaly. He is the logical product of the systems that shaped him—especially American higher education.

    While institutions obsess over rankings, fundraising, and branding campaigns, they have quietly abandoned entire generations of young people to debt, alienation, status anxiety, and a digital culture that preys on male insecurity. In this vacuum, extremist networks thrive, incubating figures like Fuentes long before the public notices.

    HEI warned about this trend years ago. Since 2016, the publication tracked the rise of Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA, noting how TPUSA used campus culture wars to radicalize disaffected young men. HEI saw that for-profit-style marketing, donor-driven politics, and relentless culture-war agitation were creating an ecosystem where reactionaries could build both influence and profit. Fuentes did not arise outside that ecosystem—he evolved from it, even as he later turned on Kirk as insufficiently extreme.

    What fuels this pipeline? A generation of young men raised on the promise of meritocracy but delivered a reality of spiraling costs, precarious futures, and institutional betrayal. Many arrive at college campuses burdened by debt, anxious about their place in an unforgiving economy, and deeply online. They bear the psychological bruises of a culture that has replaced community with competition and replaced meaning with metrics.

    This is also the demographic most vulnerable to incel ideology, a misogynistic worldview built around grievance, rejection, humiliation, and resentment. Incel communities overlap heavily with the digital spaces where Fuentes built his early audience. The mix is combustible: sexually frustrated young men who feel mocked by mainstream culture, priced out of adulthood, and invisible to institutions that once guided them. The result is a fusion of white nationalism, male resentment, Christian nationalism, ironic fascism, and livestream entertainment—perfectly tailored to a generation raised on Twitch and YouTube.

    And yet the higher-education establishment insisted for years that white supremacists were primarily rural “rednecks”—poor, uneducated, easily dismissed. This stereotype blinded journalists, academics, and administrators to the reality developing right in front of them. Higher Education Inquirer knew better because we corresponded for years with Peter Simi, one of the country’s leading scholars of extremism. Simi’s research demonstrated clearly that white supremacists were not confined to rural backwaters. They were suburban, middle-class, sometimes college-educated, often tech-savvy, and deeply embedded in mainstream institutions.

    Simi’s work showed that white supremacist movements have always thrived among people with something to lose, people who feel their status slipping. They recruit in fraternities, gaming communities, campus political groups, military circles, and online spaces where young men spend their most lonely hours. They build identities around grievance and belonging—needs that universities once helped students navigate but now too often ignore.

    This is the world that produced Nick Fuentes.

    Fuentes entered higher education during a moment of fragmentation and distrust. Tuition was skyrocketing. Campuses were polarizing. Students were increasingly treated as revenue streams rather than whole human beings. Administrators were more focused on donor relations and culture-war optics than on the psychological welfare of their students. And universities outsourced so many vital functions—to police, to lobbyists, to tech platforms—that they ceded responsibility for the very students they claimed to educate.

    Into that void stepped extremist influencers who offered simple answers to complex problems, validation for resentment, and a community that cared—if only in the performative, transactional sense of internet politics.

    The tragedy is not simply that Fuentes emerged. The tragedy is that the conditions to generate many more like him remain firmly in place.

    American higher education created the environment: hyper-competition, abandonment of the humanities, the collapse of community, the normalization of precarity, and a relentless emphasis on personal failure over systemic dysfunction. It created the audience: anxious, isolated, indebted young men looking for meaning. And it created the blind spot: a refusal to take extremism seriously until it reaches mainstream visibility.

    Fuentes is not a glitch in the system. He is the system’s mirror held up to itself.

    Unless universities confront their complicity in this radicalization pipeline—economically, culturally, and psychologically—the next Nick Fuentes is already in a dorm room somewhere, streaming at 2 a.m., finding thousands of followers who feel just as betrayed as he does.

    Sources

    Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (2017).

    Peter Simi & Robert Futrell, American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate (2010, updated 2015).

    Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018).

    Joan Donovan & danah boyd, “Stop the Presses? The Crisis of Misinformation” (Harvard Kennedy School).

    Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (2020).

    Michael Kimmel, Healing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into—and Out of—Violent Extremism (2018).

    Whitney Phillips, “The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists.”

    Brian Hughes & Cynthia Miller-Idriss, “Youth Radicalization in Digital Spaces.”

    David Futrelle, We Hunted the Mammoth archive on incel ideology.

    Higher Education Inquirer (2016–2024 coverage of TPUSA, Charlie Kirk, and campus extremism).

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  • U.S. Remains Leader in Interdisciplinary Science

    U.S. Remains Leader in Interdisciplinary Science

    Science-focused U.S. institutions take the top spots in THE’s interdisciplinary science rankings.

    U.S. colleges and universities lead the world in interdisciplinary science research according to the Times Higher Education Interdisciplinary Science Rankings 2026 (THE is Inside Higher Ed’s parent company). 

    American institutions occupy six of the top 10 slots on this year’s table. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is first for the second year in a row, followed by Stanford University in second, also retaining its 2025 position. The California Institute of Technology rose one spot to third place, and the University of California, Berkeley, debuts on the list in fourth position. 

    Duke University dropped from fifth to sixth rank this year, and the Georgia Institute of Technology appears on the list for the first time, coming in seventh. 

    On a country level, nearly a quarter of the top 100 institutions in the ranking are from the US, more than any other nation. 

    Launched in 2024 in association with Schmidt Science Fellows, the rankings were created to improve scientific excellence and collaboration across disciplines and to help universities benchmark their interdisciplinary scientific work

    THE broadened the interdisciplinary scope of research for this year’s list to cover any project that comprises multiple scientific disciplines or one or more scientific disciplines combined with the social sciences, education, psychology, law, economics or clinical and health.

    The U.S.’s performance in the rankings is driven by high scores for outputs metrics, which include the number and share of interdisciplinary science research publications, the citations of interdisciplinary science research, and the reputation of support for interdisciplinary teams. 

    “For more than 80 years, research universities have advanced our understanding of the world, leading to dramatic improvements in health, economic prosperity, and national security. That work fundamentally is done best when people ideate and collaborate without regard for disciplinary boundaries within and between scientific areas,” Ian A. Waitz, vice president for research at MIT, said in a statement. 

    “Scientific research that breaks down academic silos and crosses traditional disciplines is increasingly understood to be essential for the next generation of big breakthroughs and the key to solving the world’s most pressing problems,” said Phil Baty, THE’s chief global affairs officer.

    “The world’s biggest challenges are highly complex and require cutting-edge knowledge and fresh ideas from a wide range of specialisms.”

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  • Fewer International Students Came to the U.S. This Fall

    Fewer International Students Came to the U.S. This Fall

    One week after President Donald Trump contradicted his own policies by stressing how important international students are to sustaining university finances, there’s new evidence that his administration’s crackdown on visas and immigration is hurting international student enrollment and the American economy.

    While overall international student enrollment has declined only 1 percent since fall 2024, new enrollment has declined 17 percent, according to fall 2025 snapshot data in the annual Open Doors report, published Monday by the Institute for International Education. The 825 U.S.-based higher learning institutions that responded to the fall snapshot survey host more than half of all international students in the country.

    “It gives us good insight into what is happening on campuses as of this fall,” Mirka Martel, head of research, evaluation and learning at IIE, said on a press call last week. “Some of the changes we’re seeing in new enrollment may be related to some of the more recent factors related to international students.”

    Fewer New Graduate Students

    Those factors include cuts to federal research funding, which has historically helped support graduate students. Although graduate students made up roughly 40 percent of the 1.2 million total international students studying in the U.S during the 2024–25 academic year, they’re now driving the enrollment decline—a trend that started before Trump retook the White House.

    While the total number of new international students fell by 7 percent last academic year, new graduate enrollment dropped by 15 percent, according to the Open Doors report—a decline that was partially offset by new undergraduate enrollment, which grew by 5 percent.

    The fall 2025 snapshot data shows that pattern continuing.

    Colleges and universities reported a 2 percent increase in undergraduate students, a 14 percent increase in Optional Practical Training students and a 12 percent decrease in graduate students.

    The 2024–25 Open Doors report also includes more details about international students during the last academic year—broken down by country of origin, field of study and primary funding sources—though that data reflects trends from last fall, before Trump took office and initiated restrictions that experts believe have deterred some international students.

    It shows that international enrollment in the United States jumped 5 percent between fall 2023 and fall 2024, continuing to rebound from a 15 percent pandemic-induced drop during the 2020–21 academic year. That’s in line with the fall 2024 snapshot data, which indicated 3 percent growth in international student totals.

    However, the majority (57 percent) of colleges and universities that responded to IIE’s fall 2025 snapshot survey reported a decline in new international enrollment. And 96 percent of them cited visa concerns, while 68 percent named travel restrictions as the reason for the drop.

    Meanwhile, 29 percent of institutions reported an increase in new international enrollment and 14 percent reported stable enrollment. For those institutions that saw an uptick this fall, 71 percent attributed the growth to active recruitment initiatives, and 54 percent cited outreach to admitted students.

    The Open Doors data also confirms earlier projections from NAFSA: Association of International Educators and recent analyses from The New York Times and Inside Higher Ed about the Trump administration’s immigration policies leading to falling international student enrollment, as well as hardship for university budgets and the broader national economy.

    According to the report, international students accounted for 6 percent of the total population enrolled in a higher education institution last academic year and contributed nearly $55 billion to the U.S. economy in 2024.

    “International students come to the United States to advance their education and contribute to U.S. colleges and communities,” Jason Czyz, president and CEO of IIE, said in a news release. “This data highlights the impact international students have in driving innovation, advancing scholarship, and strengthening cross-cultural understanding.”

    Trump’s Changing Stance

    But since Trump took office in January, his administration has cast international students—the majority (57 percent) of whom come to the U.S. to study in high-demand STEM fields—as threats to national security and opportunity for American-born students rather than economic stimulants.

    International university students attending wealthy, selective universities are “not just bad for national security,” Vice President JD Vance said in March. “[They’re] bad for the American dream for a lot of kids who want to go to a nice university and can’t because their spot was taken by a foreign student.”

    But as the Open Doors data shows, it’s not just wealthy, private institutions that host international students. During the 2024–25 academic year, 59 percent attended public institutions. Meanwhile, among all institution types, community colleges experienced the fastest rate of international student growth, at 8 percent.

    And that’s despite the Trump administration’s concerted effort to deter them. So far this year, the federal government has detained foreign student activists, stripped students’ SEVIS statuses and visas, implemented social media vetting processes, paused new visa issuances, and moved to limit how long students can stay in the country.

    In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened to “aggressively revoke” Chinese students’ visas, including those “with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”

    Although the Open Doors report shows that enrollment among Chinese students declined 4 percent between the 2023–24 and 2024–25 academic years, China is still the second-most-popular country of origin for international students, making up 23 percent of all international students; India—which surpassed China as the No. 1 source in 2023—produced 31 percent of all international students living in the U.S. during the 2024–25 academic year.

    But as of late, Trump has walked back some of his hostility toward international students. Over the summer, he proposed allowing 600,000 Chinese students into the country. And last week, he defended the economic benefit of international students during an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham.

    “We take in trillions of dollars from students,” he said. “You know, the students pay more than double when they come in from most foreign countries. I want to see our school system thrive. And it’s not that I want them, but I view it as a business.”

    Economic Consequences

    According to the Open Doors Report, roughly half (52 percent) of international students funded their education primarily with their own money during the 2024–25 academic year. And the 17 percent drop in new international enrollment this fall translates into more than $1.1 billion in lost revenue and nearly 23,000 fewer jobs, according to a new analysis from NAFSA, also published Monday.

    The report explained that the reasons for that vary but may be tied in part to the disproportionate decline in international graduate student enrollment and uptick in OPT students.

    The decline in graduate students on college campuses is “cutting into higher-spending populations that typically contribute more through tuition, living costs, and accompanying dependents,” the report said. Meanwhile, “the increased share of students pursuing OPT (up 14 percent) reduced the amount of campus-based spending [on] tuition, housing and dining.”

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  • U.S. Universities Are National Security Assets (opinion)

    U.S. Universities Are National Security Assets (opinion)

    For too long, Americans have underestimated the strategic value of our universities. The popular belief is that higher education’s chief contribution to national security is soft power—the goodwill generated by cultural exchange, academic diplomacy and global networking. That’s accurate, but it’s only a small part of the security story.

    The vast majority of our 4,000-odd colleges and universities (including the elite ones) are hardly the ivory towers so associated with so-called woke movements and high-profile culture wars. Many, in fact, are the R&D labs of our national security infrastructure. They are the training grounds for the nation’s cyber warriors, military leaders, intelligence officers and diplomats. To be sure, they are one of America’s most potent weapons in an era of fierce geopolitical competition.

    The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps is the military’s largest commissioning source, with a footprint that spans the nation. Army ROTC alone operates at about 1,000 college campuses and provides merit-based benefits to roughly 15,000 students each year. It produces approximately 70 percent of the officers entering the Army annually, commissioning around 5,000 second lieutenants in a typical year.

    The scale is cross-service: Air Force ROTC maintains 145 host detachments with more than 1,100 partner universities and commissioned 2,109 Air Force and 141 Space Force officers in 2022. Navy/Marine Corps ROTC fields 63 units hosted at 77 colleges and extends to 160-plus colleges via cross-town agreements. Between 2011 and 2021, about 1,441 U.S. colleges and universities had at least one ROTC host, cross-town or extension unit—and every state has at least one host. Over its first century, ROTC has produced more than one million officers.

    The Department of Defense, as key partner with higher education, invests billions annually in university research. In fiscal year 2022 alone, the DOD’s research, development, test and evaluation budget authority reached $118.7 billion. For example, the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program awarded $43 million in equipment grants to 112 university researchers for the 2025 fiscal year. Entities like DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Army Research Laboratory, and the Office of Naval Research fund breakthroughs in AI, quantum computing, hypersonics and cyber resilience. Universities partner with the Defense Department and other government agencies to conduct research in areas like drone technology, stealth aircraft and, historically, the development of the Internet and GPS.

    Cybersecurity is another front where U.S. universities lead with global distinction. The National Security Agency has designated nearly 500 campuses as national Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity. Universities like Carnegie Mellon, Purdue and the University of Texas at San Antonio run advanced programs focused on cryptography, digital forensics and cyber policy, partnering with both government and industry to build systems that repel state-sponsored hackers.

    Biosecurity is equally critical. The COVID-19 pandemic proved that viruses can fundamentally destabilize economies and national morale as quickly as warfare can. Johns Hopkins, Emory, Harvard and Vanderbilt Universities all were at the forefront of research on the coronavirus and vaccines. Land-grant universities like Texas A&M and Iowa State have long been securing our food supply against agroterrorism and climate threats. As just one example of this partnership, in 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture announced $7.6 million in grants to 12 different universities focused on agricultural biosecurity.

    Then there’s the talent pipeline. American universities train the linguists, engineers, analysts and scientists who feed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security and the armed forces. Through partnerships with universities, the National Security Education Program, the Critical Language Scholarship and the National Security Language Initiative for Youth help produce graduates fluent in Arabic, Mandarin and Farsi—utterly essential skills for both diplomacy and national intelligence.

    Boren Scholars and Fellows are dedicated to harnessing their advanced linguistic and cultural skills within the federal government by securing a minimum of one year of employment in national security, actively strengthening the federal workforce and significantly elevating U.S. capabilities, deterrence and readiness.

    Meanwhile, China has built a centralized academic–military complex under its Military–Civil Fusion strategy. Top universities like Tsinghua and Beihang Universities are deeply integrated with the People’s Liberation Army, producing dual-use research in AI, quantum and hypersonics—technologies intended to challenge U.S. dominance. The National University of Defense Technology is a flagship institution in this network, known for dual-use supercomputing and aerospace research. This model is potent but currently lacks the kind of innovative potential of U.S. institutions.

    The U.S. system, by contrast, is decentralized, competitive and open. We often refer to this as “loose coupling”; the accompanying organizational dynamic is what enables so much of the innovative, interdisciplinary and cross-institutional work that U.S. higher education produces. But adequately funding this system is quickly becoming unsustainable and unpopular. The Trump administration is cutting funding for politically inconvenient fields—such as climate science, public health and international cooperation—and subjecting grant applications to political review. Many of these cuts target areas of academic inquiry that may appear obscure to the public but are fundamental to the foundational domains of national security. It is also worth noting that recent research suggests that the already high public and private returns to federally funded research are likely much higher than those reflected in current estimates.

    Focusing solely on weapons labs while neglecting other strategic fields is short-sighted and dangerous. Security is not merely about firepower—it’s about the stability of the knowledge-based society. Public health, basic sciences, environmental resilience, diplomacy and social cohesion are just as critical to preventing conflict as advanced missiles and cyber weapons. To be sure, our colleges and universities contribute, almost beyond measure, to the stability of U.S. civil society through each of these domains.

    Universities are not optional in the defense of this republic—they are indispensable. Undermine them and we hand our international competitors the high ground in both technology and ideas. In the contest for global leadership, the fight won’t just be won on battlefields. It will be won in classrooms, labs and libraries.

    Brian Heuser is an associate professor of the practice of international education policy at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. For much of his career, he has worked on numerous projects related to national security education, including with the Boren Scholars Program, the former Edmund S. Muskie Graduate Fellowship Program and as a U.S. Embassy policy specialist to the Republic of Georgia.

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  • U.K. University Apologizes to U.S. Scholar Over Publication Ban

    U.K. University Apologizes to U.S. Scholar Over Publication Ban

    Sheffield Hallam University has apologized to a professor whose research into alleged human rights abuses was blocked from publication after political pressure from the Chinese security services.

    In late 2024, a study by Laura Murphy, an American professor of human rights and contemporary slavery at Sheffield Hallam, into forced labor practices Uyghur Muslims allegedly face was refused publication by her institution after a campaign of harassment and intimidation from Beijing, The Guardian and BBC News reported.

    Sheffield Hallam staff working in offices in mainland China faced visits from intelligence officials over the research, while access to the university’s websites was blocked for more than two years, hampering student recruitment, officials say.

    In an internal email from July 2024 obtained by Murphy using a subject access request, university officials said “attempting to retain the business in China and publication of the research are now untenable bedfellows.”

    After taking a career break to work for the U.S. government, Murphy returned to Sheffield Hallam in early 2025 and says she was told by administrators that the university was no longer permitting any research on forced labor or on China, prompting her to start legal action.

    Her solicitor, Claire Powell, of the firm Leigh Day, said that Murphy’s “academic freedom has been repeatedly and unlawfully restricted over the past two years.”

    “The documents uncovered paint an extremely concerning picture of a university responding to threats from a foreign state security service by trading the academic freedom of its staff for its own commercial interests,” Powell added.

    Murphy, who claimed her university failed to protect her academic freedom, has now received an apology and the institution has told her it “wish[ed] to make clear our commitment to supporting her research and to securing and promoting freedom of speech and academic freedom within the law.”

    “The university’s decision to not continue with Professor Laura Murphy’s research was taken based on our understanding of a complex set of circumstances at the time, including being unable to secure the necessary professional indemnity insurance,” a spokesperson for the university added.

    These circumstances relate to a defamation case brought by a Hong Kong garment maker which initiated a libel case against Sheffield Hallam after its name was included in a report into forced labor published in December 2023. A preliminary rule at the High Court in London found the report had been “defamatory.”

    The apology comes months after new free speech laws came into effect in England in August, with the Office for Students’ free speech champion Arif Ahmed warning the regulator would take action if universities bowed to pressure from foreign governments regarding contentious areas of research.

    A U.K. government spokesperson said, “Any attempt by a foreign state to intimidate, harass or harm individuals in the U.K. will not be tolerated, and the government has made this clear to Beijing after learning of this case.

    “The government has robust measures in place to prevent this activity, including updated powers and offenses through the National Security Act.”

    The Chinese Embassy in London told the BBC that the university had “released multiple fake reports on Xinjiang that are seriously flawed.”

    “It has been revealed that some authors of these reports received funding from certain U.S. agencies,” the embassy added.

    Murphy told the BBC she has received funding over the course of her career from multiple U.S. research agencies, including the U.S. National Endowment for Humanities for work on slave narratives, the U.S. Department of Justice for work on human trafficking in New Orleans, and more recently from USAID and the U.S. State Department for her work on China.

    The Chinese Embassy said the allegations of “forced labor” in her reports “cannot withstand basic fact-check.”

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  • Ambow Education Pushes AI Agenda Abroad While Raising Red Flags in the U.S.

    Ambow Education Pushes AI Agenda Abroad While Raising Red Flags in the U.S.

    Ambow Education, once linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is aggressively exporting its AI-driven education platform, HybriU™, to global markets—even as its footprint in the United States remains small and opaque. The company’s international ambitions raise questions about transparency, governance, and potential political influence.

    Ambow’s recent partnership with Bamboo System Technology aims to scale HybriU’s AI-education ecosystem across Southeast Asia, touting a deeper technology stack and expanded distribution. Yet outside China, Ambow’s record is spotty, and critics warn that the firm’s rapid expansion may outpace oversight or educational rigor.

    In the U.S., Ambow reportedly explored a partnership with Colorado State University (CSU), though details remain murky. Engagements like these, combined with its involvement with specialized institutions such as the NewSchool of Architecture and Design, suggest a strategy of targeting schools where oversight may be limited and innovation promises can be oversold.

    Despite these global ambitions, Ambow’s American presence is modest: a small office tucked in Cupertino, California, suggesting that the company may be testing the waters in the U.S. market rather than committing to a major operational footprint.

    For U.S. institutions, Ambow’s history—including prior CCP ties—and its small domestic footprint present a cautionary tale: a company that combines ambitious AI promises with a murky past and minimal transparency. Ambow’s expansion illustrates a growing challenge in higher education: navigating partnerships with foreign edtech firms while safeguarding institutional integrity, regulatory compliance, and academic quality.

    Sources: Ambow Education press releases, Bamboo System Technology announcements, Higher Education Inquirer reporting, corporate filings.

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