With higher education funding cuts, some students, including from India, avoid U.S. colleges

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About two months ago, Sierra Moran started to panic.

She had been accepted into graduate programs at Duke and Georgetown universities, but her professors at Louisiana State University warned her that federal funding cuts were hitting labs hard, and that research and job prospects were highly unstable.

Her backup plan, to stay at LSU for her master’s degree in coastal environmental science, fell apart when she learned about a hiring freeze. And with a growing sense that skepticism about climate change was becoming federal policy, Moran, who was just named to a list of 12 outstanding seniors at LSU, decided she had to get out of the country. She applied to University College Dublin this spring and plans to attend in the fall.

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“I was freaking out, and I’m still kind of freaking out,” she said, because the mentors she turned to for reassurance were worried about their own jobs. She had wanted to stay close to family in Baton Rouge. “But I’m just done,” she said. “I’m tired.”

College decision day – the May 1 deadline at many schools across the country for accepted students to commit to attend – coincided with a time of head-spinning upheaval, reversals and uncertainty in the first months of the Trump administration. Some students, like Moran, are turning down U.S. colleges for overseas options. And some international students are newly hesitant about studying in the United States amid news of visa revocations and deportations.

“International students who have been admitted to colleges and universities in the United States are rethinking their choices,” said Elora Mukherjee, a professor and director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. “These are among the best and brightest students in the world, and the United States may no longer be their top destination in light of immigration changes in recent months.”

It’s too soon to know what enrollment will look like in the fall, experts agreed, but college presidents are concerned about both retention and recruitment.

The U.S. has long been a global destination for higher education, drawing more than 1.1 million international students last academic year. International students contributed $50 billion to the U.S. economy in 2023, according to the Commerce Department. Some colleges, such as New York, Northeastern and Columbia universities, each hosted more than 20,000 international students in 2023-2024. Some large public schools enroll many, too; Arizona State University had more than 18,000 international students that year, according to the Institute of International Education.

But many college officials were anxiously anticipating the May 1 deadline, worried that students wouldn’t commit to attend this fall.

The Trump administration has warned international students and faculty that they could be detained or deported as part of what it says are efforts to combat antisemitism on campus after protests at some schools. In March, Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University and legal permanent resident of the U.S., was arrested, the first of several high-profile efforts to deport students who have been active in pro-Palestinian protests or are accused of supporting Hamas.

Since then, thousands of international students have had their visas revoked, their immigration records terminated in a government database – some after minor infractions such as traffic tickets – or both. Some students left the country. Many joined lawsuits. On April 25, the Department of Homeland Security reversed course, saying it would restore student records.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for DHS, said in response to questions about international students that it is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the U.S. “When you break our laws and advocate for violence and terrorism, that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country.”

State Department officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

With the recent visa revocations and student record terminations, “there was no notification, no opportunity for discussion, no process to question, to appeal, to correct,” said Miriam Feldblum, president and chief executive of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. “All that created for many students and campuses Kafkaesque situations.”

The recent weeks of abrupt, unexpected action have generated fear, anxiety and uncertainty, she said – and questions about what comes next.

At the same time, Fanta Aw, the chief executive of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, said other countries are actively recruiting international students.

‘I have nothing’

Earlier this year, Pihu Yadav felt like she had the world at her feet; Columbia University had offered her a place to study investigative journalism starting this fall, and she had a job offer from the Times Network, one of India’s largest media houses.

After much deliberation, the 27-year-old journalist living in Noida, India, rejected the job offer, paid an enrollment deposit to Columbia and applied for on-campus housing. She believed the degree was the more ambitious path; it would develop her investigative skills and grant her global journalism opportunities.

Then Yadav heard about students getting arrested. “The news about Ranjani came, and that was a big trigger for me.”

Ranjani Srinivasan, a Columbia student from India, fled the U.S. on March 11 after her student immigration status was revoked. News about Srinivasan having to leave the country to escape Immigration and Customs Enforcement ignited fears in many Indian and other international students about safety and stability while studying in the U.S.

Yadav scoured Reddit channels and called friends in the U.S. asking for advice about whether it was “safe” to take Columbia’s offer. She feared inadvertently getting caught up in the wide sweep of the Trump administration’s crackdown on international students.

Yadav decided to delay her years-long dreams of an investigative journalism degree and unsuccessfully requested a deferral from Columbia.

By May, the Times Network had offered her job to someone else. “In March I had everything, and by May I have nothing,” Yadav said.

‘I would feel unsafe’

Zoya Rehman, 36, a researcher and political organizer from Islamabad, Pakistan, had decided to apply to media studies and history PhD programs in the U.S. this fall when she began reading news about the administration’s crackdown on international students.

Even though she had decided to apply to schools in “sanctuary cities,” news about revoked student visas and students ending up in ICE detention centers without due process caused her to shut down Excel sheets she had organized by name of school, program, professors and the deadlines.

“I’m a political organizer who is critical of state repression,” Rehman said. “I would feel unsafe being in the U.S. right now.”

Now, Rehman, who had only ever thought of a PhD from the U.S., is considering programs in Europe and Australia.

“If big universities are kowtowing to the state, then what chance do we have?” she said. “Studying in the U.S. now seems like a pipe dream.”

Keep your head down

Still, many international students remain excited about coming to the U.S., viewing it as the culmination of years of hard work.

Vishnu Dharshini Sathyanarayanan, a 19-year-old undergraduate from Chennai, India, says she has always wanted to be an entrepreneur. Her father, himself an entrepreneur, is her inspiration. “I took it as a challenge,” she said. “I want be better than him, earn more than him.”

Vishnu is in the process of getting her visa and has been accepted to Arizona State to study business starting in August. The news of international students’ visas being revoked initially scared her parents, she said, but they relented after she explained that she would keep her head down and follow local laws.

Some international students seeking STEM degrees shared that same view in interviews with The Washington Post, saying they expect to avoid deportation or any interaction with immigration enforcement by curtailing social engagements and focusing on their education.

“I’m not going to give a chance for them to revoke me,” Vishnu said.

American students studying climate, science leave the U.S.

Students who recently decided to move abroad for their studies give a wide variety of reasons, including no longer feeling safe in the U.S. as a young gay person, weariness with U.S. politics, worry about federal funding for research, or a desire for more affordable tuition.

Dominic Egender, who graduated last year from high school in Loudoun County, Virginia, and has been taking a gap year in California, said friends encouraged him to look at schools in Europe. He hopes to work in aerospace engineering and was impressed by the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

He appreciated that the admissions process seemed much more straightforward than that of U.S. schools, and that it seemed that when students protested there, neither the university nor the government stepped in to try to stop it. He also thought that for engineering or STEM fields, the funding would be more reliable in Europe.

Growing up in Baton Rouge, Sierra Moran learned about land erosion from a young age and saw how much it was affecting Louisiana. All through high school she knew she wanted to study the environment and work in her home state.

But she can often read the skepticism on people’s faces when they hear about her major and knows to expect the question: “Are you one of those climate change people?”

With all of her advisers telling her this is an unprecedented, volatile time for any type of academic research, amid headlines about massive federal funding cuts, she is wondering about the future of the field in the U.S. over the next few years and whether she would be able to find positions and funding. “I don’t want to run the risk of signing up for a program that’s going to be under fire,” she said.

This spring, she took her first trip to Europe to see what Ireland is like, backpacking with a friend around the Dingle Peninsula and meeting with professors on campus. “I figured I should probably go and see it once,” she said, “before I move there permanently.”

Her professors all thought it was a good idea to leave the U.S. for her studies, she said. “I think they’re kind of envious that I have a path out at the moment.”

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