New Student Visas Dropped 35.6% Last Summer

Almost 10 months after the Trump administration temporarily froze all student visa interviews in spring 2025, the State Department has released data showing the impact of that pause.

According to Inside Higher Ed’s analysis of the data, which was released Friday and covered the months from June to August, the number of student visas issued in summer 2025 declined by more than 100,000 from the previous summer, to 186,160. While the sharpest drop was in F-1 visas, which are for international students studying at a college or university and is the largest category of student visa, the number of J-1 and M-1 visas also declined.

Prior to the release of the data, international educators were still somewhat unsure about how the pause in student visa appointments—during which the State Department implemented social media reviews for all student visa applicants—had affected international enrollment in the fall.

Experts anecdotally reported that the pause caused a massive backlog in visa applications, leading to excessive wait times for appointments and making it exceedingly difficult for incoming students to secure visas. Data from other sources has also suggested declines in international enrollment in fall 2025. For instance, the Institute for International Education’s annual Open Doors report found a 17 percent decline in new international students. About 1.2 million international students studied in the U.S. in the 2024–25 academic year, making up 6 percent of all enrollment.

But the State Department’s data—the first to be released since July 2025—is the most comprehensive yet and shows a more drastic drop than previous reports indicated, according to experts.

“It’s brutal and unmistakable what happened last summer, now, and it’s plain for everybody to see. The hard numbers are clear of what the new structural reality is for the sector, and it demands that institutions adapt,” said Chris Glass, a professor of educational leadership and higher education at Boston College who studies international education. “I think it confirmed everyone’s worst fears.”

The pause on visa appointments followed a widespread crackdown on international students in March and April. Several pro-Palestinian activists were targeted for deportation and thousands of other F-1 visa holders had their status in the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System, a database of international students, terminated, in many cases over minor traffic infractions.

Since then, the Trump administration has continued to seek to limit international students’ ability to study and work in the U.S. At the same time, the administration has led a massive and widely criticized deportation effort across the country that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deportations and nearly two million self-deportations, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

The summer months are when most international students receive their visas to study the following fall, making the data particularly valuable. The biggest drop was in June, when visa appointments were paused for over two weeks; a whopping 49.9 percent fewer visas were issued in June 2025 than in the same month the previous year. In a typical year, June is the month in which the most student visas are issued.

But the data also indicates some recovery. That gap narrowed slightly in July to 34.3 percent and then even more to just 6.5 percent in August, which is typically a lower-volume month for visa issuance. For both months, the decline was more severe for F-1 than J-1 and M-1 visas; in August, the number of J-1 visas issued was actually slightly higher than in August 2024. (J-1 visas are used by students and scholars in specific exchange programs, such as the Fulbright program, while M-1 visas are for students in vocational school.)

The impact varied by country, though there were declines in four out the top five countries of origin for U.S. international students. (Students from Canada, the third-biggest supplier of international students, do not need visas to study in the U.S.) The largest drop by a wide margin was among Indian students, who received 63 percent fewer student visas compared to summer 2024.

Hilary O’Haire, executive director of analytics and data science for Shorelight, noted that Indian students made up about a quarter of all international student visas issued in summer 2023, versus just 8 percent last summer. Chinese students, meanwhile, maintained a fairly similar share of all student visas, declining from 17 percent in 2023 to 15 percent in 2025.

“India just had no recovery,” she said. “From our global team on the ground, we knew there were disparities in the openings of different consulates and embassies. India was one of them that was lagging and even once many were almost back to normal processing, India still hadn’t reopened fully, and we see that in the data.”

China saw some recovery in August, she said, though not enough to offset the damage of the previous few months. But the visa situation for some European countries that send much smaller overall volumes of students to the U.S., such as Germany and Spain, improved by the end of the summer; their visa issuances in August were higher than in August 2024.

The State Department told The Chronicle of Higher Education, which first reported on the data, that consulates are “prioritizing thoroughly vetting each visa case above all” and “that entry to the United States is a privilege—not a right—and that the safety of the American people comes first.”

But even with this data available, some questions still remain, including the exact root cause of those declines: Were they solely due to the backlog of appointments caused by the pause in May and June, or was there also an increase in visa denials? Did that recovery continue past August? And will international students looking to enroll in fall 2026—especially those from the hardest-hit countries—face the same difficulty accessing visa appointments this year?

It’s also unclear when the State Department will release the next set of data on nonimmigrant visas.

Glass said that institutions shouldn’t treat this decline as a blip that will rebound naturally, similar to previous instances when international enrollment declined.

“It should be clear to people in the field that the policy direction of the United States is to reduce the number of international students in an effort to address concerns related to the growth in international students,” he said. “This is more of a structural shift than there is a cyclical shift. COVID—there was a pandemic, but we recovered. There was a recession, but we recovered. [Sept.] 11, there was a dip, but we recovered. But the policy direction, at least under this administration, foreseeable for the next three years, is one that is looking to have more scrutiny on student flows to the United States.”

Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired immigration law professor at Cornell University, warned that the effects of these declines could be deleterious to the American economy and its status as a global leader of research and innovation.

“I don’t think Americans realize how this decline in international students will hurt them both in the short term, in terms of local economies … and in the long term in terms of stifling our innovation,” he said. “I think we’re shooting ourselves in the foot, and, unfortunately, I don’t think the Trump administration plans to change its war on immigrants.”