International interest in US masters degrees falls by 61%

International interest in studying for a masters degree in the United States has fallen by 61% since 6 January, according to data provided by Studyportals, the online global repository of academic programmes and educational institutions.

The decline in international interest continued in September, with Studyportals logging 82,885 page views from non-US perspective masters students seeking information about studying in the US, a decline of 119,708 page views as compared to September 2024.

In the year ending 28 September 2025, Studyportals logged 565,612 fewer page views by students outside the US seeking information about US masters programme.

“This is the lowest level of student interest for the United States we’ve seen in over five years,” said Cara Skikne, head of communication and thought leadership at Studyportals, which is based in the Netherlands.

“The last time page views for degrees in the US were so low was in August 2020, at the height of the COVID pandemic.

“What makes this moment especially concerning is that the decline is not driven by a global crisis or public health emergency, but by policy choices. This suggests it could become a more entrenched, long-term shift rather than a temporary shock,” wrote Skikne in an email.

Policy changes

According to Studyportals, this most recent decline appears to be a cumulative effect of the drivers that pushed down interest in studying in the US earlier in the year, plus changes the Trump administration is making to visa duration and two graduate pathways: the Optional Practical Training (OPT) programme and, especially, H-1B visa work authorisation rules.

As University World News reported in March, within weeks of Donald Trump’s return to power on 20 January, Studyportals saw a 42% decline in interest in studying for a masters or PhD in the US.

These were the weeks during which Trump issued a myriad of executive orders and other administrative orders, some targeting visa students who had taken part in pro-Palestinian protests the year before; others starting the process of cutting billions of dollars in medical and scientific research; still others directed at universities like Harvard and Columbia for, allegedly, allowing antisemitism to flourish; and others ordering universities to close their diversity, equity and inclusion offices and suspend all such programmes.

Speaking only to the cutting of research funds, Edwin van Rest, co-founder and CEO of Studyportals, told University World News at the time: “Students, especially international students who are investing a great deal of money and are going to be far from home, need to know that their future at the schools they apply to will be stable. Hundreds of millions of dollars in US government cuts splashed across the world’s newspapers do not suggest stability.”

In May, the Global Enrolment Benchmark Survey, for which Studyportals provided the analytics, showed that by the end of March, interest by prospective international students in taking their masters in the United States had fallen by 54% since the beginning of the year.

At the end of July, the Washington, DC-based NAFSA (Association of International Educators) published the Fall 2025 International Student Outlook and Economic Impact, which predicted between a 30% and 40% drop in total international enrolment in the United States.

NASA identified as the reasons for this decline the more than month-long delay in setting up the bureaucratic systems to screen applicants’ social media accounts; reductions in the number of consular interview appointments that resulted in long wait times (in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, waits stretched up to 60 days); the decreasing number of visas being issued (the figure for May 2025 being 22% lower than a year earlier); and visa bans for 19 countries.

Trump’s surprise volte-face in late August regarding the doubling of the number of Chinese students he wants American colleges and universities to enrol to 600,000 came too late to impact this year’s enrolment and, as Studyportals data is showing, is not buoying the numbers of international students looking to take their masters in the US.

Trump’s reason – that without the international tuition fees Chinese students pay, “Our college system would go to hell very quickly. And it wouldn’t be the top colleges, so it’d be colleges that struggle on the bottom” – may have been crudely put, but from a financial point of view, he was accurate.

It’s also worth noting that neither his words nor those of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who said to Fox News host Laura Ingram that if the US did not take in 600,000 Chinese students destined for the nation’s top schools, American students who would have gone to second-tier schools “would go up to better schools, and the bottom 15% of universities and colleges would go out of business in America”, convinced Ingram or Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Green.

Green posted on X: “If refusing to allow these Chinese students to attend our schools causes 15% of them to fail, then these schools should fail anyways because they are being propped up by the CCP.”

Chilling effect

OPT and H-1B visas were pathways for (mainly) STEM graduates to remain in the United States after graduation by working in their chosen field. The proclamation Trump signed on 19 September, “Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers”, raised the cost of the H-1B visas for employers from between US$5,000 and US$7,000 to US$100,000, starting on 21 September 2025, that is, two days after the proclamation was announced, which effectively priced international visa students out of the market.

Also on 19 September, Jim Banks, a Republican senator from Indiana, tabled a bill that would do away with the OPT programme entirely.

Banks posted on his website that under the programme, which allows almost half a million Indian graduates to remain in the United States, “corporations rigged the system to flood the country with cheap foreign labour and drive down wages.” His bill, he said, “puts American workers first”.

According to Van Rest, these changes combined to have a chilling effect on student ambitions and reshaped global talent flows.

“The policies we adopt today will echo for years in global talent flow,” said Van Rest. Prospective international students and their families weigh not only academic reputation but also the regulatory stability and post-graduation prospects. Right now, those factors are working against US institutions.

“Prospective students are making go/no-go enrolment decisions, while current students are making stay/leave decisions. Policy changes ripple through both ends of the pipeline, reducing new inflow and pushing out existing talent already contributing to US research, innovation and competitiveness,” he said.

Studyportals data shows that every type of American higher education institution is suffering declines in interest from overseas students. According to Skikne: “The chilling effect of policy uncertainty cuts across the entire spectrum of institutions.”

Likewise, the decline in interest is impacting every part of the US. “Out of the top 10 states by student interest,” Skikne said in an email, “the biggest declines are in Texas, Florida, Illinois and Ohio. Out of the top 10 states by student interest, only one state has not dropped between 40% and 60%” – and that state is Pennsylvania, for which interest declined by 26%.

In 2023 and 2024, 502,000+ international students in the US were taking graduate degrees, compared to nearly 343,000 taking undergraduate degrees and 242,000 entering on the OPT programme, according to Open Doors data published by the Institute of International Education.

America’s loss of interest at masters level is other countries’ gain. Both the UK and Ireland have posted year-to-date increases of 16% in interest by prospective international masters students. Australia, Austria, Sweden and Spain have all seen a 12% increase in interest.

“The message is clear: students still want to study abroad,” said Skikne, “but they’re voting with their feet and choosing destinations where the policy environment is more welcoming.”

By contrast, when they look at the United States, “many prospective students see a country that increasingly views them as a threat to domestic students and workers, even though the data shows the opposite is the case”, she wrote.

An unattractive cycle

Surveying the numbers, I asked Skikne, at what point would a decline in interest and the number of international students begin to look like the beginning of a death spiral for US international education.

For American supporters of international education and university administrators who have built their research programmes on the assumption the best and the brightest from around the world would be flocking to America, Skikne’s answer gives little comfort, especially because the collapsing market is due to regulatory and policy changes beyond the control of university presidents, provosts and chancellors.

“I don’t think we’re there yet,” she responded. “But fewer international students means less investment into innovation, reduced programme diversity and diminished global visibility, all of which [would] make US institutions less attractive to the next cohort.

“Once that cycle starts, reversing it becomes exponentially harder,” she wrote.