Roughly 1.3 million international students and recent graduates enrolled in work training are in the United States for the 2025–26 academic year.Credit: Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe/Getty
International students in the United States have defied predictions of a huge downturn in their population. Data for the current academic year show that the number of international students — including PhD candidates and newly minted PhDs — has remained essentially flat, year-on-year.
The administration of US President Donald Trump has shaken up the landscape of higher education, revoking student visas, cutting funds to institutions and implementing travel bans for selected countries. As a result, many higher-education researchers had expected significant numbers of overseas students to turn away from US academia.
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In July, NAFSA: Association of International Educators, a non-profit organization in Washington DC, predicted that the number of overseas students in the United States would decline by 15% between the previous academic year and this one. And in October, The New York Times reported a 20% drop in the number of students arriving in the United States in August 2025 compared with August 2024, a finding based on data from the US Department of Commerce.
But data released by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for September and October show almost no change in the population of international students and recent graduates in the United States between this year and last — and specialists say these data are more reliable than others.
“It doesn’t appear to be as catastrophic as had been originally feared,” says Chris Glass, a higher-education researcher at Boston College in Massachusetts.
Data points
The DHS statistics, which are part of a database called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), track students enrolled in educational institutes and recent graduates gaining work experience in a programme called optional practical training (OPT). OPT is one of the largest foreign talent pipelines to the United States, feeding thousands of people into Amazon, Google and other leading companies. It is key for people doing PhDs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) topics: between 2010 and 2022, 76% of recent graduates took part in it.
According to SEVIS data, roughly 1.3 million international students and OPT participants are in the United States for the 2025–26 academic year — about the same as the number for the 2024–25 academic year. The total number of doctoral students also remained nearly the same year-on-year (see ‘Surprising stability’).
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