As Trump pushes international students away, Asian schools scoop them up

SEOUL – For Mr Jess Concepcion, a microbiology student from the Philippines, obtaining a doctorate from a university in the US had been a dream. It was where most of his academic mentors had studied and done research, and he wanted to follow in their footsteps.

But when the US, under President Donald Trump, started pausing visa interviews this spring, threatening to deport international students for political speech and slashing funding for academic research, he changed plans.

Applications for doctoral programmes take years and have to be tailored to specific schools, so he is aiming for programmes in Switzerland and Singapore instead.

“That uncertainty made me stop in my tracks and choose another country,” said the 24-year-old.

According to the United Nations, 6.9 million people studied outside their home country in 2022. The US has long attracted the most foreign students, 1.1 million in the 2023 to 2024 academic year.

It is too soon to know whether more foreign students will choose not to attend US schools. But warning signs abound.

International education search platforms, including IDP and Keystone Education Group, have detected a marked decline in student interest in American programmes.

These are not the first signs that American higher education is losing its dominant position. For years, countries in Asia have been strengthening their universities and marketing them to students around the world. With more appealing alternatives, the Trump administration’s hostile stance may hasten the decline in US higher education pre-eminence.

“We’re shifting from a world in which there were only a few primary target destination countries to a much more multipolar world,” said Mr Clay Harmon, executive director of the Association of International Enrolment Management, which represents recruitment agencies.

“It’s all adding up to this narrative that ‘maybe that’s not the right destination for me after all’,” he said. “And there are a whole bunch of other countries that are eager to take my money instead.”

Asia steps up

For decades, Oxford and Cambridge in Britain, the Ivy League in the US, and brand-name universities in Australia and Canada tended to top application checklists.

Schools in China, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore gradually started showing up in annual rankings of the top universities – with lower price tags. Governments dispatched representatives to college fairs and set goals for the number of students they wanted to bring in every year.

So when Mr Trump began pushing international students away, Asian nations welcomed them.

Take South Korea, where Mr Concepcion went for his master’s degree after winning a scholarship from the South Korean government. He added a year of mandatory language study and enrolled in Korea University in Seoul, where his programme starts this autumn.

Korea University was among several institutions to offer relief measures as the US government began cancelling some student visas and terminating funding programmes. Another South Korean school, Yonsei University, will open rolling admissions for undergraduate transfers year round starting in 2026.

This effort has been under way in Asia for decades.

South Korea has for years sent students to other countries, while attracting few from overseas. In the early 2000s, leaders started to think of that imbalance as a kind of trade deficit and set out to boost their international recruitment. They took guidance from a similar effort in Japan, which had about 337,000 foreign students in 2024 and is aiming for 400,000 by 2033.

South Korea’s latest target was set in 2023: 300,000 international students by 2027. For 2026, Seoul was named the top city for international students in the Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings. The government’s work was intended to buoy flagging schools in smaller towns, where low birth rates and emigration to larger cities have shrunk classes of high school graduates. Foreign students are also not subject to tuition caps that apply to domestic students, creating a new revenue stream to keep universities afloat.

Ms Shin Mee-kyung, director of educational globalisation for South Korea’s Ministry of Education, said that at first foreign students were expected to return home after their studies. More recently, officials have started to see them as an answer to the nation’s labour shortage. Seoul set up a support centre to help them get jobs and visa policies have been loosened to help them work after graduation.

In South Korea, there are about 70,000 students from China and 50,000 from Vietnam. Myanmar and Nepal send thousands each year. For South Korean companies, they are potential hires who could help expand the business into their home countries or manage overseas factories.

Hyundai, for example, makes many of its cars in Vietnam and is trying to sell them in Singapore.

Mr Kyle Guadana, 24, a Singaporean student studying at Yonsei University, said Hyundai, among other companies, had reached out directly.

“They are looking for foreigners who will be able to work with them,” he said.

The recruiting drive has had some complications, however. To hit its targets, the government has accepted a wider range of language proficiency tests and lowered the minimum bank balance required to obtain a visa.

But the larger challenge may be making sure that those who come primarily to study are able to work in South Korea when they graduate – and that they want to stay.

Ms Keity Rose Mendes, 21, grew up in Mozambique and received the same scholarship granted to Mr Concepcion, studying industrial engineering at Seoul National University. She chose South Korea for its safety and because she wanted to learn about its manufacturing techniques. But after three years of classes, she felt that collaboration was not valued and that foreign students were not well integrated.

“A lot of them just want to finish their studies and leave,” said Ms Mendes. “I wish the same effort that they’re putting into bringing international students, they also tried to put into creating facilities to maintain them here.”

Hedging their bets

For millions of students deciding where to study, the US is still the leading destination. Degrees from top American universities command societal respect – and lucrative job offers – in countries like South Korea.

But that shine has been dulled by new obstacles since Mr Trump took office, said Mr Pierre Huguet, chief executive of the global admissions consulting firm H&C Education.

“Many saw the US as offering more freedom and an escape from rigid social pressures in Korea,” he said. “Now they fear visa revocations, invasive online presence reviews and a chilled campus climate.”

Mr Huguet said his clients were focusing on Britain and Australia. The number of South Korean students studying abroad overall has been dropping as the country’s own universities climb the rankings.

And the US is not the only developed country to push back against international students. Canada and Australia limited international student visas in 2024, while Britain raised visa fees.

“Everywhere in the English-speaking world, there is anti-immigration sentiment going around,” said Mr Yash Sharma, who runs an admissions consultancy focused on the market in India. NYTIMES