Something troubling is happening on Virginia’s college campuses. Between fall 2024 and fall 2025, international enrollment in graduate and doctoral programs at Virginia’s four-year public colleges and universities fell 13%.
At George Mason University, international graduate enrollment dropped 27%, a loss of more than 700 students. At Virginia Tech, overall international graduate enrollment fell about 12%, while new international students entering advanced-degree programs dropped by more than 30%.
And the decline may be accelerating. Virginia Tech expects international graduate enrollment to fall another 20% to 25% this fall.
Virginia is hardly alone. The National Association of Foreign Student Advisors: Association of International Educators projects that the United States could lose as many as 111,000 international students this fall, costing the U.S. economy as much as $3.4 billion and nearly 40,000 jobs.
But what we are losing is much more important than tuition revenue.
We are losing talent. And other countries are more than happy to take it.
Virginia is an early warning
During the 2024-25 academic year, more than 23,000 international students studied in Virginia, contributing nearly $900 million to the commonwealth’s economy and supporting thousands of jobs. More recent estimates suggest that contribution declined by roughly $23 million during 2025-26. NAFSA projects declining international enrollment could cost Virginia another $71 million in economic activity during 2026-27.
But focusing on dollars understates what is at stake.
International students are deeply embedded in America’s scientific enterprise, particularly in fields central to our technological and economic competitiveness. They are researchers in laboratories, teaching assistants educating American students, and scientists and engineers developing new technologies. Some will create the next generation of American companies.
Today’s international student may be tomorrow’s American entrepreneur
Immigrants have founded or co-founded 455 of America’s 775 privately held billion-dollar companies (59%), collectively valued at approximately $5 trillion. Even more striking, nearly one-quarter of America’s billion-dollar startups have a founder who originally came here as an international student.
Think about that. Nearly one out of every four of America’s most valuable startups exists in part because someone once arrived in the United States carrying a student visa.
That is not charity. It is competitive advantage.
International students do not simply benefit from America’s innovation ecosystem. They help create it. Research has even found that increasing international graduate enrollment can increase entrepreneurship among U.S.-born graduates who study alongside them.
International talent doesn’t simply add to American talent. It multiplies it.
That is precisely the ecosystem we should cultivate as China and other global competitors race to lead in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, quantum computing, advanced manufacturing and other industries that will define this century.
Instead, we are making America a harder place for that talent to reach. And a less attractive place for it to remain.
Death by a thousand cuts
There is no single policy responsible for what we are seeing. That is precisely the problem.
International students have confronted a growing collection of barriers and uncertainties: visa-processing disruptions and appointment shortages; expanded travel and visa restrictions; increased screening and vetting; and other changes that make studying and building a career here more complicated and less predictable.
Each policy can be debated individually, but prospective students experience American immigration policy cumulatively.
Talented students around the world deciding where to pursue a doctorate do not parse Federal Register notices or distinguish among federal agencies. They ask a simpler question: Do I want to build my future in the United States?
Increasingly, America is giving them reasons to answer no. And they have choices.
Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, China and others understand that globally mobile students, researchers and entrepreneurs are strategic assets. Once talent flows shift elsewhere, they will not necessarily return when American policy changes. Laboratories will be built elsewhere. Companies will be founded elsewhere. Patents will be filed elsewhere. Jobs will be created elsewhere.
That is how competitive advantage migrates.
I worried about this 24 years ago
In 2002, after the September 11 terrorist attacks, I wrote an op-ed for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette arguing that keeping American universities open to the world was vital to national security. America, I argued, had to achieve both the security necessary to protect its citizens and the openness necessary to sustain its global leadership.
Twenty-four years later, I believe that even more strongly: Security and openness are not opposing values. A confident nation can do both.
We can screen visa applicants carefully, enforce immigration law, protect sensitive research and identify bad actors without constructing a system so unpredictable, burdensome and unwelcoming that talented people simply choose somewhere else.
Indeed, driving away students who would strengthen America’s universities, laboratories, companies and international relationships may itself undermine national security.
We risk inflicting strategic damage on ourselves that our competitors could never accomplish so efficiently on their own.
Apply the administration’s own test
When Secretary of State Marco Rubio took office, he offered a straightforward test for American foreign policy: Does it make America safer? Stronger? More prosperous?
Those remain the right questions.
Does making it harder for talented students to attend Virginia Tech, UVA or George Mason make America safer? Does pushing future scientists and engineers toward universities in other countries make America stronger? Does discouraging the next generation of immigrant entrepreneurs from building their companies here make America more prosperous?
I believe the answer to all three is no.
International students strengthen American research. They create companies and jobs. They prepare American students to compete in a global economy. And many eventually return home as professors, scientists, entrepreneurs, diplomats and government officials carrying something no government program can manufacture: years of personal relationships and firsthand experience with Americans.
That is soft power at its most human level.
Virginia should speak up
Virginia cannot set federal immigration policy. But state leaders are beginning to recognize what is at stake. The General Assembly has directed the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) to study declining international enrollment, including the role of federal visa, immigration, and regulatory policies, and the consequences for university finances, research capacity, graduate education, workforce pipelines, and Virginia’s long-term economic competitiveness. A report is due December 1, 2026.
That is exactly the broader conversation we should be having.
University presidents should speak up. Business leaders should speak up. Virginia’s congressional delegation (Republicans and Democrats) should speak up.
Because this is not ultimately about protecting university enrollment.
It is about protecting America’s capacity to lead. And that is something we should be extraordinarily careful about giving away.
David Clubb currently serves as executive director of the Cranwell Family Foundation, a family philanthropy based in Blacksburg. He previously served for nearly 30 years as a faculty member and senior administrator in international education and global engagement at higher education institutions across the United States, and currently works as a global consultant with Gateway International Group.
