Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln welcomed 40 international students to its campus last year, down from 57 the year before.
It’s a scene that’s playing out across the state and across the country. The pipeline of students arriving from abroad to study at American universities has begun to narrow. Visa appointment pauses, expanded social media screening and a climate of perceived hostility toward immigrants have combined to send international enrollment down. And that has consequences that reach far beyond tuition revenue.
Across 825 institutions surveyed by the Institute of International Education in its Fall 2025 snapshot, international enrollment dropped 1% overall, but the amount of new international students fell by 17%.
At Nebraska Wesleyan, a small private liberal arts college with a total enrollment of roughly 1,600, every international student matters, both financially and culturally,
"In the recent years, one of the challenges that we've seen is that more students have been denied visas to study in the United States," said Ryan Cassell, vice president of enrollment management at Nebraska Wesleyan. "Last year in particular, we saw a number more who wanted to come here and declared their interest in enrolling at Nebraska Wesleyan, but their visa was not approved when they sought that embassy appointment."
Cassell said the decline may cause the campus to lose the cultural richness that comes with having students from around the world. It also loses the tuition revenue those students generate.
"When we don't have the same number of students, it creates a deficit for us in the sense of cultural experiences," Cassell said. "And then the financial piece, too, that's just fewer students who are investing in the overall operating budget that we need to offer at the level of excellence that we would like."
Cassell added that for a smaller school, even a handful of missing students makes a meaningful difference.
"If we have five to 10 fewer students at a smaller school, it's definitely going to affect campus life and budget in a much bigger way when compared to a larger school."
The anxiety is not just felt financially. Yoko Iwaki-Zink, who works in Nebraska Wesleyan’s Office of Global Engagement and is herself a former international student at the university, said that current students are feeling the pressure of the uncertain policy environment.
"Our current international students are experiencing a great anxiety about their visa requirements and potential impacts on the continuation of their education because the government rules could impact them quite a lot," she said.
Nebraska Wesleyan has not had any students whose visas were revoked, Cassell confirmed. But Wesleyan’s incoming class is already showing a decrease, with applications from international students down this year. To strengthen enrollment, the university is looking at different strategies, including increased domestic recruitment targeting Nebraskans and students from neighboring states, and a push for international outreach.
At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the enrollment picture looks similar. Monique Snowden, interim associate vice chancellor of enrollment management, said the university is experiencing the same problem.
India and China remain UNL’s top countries for international students, Snowden said that strained U.S.- China relations have made it harder for interested Chinese students to secure visas. Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, are emerging as growing markets.
As a land-grant university, UNL has a particular draw: agriculture. The university has leveraged its expertise in agriculture, irrigation and farming science to build relationships with universities in other countries. Rather than individual students applying, partner institutions send groups of students to complete part of their degree at UNL.
Snowden believes international students choose UNL in part for its: academics and safety.
"I think students are looking for spaces and places where they feel like they can find a sense of belongingness and feel safe, physical safety, but also emotional safety," Snowden said. "Whatever is going on in immigration, whatever might be going on with the tensions happening in the world, students are looking for spaces where they feel like they can come and do what they came to do, but also feel like they will be safe in doing it."
Snowden said the visa process is often not clear. When a student is denied, neither the student nor the institution is always told why.
"It's a blind process for us," Snowden said. "We do everything we can to make sure that they have all the materials. But students will be denied, and we don't know. And then the students are trying to figure out why they got denied, and they might not really be told specifically why."
Snowden described the visa system as a two-step process. First, the I-20, a document issued by the university confirming a student's eligibility to study, and then the visa itself, issued by the State Department. Any slowdown in either step can affect the rest of the process.
Schools still investing in international student recruitment
Despite the downturn, Snowden said that pulling back entirely from international recruitment would be a mistake.
"Now's not the time to just back out of everything," Snowden said. "You may need to pull back a bit because you need to focus your resources where they're best used. But at the same time, you don't want to divest totally. This is not the first time that we've seen declines in international enrollment. They come, and then they go, and they come back up.”
UNL recently sent its director of international undergraduate recruitment on a high school tour in India and continues to explore emerging recruitment markets. This helps maintain relationships with alumni living and working abroad, who work as informal ambassadors for the university.
Another strategy that is increasingly popular during periods of restrictive immigration policy is recruiting international students who are already in the United States, at community colleges, other four-year institutions or living with family.
"When we have these difficult times for students to get to the States, sometimes our best strategy is to look at those who may already be located in the United States," Snowden said.
The University of Nebraska at Omaha's Andrea Stiefvater, who leads international programs, said UNO’s roughly 550 to 600 international students are part of a deliberate, long-term investment in the “common good,” one that the university has no intention of abandoning despite the current climate.
"We definitely have seen a decline in the international enrollment for this academic year, as has every institution in the U.S.," Stiefvater said. "We are on track with the national trend, as are, again, most of our colleagues in Nebraska as well."
Stiefvater was careful not to blame a single factor, believing international enrollment is inherently subject to currency fluctuations, geopolitical shifts and personal decisions that are far beyond a university’s control.
"International recruitment does tend to be a little bit more volatile simply because of the realm that we're working in," Stiefvater said. "We know that international education is a valuable endeavor, that it brings a lot of benefit to Omaha and to our partners and to the globe, and we just want to continue to work toward that common good."
Decline in students has financial, other effects
NAFSA, the Association of International Educators, estimated that this year's 17% decline in new international students has already translated to $1.1 billion in lost revenue and 23,000 fewer jobs nationwide. For Nebraska specifically, the estimated loss for the 2025-26 academic year is $3.1 million.
Nebraska’s international students collectively contribute $121.4 million and support 770 jobs statewide. Every three international students support one job, often reducing the costs for domestic students in the process.
Federal policy has played a role in accelerating this trend. Between May 27 and June 18, 2025, the State Department paused scheduling new F-1 and J-1 visa appointments during the peak issuance season. On June 4, President Donald Trump announced a full suspension on entry from 12 countries, with partial restrictions on seven more. By Dec. 16, seven additional countries had full entry restrictions. The State Department has also mandated expanded social media vetting for all student visa applicants.
Beyond the financial numbers, enrollment officials across Nebraska campuses are worried about something you can't measure, the cultural and intellectual value that international students bring to the classroom and the community.
"When we have international students here and we see a tragedy happen in another country, our student life areas are reaching out to those students because they're here and their whole family is somewhere else," Snowden said. "It gives students an opportunity to really experience empathy for what might be happening in another place. If they didn't have that classmate, if that wasn't their roommate, maybe they could be more distant from what's happening."
Snowden stressed that the value doesn't just go in one direction. International students arrive with their own fixed impressions of America, impressions that Nebraska has the opportunity to change.
"When our international students come here, Nebraska is rich. It's rich with different experiences, different people from rural to city and all that and everything," Snowden said. "They get an understanding that the U.S. isn't just monolithic. The state is not just monolithic."
At UNO, Stiefvater believes international students are essential to its core mission.
"Just as our students from Papillion come with their personal stories and their unique perspectives, so, too, do our students from Paris," Stiefvater said. "That's the really great thing about a university campus, allowing for that academic mobility and for allowing people to really be thinking about how to solve some of the world's problems in a way that crosses borders."
Nebraska Wesleyan’s Iwaki-Zink hopes students will still take the same risk she did as a young adult.
"I want as many students around the world as possible to have the same great experience, great cultural, global experiences at Nebraska Wesleyan University," she said. "And I can guarantee them that they will be able to have those experiences."