A war on international students doesn’t help anyone

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (News-Press NOW) -- If you told college presidents there is a group of students who pay their bills and excel at STEM classes, they’d have one question:

Where are they?

Well, 43 of them aren’t in the United States. At least not for much longer after the federal government revoked the visas of 43 students associated with Northwest Missouri State University. These Bearcats join more than 800 students from 150 colleges who were caught up in a recent purge of international students.

Why were these students singled out? Were they out of compliance, or is the government moving the goalposts? There’s plenty we don’t know right now. At Northwest, most had graduated but remained in the country for employment associated with their education.

What’s certain is that the Trump administration’s hard line will reverberate well beyond the college campus. This is not just a human interest story. International students contributed $43.8 billion to the U.S. economy and supported 378,000 jobs in the 2023-24 academic year, according to an analysis from the Association of American Universities.

Some of those students stay in the United States after they graduate, meaning we get the benefit of their intellectual capital and innovation. International students are credited with developing Chobani yogurt, SunDisk memory storage, Instagram and Tesla electric vehicles. (Ironic, isn’t it?)

If you drive them out, it just means all that investment happens overseas, and we have to import whatever they produce – probably with a tariff added to the cost.

Many colleges have come to rely on international students to supplement stagnant growth in the domestic student population. International students account for about 6% of college enrollment nationwide.

In the end, the issue isn’t about these 43 students who were sent packing. It’s about future international students who are scared off and decide to pursue a postsecondary degree in Great Britain or Australia. For U.S. colleges, the difference is made up in several ways: increased tuition, increased tax support for higher education or program cuts.

It’s not a very appealing scenario.

A war on international students will go down as a significant unforced error that hurts colleges, hurts taxpayers and hurts U.S. competitiveness.