America's foreign student fiasco

Newsroom

10-06-2025

One of the world's best universities, a magnet for the globe's brightest brains, is under attack by the Trump administration.
And while Harvard is fighting various funding restrictions and bans on foreign student visas, harsher policies on America's borders are creating fear from returning students that they could be arrested by immigration officers and jailed or deported.
International students are big money-makers for universities worldwide – in New Zealand they pay four times the amount in fees as domestic students.
'We could be doing well while doing good,' says the chief economist at the policy think-tank The New Zealand Initiative, Dr Eric Crampton.
'It's amazing that America's throwing all this away.
'We aren't the destination market for the best students in the world. But if the place that is the destination for the best students in the world suddenly says 'We don't want them any more' – my God we'd better be ready for that,' he tells The Detail.
Crampton is Canadian, but spent time in the US on a student visa so knows what it's like to study there. He's also taught at Canterbury University and has experience with exchange students.
He says the American administration has now basically put every student visa under threat, with erratic threats coming from the President, whether over funding or threats to Chinese students on the basis that 'they're all spies or something'.
Trump's move to bar international students from Harvard by blocking their visas has itself now been blocked by a court order, but the situation remains uncertain. At the same time foreign students are getting nervous about leaving the country and trying to get back in, with reports about people getting arrested randomly at the border.
The hit to the US economy is expected to cost billions in revenue, and has been described as an 'anti-intellectual spree'.
'When you live in America on something like a student visa, every interaction with the state you're reminded that you're less than an American. Even in 2002 it was very clear that you are there by their sufferance.
'It would be awful being there now on a student visa because just imagine it … you'd be paying $US50,000 per year in international tuition fees, maybe you've already paid for two years of study and you're coming towards the end of it … and you've got two more years ahead of you … if they cancel your visa you've wasted $100,000 and two years.
'If you're at a place like Harvard, people wouldn't hold it against you, you could continue your studies elsewhere. People would say 'Well, he was admitted to Harvard, he must be really good', but if you're at a mid-tier US university – which is still better than anything New Zealand has – you'll have sunk two years' worth of study and $100,000 worth of cost, and you won't be able to finish your degree.
'It feels like the kind of spot where New Zealand could help. We've always been able to accommodate students on international exchange. We could make it really easy for students to come in that way.'
Universities New Zealand chief executive Chris Whelan says New Zealand is nearly back up to pre-Covid numbers of foreign students, with our eight universities having about 20,000 full-time equivalent students between them.
'International students help, but they're just one of a number of different mechanisms that universities are looking to for making payroll and keeping lights on,' he says.
'We don't want to grow too far … we want international education to be a genuinely quality and value proposition for both domestic students – giving them the ability to rub shoulders with people from different cultures – but also for the international students, to give them a genuine international experience.
'But if any student did want to, or was forced to, discontinue their studies in the US, there are places like New Zealand that I think would welcome them and would make it as easy as possible for them to get here.'
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