“Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard.”

That’s what the nation’s oldest and wealthiest private university in the U.S. said in its lawsuit against the Trump administration, which sought to prevent the elite institution from enrolling thousands of international students.

A judge quickly blocked the Trump administration’s effort on Friday, and issued a temporary restraining order. The ruling comes as the number of international students at U.S. colleges and universities reached a record high.

Here’s a look at the impact of international students, by the numbers:

1.1 million

In November, Open Doors® 2024 Report on International Educational Exchange announced that the total number of international students at U.S. colleges and universities reached an all-time high of more than 1.1 million students for the 2023 and 2024 year.

This represented a 7% increase from the previous academic year.

“The experience of studying in the United States not only shapes the lives of individuals, but the future of our interconnected world,” said Scott Weinhold, with the Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in a statement announcing the Open Door findings. “The ties formed between U.S. and international students today are the basis of relationships for future business and trade, science and innovation, and government relations.”

India sent the most international students to the U.S. for higher education with more than 331,000 students enrolled, according to the 2023-2024 data from Open Doors.

China followed as the second leading country of origin with more than 277,000 students, including nearly 123,000 graduate students, studying in the U.S. It’s the leading nation for sending undergraduates and non-degree students to the U.S. Combined, India and China account for more than half of all international students in the country.

$43.8 billion

International students contribute not only academic and athletic talent to their campuses but also billions of dollars in economic activity across the nation.

According to NAFSA: Association of International Educators, these 1.1 million international students at U.S. colleges and universities contributed $43.8 billion to the U.S. economy during the 2023-2024 academic year and supported more than 378,000 jobs.

“International students’ contributions to the U.S. are significant and multi-faceted, and this year’s record-breaking economic total is the latest proof of that,” Fanta Aw, NAFSA executive director and CEO, said in a statement. “Yet we cannot be complacent. Meanwhile, competition for the world’s best and brightest is increasing.”

Aw urged the U.S. government to adopt politics that help attract and retain talent from overseas.

“We cannot afford to lose international students’ meaningful positive impact on American students’ global competence, our economies, and our communities, particularly in the areas of STEM-related research and innovation,” Aw said.

Students pose with a person dressed as Roar-ee the Lion mascot, before the Commencement Ceremony at Columbia University in New York on May 21.

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140 

Harvard relies on nearly 7,000 international students from more than 140 countries to come to its campuses. This is more than 25% of its total enrollment, according to 2024-2025 data from Harvard.

When including all of the scholars and researchers, the international population at Harvard exceeds 10,000.

In comparison, as of fall 2024, Yale University had 3,639 international scholars (including trainees, researchers, students and others) from 129 countries.

And Columbia University reported a total of 16,926 international students and scholars (including faculty and researchers) coming from 149 countries.

196

Students from other countries make a notable impact across on a various sports and fields.

Harvard has 42 varsity sports teams, and for the 2024-2025 rosters, about 21% of the athletes — approximately 196 out of 919 — are from abroad, Sportico reported last month.

The Yale Bulldogs mascot looks on during a game against the Harvard Crimson at Fenway Park on November 17, 2018 in Boston, Massachusetts.

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70

Harvard has hosted international students under the F-1 visa program for 70 consecutive years, the university said in its federal lawsuit against the Trump administration. This program, provided by the U.S. government under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) and overseen by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, allows international students to pursue their education at Harvard. The university has also long been designated as an exchange program sponsor to host J-1 nonimmigrants. Both programs allowed students from other countries to get an education at Harvard.

And Harvard is not unique. Thousands of high schools, colleges and universities have similarly hosted international students through these visa programs.

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Donald Trump has dramatically shrunk the White House National Security Council by firing a number of officials, placing others on administrative leave and ordering many secondees to return to their home agencies.

Several people familiar with the firings said the NSC, which is being run temporarily by secretary of state Marco Rubio, had retained some staff, mostly senior directors, while eliminating dozens of positions in the office.

The move, which one person described as a “liquidation”, comes three weeks after the president fired Mike Waltz as his first national security adviser, the top position at the NSC.

The officials who lost their positions were notified on Friday afternoon. The move followed weeks of speculation about an imminent purge at the NSC.

NSC chief of staff Brian McCormack emailed the officials shortly after 4pm to tell them they had 30 minutes to remove their belongings from their desks and to exit the NSC building next to the White House.

It was unclear if Alex Wong, the deputy national security adviser, had been dismissed. Laura Loomer, a right-wing conspiracy theorist who helped persuade Trump to fire Waltz, has also been gunning for Wong, who is a well respected official with hawkish views on China.

Three people familiar with the dismissals said Ivan Kanapathy, senior director for Asia, remained but his entire team, including his China staff, had been let go. Loomer had also urged Trump to fire Kanapathy, a former fighter pilot.

Robert O’Brien, who served as national security adviser in the first Trump administration, recently wrote an opinion article calling for the NSC to be cut to about 60 officials. The NSC, which traditionally has served as a co-ordinating office but has sometimes been used to centralise power in the White House, had more than 200 officials during the Biden administration.

“There is no question that the NSC in the Biden administration had become bloated and was high-handedly trying to implement foreign policy rather than doing its traditional role of co-ordinating the implementation by the rest of the national security establishment,” said Dennis Wilder, a former top NSC official in the administration of George W Bush.

“That said, there is a danger that a severely trimmed NSC will not have the executive firepower to ‘herd the cats’ of the national security system.”

Some supporters said the move would help Trump by reducing the number of officials from other agencies who might not support his “Make America Great Again” agenda.

One person close to the White House said Trump had learned a lesson from his first administration when he came to believe that many NSC officials were quietly blocking his agenda. “He was not going to make the same mistake again,” the person said.

But others questioned the impact that the purge would have on policy, and particularly the ability to referee disagreements across the government.

“While it might seem a hobbling bureaucratic move because the NSC’s purpose is to staff the president, its significance is about far more,” said one former NSC official.

“By whittling down the NSC staff to almost nothing, you kneecap the US government’s ability to generate foreign policy options, or to potentially act as a brake on Trump’s preferences. All that remains is presidential power.”

Trump also dismantled most of NSC directorate that oversaw technology and national security policy, according to several people. The president previously fired David Feith who headed the office, which was created during the Biden administration.

That directorate was instrumental in creating export controls that were designed to make it much harder for China to obtain advanced American technology that could help its military.

The NSC did not comment. But Brian Hughes, the NSC spokesperson, said he would remain and “continue to serve the administration”. The White House press secretary did not respond to a request for comment.

Hong Kong
CNN
 — 

The Trump administration’s move to bar Harvard University from enrolling international students has ricocheted across China, with officials and commentators seeing it through one lens: the growing rivalry between Washington and Beijing.

“China has consistently opposed the politicization of educational collaboration,” a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry said Friday, adding that the US move “will only tarnish its own image and reputation in the world.”

Some commentators across Chinese social media platforms took a similar tack: “It’s fun to watch them destroy their own strength,” read one comment on the X-like platform Weibo that garnered hundreds of likes.

“Trump comes to the rescue again,” wrote another, commenting on a hashtag about the news, which has tens of millions of views. “Recruiting international students is … the main way to attract top talent! After this road is cut off, will Harvard still be the same Harvard?”

The announcement by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is a clear escalation of a dispute between the oldest and the richest Ivy League institution and the White House and part of a broader drive to tighten control over international students in the US amid an immigration crackdown. The administration of US President Donald Trump has revoked hundreds of student visas in nearly every corner of the country as part of a vast immigration crackdown.

Harvard and Trump’s administration have been locked in conflict for months as the administration demanded the university make changes to campus operations. The government has homed in on foreign students and staff it believes participated in contentious campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war.

But the revocation isn’t just about a feud between a university and the US president. It’s also the latest in a widening rupture between two superpowers.

For years, China sent more international students to America than any other country. Those deep educational ties are being reshaped by a growing geopolitical rivalry that has fueled an ongoing trade and tech war.

“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement Thursday.

The DHS statement included claims of ties between Harvard and Chinese institutions or individuals linked to military-related research, as well as with an entity blacklisted by the Trump administration for alleged human rights violations. It links to information about a letter that bipartisan US lawmakers sent earlier this week to Harvard requesting information about the university’s alleged “partnerships with foreign adversaries.”

Harvard has not replied to a CNN request for comment on the alleged partnerships. In a statement on its website, the university said it was “committed to maintaining our ability to host our international students and scholars, who hail from more than 140 countries and enrich the University and this nation.”

The ability of elite American universities to recruit top students from around the world, many of whom often go on to stay in the United States, has long been seen as a critical factor in America’s science and tech prowess, as well as a key source of income for its universities.

The decision by the DHS both bars Harvard from enrolling international students for the coming academic year and requires current foreign students to transfer to another university to maintain their status.

International students make up more than a quarter of Harvard’s student body, with those hailing from China making up the largest international group, according to a tally on Harvard’s International Office website.

Among those students is Fangzhou Jiang, 30, a student at Harvard’s Kennedy School, who said he couldn’t believe it when he heard that his university status was in jeopardy and immediately began to worry if his visa was still valid.

“I was absolutely shocked for quite a few minutes. I just never anticipated that the administration could go this far,” said Jiang, who is also the founder of an education consulting company helping foreign students gain admission to elite American universities. “Ever since I was young, when it comes to the best universities in the world, from a young age, I learned that it’s Harvard,” he said.

Ivy League schools like Harvard, Princeton and Yale are household names in middle class China, where American universities have for years been viewed as a path to a prestigious education and a leg-up in China’s fiercely competitive career-ladder.

China was the top source of international students in the US for 15 straight years since 2009, before it was surpassed by India just last year, according to figures from Open Doors, a US Department of State-backed database tracking international student enrollment.

Along the way, US-China educational ties have cultivated close relationships between Chinese and American academics and institutions, while US universities and industry are widely seen to have benefited from their ability to attract top talent from China, and elsewhere, to their halls.

Harvard has educated Chinese figures like former Vice Premier Liu He, who played a key role negotiating Trump’s phase one trade deal during the American president’s first term.

But those ties have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years as the US began to see an increasingly assertive and powerful China as a technological rival and a threat to its own superpower status.

More than 277,000 Chinese students studied in the US during the 2023 to 2024 academic year, down from over 372,000 in the peak 2019-2020 year – a decline that coincides with the Covid-19 pandemic but also increasing friction between the two governments.

Meanwhile, rising nationalist sentiment and government emphasis on national security in China have led to a shift in perception about the value of American versus Chinese universities.

The Department of Homeland Security’s claims regarding Harvard’s institutional ties to entities and individuals with ties to military-related research are the latest move reflecting deep-seated concern in Washington about Chinese access to sensitive and military-applicable American technology via academia.

To crack down on the perceived threat of Chinese students conducting espionage on US soil, Trump introduced a ban during his first term that effectively prevented graduates in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields from Chinese universities believed to be linked to the military from gaining visas to the US.

His first administration also launched the now defunct China Initiative, a national security program intended to thwart China’s intelligence activities in the US, including those aimed at stealing emerging technology from research universities.

The program, which drew comparisons to the McCarthy-era anti-Communism “red scare” of the 1950s, was cancelled by the Biden administration after facing widespread blowback for what was seen as over-reach and complaints that it fueled suspicion and bias against innocent Chinese Americans.

Trump’s broader tightening of US immigration policy during his second term has now unleashed a new wave of insecurity and uncertainty for many students and schools.

While those concerns are shared by international students from many countries, the heightened tensions between the two countries have elevated pressure on Chinese students and scholars – and the impact has already been seen.

Over the past year, at least a dozen high-profile academics with roots in China who were working in the US have returned to China and taken up posts at prominent universities in the country, CNN has found.

And for some students at the start of their academic and professional careers, the latest development leaves them unsure about what to do next.

Among them is Sophie Wu, a 22-year-old from China’s southern tech hub of Shenzhen, who was accepted at a graduate program at Harvard this fall, after finishing her undergraduate degree in the US. Wu said she felt “numb” after hearing the news.

“I did not expect that the administration would make such an irrational decision, and I also feel that it is more of a retaliation than a policy decision,” she told CNN. “International students are being held hostage for some political purpose.”