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Trump's Foreign Student Crackdown Puts These 16 Struggling Colleges At Risk
S t. Francis College is trying to turn things around. After operating in a deficit since fiscal year 2017, the 166-year-old Roman Catholic college in Brooklyn, New York, ended fiscal 2023 with $66 million in net income, thanks largely to the $160 million sale of its 150,000 square foot campus at 180 Remsen Street. The sale was paired with austere cuts. After former human resources executive Tim Cecere took over as president in 2023, he scrapped the school's 21-team Division I athletics program (saving the college about $8 million per year) and laid off dozens of employees, including, most recently, 17 academic advisors, registrars and librarians in January.
Still, auditors are skeptical of St. Francis's ability to continue operations. The college doesn't have much to fall back on—at the end of fiscal 2023, its endowment was worth only $46 million or $16,409 per full-time enrolled student. To raise revenue and fight decaying enrollment, St. Francis has taken its recruitment efforts worldwide, and it's working. Between 2022 and 2023, the college tripled its international student headcount from 465 and 1,289. Most of these foreign students are enrolled in graduate programs at the college, which, in a June 2024 audit, university officials highlighted as 'a significant source of revenue growth.'
The Trump administration's recent policies limiting student visas have now endangered that plan, and created an existential risk for the small college. Forbes's requests for St. Francis to comment on its future plans considering the visa crackdown went unanswered.
But St. Francis isn't alone. Forbes identified 16 private, not-for-profit colleges that are particularly vulnerable to the Trump administration's crackdown on foreign student enrollment. All 16 schools, listed below, rely on foreign students to fill at least a third of their enrollment, and rely on tuition and fees to make up at least half of their operating revenues. The schools were also financially weak to begin with—each of the 16 scored a C+ or lower on Forbes most recent college financial health ranking. Private colleges that score C's or Ds on Forbes ranking typically struggle from year-to-year to meet their expenses. Tuition income from foreign students is Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania and Hult International Business School in Boston, which both scored the lowest grade, a D, on the 2025 Forbes Financial Grades, more than three quarters of all students are from outside the U.S. The students at arts-focused Manhattan School of Music and California College of the Arts, which both scored a C, are 51% and 42% international, respectively.
Under the guise of combatting antisemitism on campus and terrorism in the United States, the state department last month paused scheduling new appointments for people seeking F-1 and J-1 visas, the primary visa types students use to come to the United States. Earlier this month, President Trump issued an executive order that prohibits the state department from issuing visas to any individuals from Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, with only a few exceptions. Trump also yanked Harvard University's Student Visitor Exchange Program certification (though the move is currently blocked by a temporary restraining order), preventing the Ivy League university from enrolling international students at all and stoking fear about his plans to go after foreign students at other colleges who resist his demands.
All 16 colleges on this list declined to comment or did not reply to Forbes's requests for an interview. Their silence is not surprising—the Trump administration has been eager to punish individual colleges, especially those that speak out against administration policies.
As the population of American college-age students declines, colleges are tapping new markets to boost their enrollments. Some are targeting adult learners who never enrolled in college or didn't finish their degrees. Others are expanding online course options. But many, especially those that need to fill undergraduate and graduate seats and dorm rooms on campus, have been upping their recruitment of international students. International students don't qualify for federal aid, and many don't receive institutional scholarships either, which means that most of them pay full fare tuition. In other words, filling a seat with an international student instead of an American student often yields higher net tuition revenue.
Foreign students not only help keep the lights on at many small colleges, but they also contribute tens of billions to the U.S. economy, start businesses and spearhead invaluable research. One quarter of the 582 billion-dollar startup companies in the U.S. were founded by someone who attended an American university as an international student, according to a 2022 study from the think tank National Foundation for American Policy. Foreign students who are educated here tend to keep their talents in the U.S.—a study from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics found that of 44,450 temporary visa holders who attended American colleges between 2017 and 2019, 32,650 still lived in the U.S. in 2023. Two in five doctorate-level scientists and engineers in the United States are foreign-born.
At Campbellsville University in Kentucky, nearly half of the students are international, and the university, which scored a C on the Forbes 2025 Financial Grades, relies on tuition and fees to make up 83% of its operating revenues. The University of Bridgeport in Connecticut enrolls about 3,400 students, and 36% of them are foreign. It makes up 72% of its operating revenues with tuition and fees. Like St. Francis, Bridgeport is also working to reverse a yearslong march toward insolvency. In 2021, the university was acquired by nearby Goodwin University for a small $32 million, though it has continued to operate as an independent institution with its own campus and board of trustees. It has since posted net income of $13.6 million at the end of fiscal 2023, and increasing international student enrollment has been a key part of its turnaround strategy.
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