To attract the brightest minds to America, President Donald Trump proposed a novel idea while campaigning: If elected, he would grant green cards to all foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges.
“It’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greatest schools,†Trump said during a podcast interview last June. “That is going to end on Day One.â€
Vladyslav Plyaka, an exchange student from Ukraine, poses for a photo Monday in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington.
That promise never came to pass. Trump’s stance on welcoming foreign students has shifted dramatically. International students have found themselves at the center of an escalating campaign to kick them out or keep them from coming as his administration merges a crackdown on immigration with an effort to reshape higher education.
An avalanche of policies from the Trump administration — such as terminating students’ ability to study in the U.S., halting all new student visa interviews and moving to block foreign enrollment at Harvard — have triggered lawsuits, countersuits and confusion. Foreign students say they feel targeted on multiple fronts. Late Wednesday, Trump himself took the latest action against international students, signing an executive order barring nearly all foreigners from entering the country to attend Harvard.
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In interviews, students from around the world described how it feels to be an international student today in America. Their accounts highlight pervasive feelings of fear, anxiety and insecurity that have made them more cautious in their daily lives, distracted them from schoolwork and prompted many to cancel trips home because they fear not being allowed to return.
For many, the past few months have forced them to rethink their dreams of building a life in America.
Markuss Saule, a freshman at Brigham Young University-Idaho, took a recent trip home to Latvia and spent the entire flight back to the U.S. in a state of panic.
For hours, he scrubbed his phone, uninstalling all social media, deleting anything that touched on politics or could be construed as anti-Trump.
“That whole 10-hour flight, where I was debating, ‘Will they let me in?’ — it definitely killed me a little bit,†said Saule, a business analytics major. “It was terrifying.â€
As a student in Minnesota three years ago, he felt like a proud ambassador for his country.
“Now I feel a sense of inferiority. I feel that I am expendable, that I am purely an appendage that is maybe getting cut off soon,†he said. Trump’s policies carry a clear subtext. “The policies, what they tell me is simple. It is one word: Leave.â€
A concern for attracting the world’s top students was raised in the interview Trump gave last June on the podcast “All-In.†Can you promise, Trump was asked, to give companies more ability “to import the best and brightest" students?
“I do promise,†Trump answered. Green cards, he said, would be handed out with diplomas to any foreign student who gets a college or graduate degree.
Trump said he knew stories of “brilliant†graduates who wanted to stay in the U.S. to work but couldn’t. “They go back to India, they go back to China†and become multibillionaires, employing thousands of people. “That is going to end on Day One.â€
Had Trump followed through with that pledge, a 24-year-old Indian physics major named Avi would not be afraid of losing everything he has worked toward.
After six years in Arizona, where Avi attended college and is now working as an engineer, the U.S. feels like a second home. He dreams of working at NASA or in a national lab and staying in America where he has several relatives.
But now he is too afraid to fly to Chicago to see them, rattled by news of foreigners being harassed at immigration centers and airports.
“Do I risk seeing my family or risk deportation?†said Avi, who asked to be identified by his first name, fearing retribution.
Avi is one of about 240,000 people on student visas in the U.S. on Optional Practical Training — a postgraduation period where students are authorized to work in fields related to their degrees for up to three years. A key Trump nominee said he would like to see an end to postgraduate work authorization for international students.
Avi’s visa is valid until next year but he feels “a massive amount of uncertainty.â€
Vladyslav Plyaka came to the U.S. from Ukraine as an exchange student in high school. As war broke out at home, he stayed to attend the University of Wisconsin.
Vladyslav Plyaka in the Capitol Hill neighborhood Monday in Washington.
He was planning to visit Poland to see his mother but if he leaves the U.S., he would need to reapply for a visa. He doesn’t know when that will be possible now that visa appointments are suspended, and he doesn’t feel safe leaving the country anyway.
He feels grateful for the education, but without renewing his visa, he’ll be stuck in the U.S. at least two more years while he finishes his degree. He sometimes wonders if he would be willing to risk leaving his education in the United States — something he worked for years to achieve — if something happened to his family.
“It’s hard because every day I have to think about my family, if everything is going to be all right,†he said.
It took him three tries to win a scholarship to study in the U.S. Having that cut short because of visa problems would undermine the sacrifice he made to be here. He sometimes feels guilty that he isn’t at home fighting for his country, but he knows there’s value in gaining an education in America.
“I decided to stay here just because of how good the college education is,†he said. “If it was not good, I probably would be on the front lines.â€
Higher education, higher earnings? Here's where advanced degrees pay off the most.
Higher education, higher earnings? Here's where advanced degrees pay off the most.
A college degree has often been viewed as a ticket to the middle class and a requirement for the increasingly high-tech, high-skill jobs of tomorrow. Software developers, registered nurses, and accountants are some of the occupations requiring a college education that are , according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.Â
Indeed, jobs that require a bachelor's degree are projected to grow faster than the average across all jobs, with 3.3 million openings each year. The share of jobs that will need at least a college education is also expected to rise: by 2031, compared to 36% in 2021, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
As demand for highly educated workers increases, the share of Americans with a college degree has also gone up. In 2022, of Americans 25 years and older had completed four or more years of college, while in 2000, less than 26% had. Some states had even higher shares of college graduates—, per the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Those two states trailed only Washington D.C. in having the most highly educated population—nearly two-thirds of the residents in the nation's capital are college graduates.
Having a bachelor's degree not only helps qualify graduates for more jobs, but it also qualifies them for higher-paying positions. Those with college degrees enjoy a significant pay increase over those with only a high school diploma. But the size of that increase is not equal everywhere. analyzed to determine the wage boost a college education provides both nationally and by state.
College degrees provide a significant earnings boost
Nationally, college graduates earn significantly more than those with only a high school education or less. This wage gap has widened over time, too. An analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that in 1980, a than a high school-educated worker by mid-career. But in 2020, this gap had grown to $18,000. Much of this difference is because jobs that high school graduates work in , whereas college graduates might see their salary increase significantly over the course of their career, according to a study by Harvard University's David J. Deming, published in the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Even within the same occupation, those with a college degree tend to earn more than those with just a high school diploma. A 2023 of jobs that employed a significant number of both high school graduates and college graduates found that the earnings gap ranged from 12% for bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks to 78% for supervisors of nonretail sales workers. The median salary for a nonretail sales supervisor with a college degree was $95,000 compared to just $53,400 for a supervisor with only a high school diploma.
Of course, not all college graduates will earn equally high salaries. What one studies can significantly impact one's financial outcome, as earnings vary significantly across different fields. Those who studied engineering, economics, or finance tended to have a mid-career annual median wage of $100,000 or more, while education, social services, and theology and religion majors had the lowest median wages, earning $60,000 or less annually, according to .
The wage boost is bigger in some states than others
How much of a wage boost a college degree provides also varies by state. The range from around $52,000 in Mississippi, the lowest in the country (except for Puerto Rico), to over $95,000 in Washington D.C. While college graduates earn more than high school graduates in all states, the pay bump is larger in some places, such as D.C., New Jersey, New York, and California, and smaller in others like Vermont, Maine, and Montana.
Some of what drives these differences in educational pay gaps is related to the share of residents employed in high-paying jobs and industries. States with the biggest gaps tend to have a larger share of workers in occupations that both require high levels of education and are well compensated. For example, D.C. has a large number of lawyers (, per the Bureau of Labor and Statistics), a profession that both pays well (average salary of nearly $240,000 in D.C.) and requires an advanced degree.
Not only do these jobs pay more, but workers might also earn some of the highest salaries in their field in states with larger wage boosts. In New Jersey, the average salary of registered nurses, one of the top five jobs in the state, is among the highest in the nation, at nearly $102,000. Similarly, in New York, general and operations managers—the third largest occupation in the state—earn nearly the highest average salaries in their field.
States with larger wage gaps also predict that there will be a growing demand for workers with a college degree. California, for example, projects that some of its will be nurse practitioners, physician assistants, medical managers, data scientists, and information security analysts—all jobs that typically require a college education at minimum.
Vermont, on the other hand, forecasts will mainly be for waitstaff, carpenters, sales representatives, and fitness trainers—these jobs are ones that do not typically require a bachelor's degree. Without strong local demand for their skills and knowledge, it makes sense that college graduates would not earn as much in states like Vermont.
An additional factor that may influence how much of a wage boost a college education provides is institutional prestige. Several studies have shown that graduates from more selective institutions tend to . An analysis of data from more than 1,500 schools by PayScale found that early-career median pay for Ivy League graduates was , compared to around $58,000 for graduates from other institutions—and that the gap grows even wider by mid-career.
Opportunity Insights studied anonymized admissions data and income tax records and found that attending such selective colleges also of being in the top 1% of earners. However, research from Mathematica Policy Research and Princeton University points out that the advantage that attending a highly prestigious institution provides in terms of earnings , suggesting that it isn't so much the quality of the school as much as the quality of the students that affects future earnings.
Although having a college degree can significantly boost one's wages, attending college comes with a hefty price tag, too. In 2023, , owing a median amount of $20,000 to $25,000, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve Board data by the Pew Research Center. It also found that college graduates with student loan debt tend to have lower household incomes than those without debt (though they do still earn more than noncollege graduates).
Perhaps it is not surprising that doubts are growing as to whether attending college is worth it. now think that someone without a degree could potentially get a well-paying job in today's economy, and than it was 20 years ago. As college enrollment declines from a peak of 70% in 2009 to 61% in 2021, it seems that the perceived financial benefits of a college degree may not be as clear-cut as before.
Story editing by Carren Jao. Additional editing by Elisa Huang. Copy editing by Tim Bruns.
originally appeared on and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.
