Earlier this year, The PIE News reported on an error found in federal datasets that appeared to show falling international student numbers from August 2024 to the present.
The inaccurate SEVIS data painted a picture of dramatically declining international student numbers, which then flatlined in an unusual fashion – with data appearing to show an 11% enrolment decline between March 2024 and March 2025.
In reality, the number of international students in the US was increasing at a steady rate, with corrected data published by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on July 4 showing a growth rate of 6.5% from September 2023 to September 2024.
In September last year, the inaccurate figures were over 200,000 students short of the actual totals, according to analysis by Boston College professor Chris Glass.
The real data has revealed a new all-time high for international student numbers in the US, reaching nearly 1.3 million in September 2024.
What’s more, last year’s growth rate of 6.5% is more than double IIE’s predicted 3% growth rate, laid out in its 2024 Fall Snapshot survey.
After India surpassing China as the US’s top sending destination in 2023, the gap between the two sending countries continues to widen, with new SEVIS data for June 2025 showing almost 143,000 more students from India than China.
However, it is important to note that the figures include both international students enrolled at US colleges and those working on Optional Practical Training (OPT).
The US is the only one of the ‘big four’ study destinations to include the post-graduation work stream in overall student figures, and stakeholders have called for the two to be disaggregated to help institutional recruitment plans and wider sector advocacy about career opportunities.
“It’s odd to me that OPT participants are routinely characterised as students in prominent reporting,” said Eddie West, assistant vice-president, international affairs, at California State University, Fresno.
“Counting F-1 visa-holders working on OPT as students makes almost no sense and is an artefact of how they first arrived. They’re employees in the US workforce,” he added.
The issue of including OPT in the US’s overall student population was laid bare last year, after IIE’s Open Doors report for 2023/24 revealed an all-time high of 1.1 million international students in the US.
As IIE separates the two counts, closer analysis could subsequently reveal that while OPT had increased by 22%, new enrolments had only risen by 0.1% – a crucial detail that was getting lost in prominent reporting.
Counting F-1 visa-holders working on OPT as students makes almost no sense and is an artefact of how they first arrived
Eddie West, California State University, Fresno
Meanwhile, though historical data helps inform tactical implementation of recruitment strategies, according to Intead CEO Ben Waxman, colleges should focus on the present and make decisions with what they have available.
“The macro trend numbers make good headlines but don’t necessarily inform how a specific institution should move forward… What works for individual institutions is keeping eyes on the ball,” Waxman told The PIE.
“Backing away from concerted recruitment efforts pretty much guarantees that the declines in student volume we all anticipate will land squarely on your institution,” he warned.
The anticipated declines highlighted by Waxman refer to the drop in F-1 visa issuance already being felt by US institutions as the damaging effect of Donald Trump’s hostile policies take hold.
In May 2025, there was a 22% drop in student visa issuance as compared to the previous year, according to State Department data.
And this doesn’t account for the impact of the pausing of new visa appointments – which stretched from May 27 to June 26 – and continues to cause severe backlogs and cancelled visa appointments.
What’s more, the expansion of social media screening for student and exchange visitor visas is causing further delays, as interest in the US as a study destination plummets under Trump.
Amid the administration’s attacks on Harvard, as well as its proposals to enforce time limits on student visas, its appeal among international students has fallen to its lowest level since the pandemic, with 73% of institutions surveyed by NAFSA expecting fewer international students this fall.
According to Glass, the appointment pause coupled with expanded screening measures could translate into a potential international student decline of 7-11% in the upcoming semester, as compared to 2024.
Depending on future policies, “we may see fluctuations in 2026 due to deferrals … akin to when we saw pent-up growth express itself after COVID was more firmly in the rear-view mirror”, suggested West, though he said continued growth in the short-term was “highly unlikely”.
The macro trend numbers make good headlines but don’t necessarily inform how a specific institution should move forward
Ben Waxman, Intead
With the initial error being resolved, stakeholders have acknowledged the difficulties of maintaining such a large database.
“Something so vast in scope, complex and fluid as international student mobility and enrolment is no easy feat, especially in the States,” said West, adding that he was more concerned about “long-standing deficiencies”, pointing to Australia’s PRISMS system as a far more sophisticated and precise tracking method.
Elsewhere, concerns remain around the department’s lack of transparency, which has left many unanswered questions about how the department will ensure there are no future data failures of a similar kind.
The timeframe of the glitch has also raised eyebrows, with almost a year passing from when the data irregularities emerged in August 2024 to when they were removed from the website in April 2025 and finally corrected this July.
What’s more, it is still unclear whether anyone at the department was aware of the glitch before DHS was notified of it by EnglishUSA in mid-April, with Mark Algren of the University of Kansas who noticed the error saying he had “no idea why someone didn’t catch it”.
The PIE reached out to DHS but is yet to receive a response.
