India, the US’s largest sending market, saw visa issuance plummet by 62%, with just over 22,000 F-1 visas issued to Indian students across the summer, during which visa interviews were suspended at global consulates for the best part of June.
It was during this month that visa issuance across F, M and J categories collapsed by 50% year over year, highlighting the direct impact of the freeze which lasted from May 27 until June 26 when interviews resumed. But stakeholders have emphasised other compounding forces at play.
“The June collapse was largely mechanical, but students and families were already reassessing the US well before that, with visa revocations, social media screening and real uncertainty around OPT all feeding into their decision-making,” Bill Colvin, Shorelight senior vice president, global solutions, told The PIE News.
Following a highly turbulent spring, F-1 visa issuance was already down by 14% before the pause – a “bad, but manageable” situation – according to Boston College professor Chris Glass.
“The pause took a soft enrolment cycle and turned it into a severe contraction,” Glass continued, warning underlying structural constraints did not disappear when interviews resumed.
Alongside policy volatility dampening the appeal of the US, higher refusal rates from stricter adjudication processes and fewer appointments from reduced consular capacity continue to compound the situation, with Colvin warning: “The federal policy environment has created a perception problem the sector can’t solve alone.”
The overdue State Department figures provide the most comprehensive dataset exposing the reality of US inbound mobility and have been widely anticipated by the sector since the last data release in July 2025.
Amid anecdotal reports of visa delays and cancelled appointments at global consulates, some indicators had painted a less dramatic picture, with IIE’s fall snapshot recording a 17% decline in new international enrolments this academic year.
Elsewhere, NAFSA’s warning of a 30-40% drop in new international enrolments has been proven accurate – a decline the association linked directly to policy changes “that have erected unnecessary barriers for qualified students”, said NAFSA CEO Fanta Aw.
For Colvin, where the 36% visa drop reflects how significantly the pipeline was disrupted upstream, the 17% enrolment figure reveals the students who actually arrived on campus.
“What this visa data makes undeniable… is that the upstream disruption was far more severe than most institutions had internalised,” he said.
This will definitely take some time to regain the faith and trust of Indian parents
Rachit Agrawal, AdmitKard
And while August saw F, M and J issuance levels only 7% below the previous year, stakeholders have warned against pre-empting any signs of “recovery” in the data.
Not only is August a lower-volume month for visa issuance, making the numbers look better by comparison, but any so-called recovery was highly uneven across source countries, with China seeing a partial rebound while India’s numbers were still down 66%.
On the ground accounts from India exposed the reality of the data, reporting that no visa slots could be booked for approximately two and a half months following the halt, according to Rachit Agrawal, co-founder of AdmitKard education consultancy.
The disruption meant a “huge number” of students missed the fall intake, with some booking interviews in alternative countries and many deferring to January, only to see a “similar situation” with a scarcity of slots, said Agrawal.
While he said the US remained the number one choice for top Indian candidates, he noted students were increasingly applying to other countries in addition to, or instead of, the US.
“What has happened over the last year has definitely reduced the confidence of Indian parents and students,” said Agrawal, adding it would “take some time” to regain their faith and trust.
Experts have said the uneven impact of the decline is causing a “fundamental shift” in America’s international student pipeline.
Where India and China together accounted for 42% of all student visa approvals in summer 2023, by 2025 that figure had dropped to 23% according to Shorelight analysis.
Alongside India’s 62% drop in F-1 issuance from May to August 2025, Nepal and Nigeria saw declines of 72% and 52% respectively, with experts warning of a disproportionate impact felt at the graduate level.
Other top sending countries, China (-35%), South Korea (-21%) and Vietnam (-25%), saw notable but more modest declines. And while Canada is the third-largest source market for the US, students do not need visas to study in the US so are not included in the data.
For institutions planning recruitment strategies, the data provides much to get to grips with.
“The countries most likely to hold steady – Canada, South Korea, Western Europe – skew undergraduate. The countries in free fall, like India, are the ones that have powered graduate enrolment growth for the last decade,” according to Glass.
The publication of the data has once again brought US sector woes to the fore, with commentators sounding the alarm on the damaging repercussions of such trends.
“Looking ahead to 2026, the bigger concern is that competitor destinations across Europe, Asia Pacific and North America have coordinated national strategies to attract international students, and the US does not,” said Colvin.
Illustrative of these efforts are the growing flows of US scientists to Europe, with France recently welcoming over 40 researchers driven away from American institutions amid funding cuts and attacks on academic freedom under the current administration.
What’s more, Aw emphasised knock-on economic damages including the loss of tens of thousands American jobs, citing the sobering forecast that losing one-third of international students in US STEM fields alone would cause long-term GDP losses of $240bn to $481bn each year.
