As the Trump administration arbitrarily revokes and denies student visas, and xenophobic rhetoric scares away potential foreigners, agencies specializing in recruiting students from abroad are facing a sharp downturn.
Every year, Kamal Kant and his student recruiting firm Abacus Overseas Education Advisors helps more than 3,000 students apply to and enroll at hundreds of American colleges, from the giant Arizona State University to tiny Valparaiso University in Indiana and Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. Interested students work with Abacus free of charge. Instead, partner colleges pay the firm a per-student finders fee—usually equal to 10% of the students’ first-year tuition rate—once the students arrive on campus and pay their bills in full.
Business has been good for Kant, who is based in Hyderabad, India. During the 2023-24 academic year, India surpassed China as the leading place of origin for international students at American colleges, sending 331,602 of the record-breaking 1.1 million international students studying stateside. These numbers are set to decline as the Trump administration restricts new student visa approvals and continues widespread, loosely justified revocations of student visas. In the past month, the administration has already revoked more than 1,300 student visas, often with no explanation or notice.
A drop in foreign student enrollment will have great consequences for colleges that rely on their tuition dollars, but it also endangers the ecosystem of businesses that bring students overseas to study in the United States—which includes student recruiting firms like Kant’s, travel services, insurance providers, SIM card providers and businesses that evaluate international academic credentials, to name a few. According to the NAFSA Association of International Educators, international students contributed $44 billion to the U.S. economy during the 2023-24 academic year. “The overall mood among the agencies was that this will be a downturn. It’ll be a slow market for the next year or two, but that overall the fundamental interest in the U.S. market is still strong,” says Clay Harmon, executive director for the Association of International Enrollment Management, who talked with agencies during a visit to India three weeks ago. Harmon’s optimism has already been dimmed as the daily news cycle emphasizes xenophobic rhetoric and further Trump administration assaults on the nation’s elite universities.
Oslo, Norway-based Keystone Education Group, one of the world’s largest international student recruiting firms which helps a quarter million students enroll at global universities each year, has also noticed a drop in foreign student interest in the United States. Between August and December of 2024, student searches for U.S. destinations on Keystone’s websites declined by 33%, with the decline accelerating following Trump’s November election victory, says Keystone chief marketing officer Saba Davenport. The increased hesitancy was especially prominent for women—60% more female students reconsidered studying in the U.S. than male students.
During Trump’s first presidency, the rate of student visa approvals fell below the 10-year average of 70% in 2017 and 2018 to 65%, but rebounded to 75% in 2019. The student visa approval rate also fell below 70% in 2022 and 2023 to 65% and 64%, respectively, during the Biden administration. International recruitment experts agree this time is different. The Trump administration’s widespread condemnation of student protestors and international students at large suggest that studying in the United States is fraught with risks.
Kant is bracing his business for a Trump shock. “Normally when one country goes down, another one picks up in terms of overall numbers,” says Kant, who has been in the business for 25 years. Abacus works with multiple destinations, including Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and other European countries. However, United States-based colleges represent the bulk of his placements and this year, Canada, which has seen a surge in applications from U.S.-based students, has also become more stingy with its student visas.
Most recruiting agencies focus on the Big 4 destinations—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, says Harmon. Single-country firms that, for example, primarily recruit Chinese students to U.S. colleges, are now extremely vulnerable. “Some companies are mom and pop shops—they have the expertise and maybe the personal history of studying in the U.S. and they’ve really built that deep knowledge about our system. It’s not going to be easy for a company like that to turn on a dime and transition to other destination markets,” says Harmon. Bigger companies are starting to look at expanding into emerging higher education markets, including Singapore, Germany, and Malaysia, he notes.
Students can be fickle—someone could go through the entire application and enrollment process only to opt not to attend. And so even under normal circumstances, “agencies have a lot of stress and anxiety around the cashflow timeline,” Harmon explains. With visa denials on the rise, “we will probably see agencies struggling who have invested all of … this staff time, expertise, et cetera, in getting the student over the line in the expectation that they would earn a commission. And then the student either does not receive a visa or chooses not to come to the U.S., and they’re simply out all of the time and money they’ve invested in that student.”
International student recruitment businesses are typically split into two types: the first are pathway companies, like Abacus and Keystone, which partner directly with foreign universities and are paid by the universities. The second are concierge-type businesses that work directly with families to help students gain admittance to foreign colleges, especially elite schools. Pathway companies make up about 70% to 80% of the market, says Joel Butterly, co-founder and CEO of InGenius Prep, a college admissions consulting firm which falls under the concierge-type umbrella. Many of InGenius Prep’s student clients come from wealthy families in countries like China and India. “That’s the big market, but it’s also the most capricious,” he says of pathway companies. The upper end of the market, where most of InGenius’s clients are, “is inelastic in some ways, so it tends to be less susceptible to geopolitical or economic problems. Not immune, but less susceptible.”
Butterly likens InGenius to a law firm, but instead of paying to pursue litigation, clients pay for help with college admissions, including strengthening their extracurricular resume and their academic performance. The price clients pay varies enormously, says Butterly, starting at around $4,000 and going up from there. Similar concierge-type companies can charge clients up to $100,000, though Butterly says InGenius’s prices don’t go that high.
“Most of these families are locked into studying abroad anyway,” Butterly says. The students often already attend international high schools and haven’t completed their national curriculum. For example, in China, aspiring undergraduates must take and pass the Gaokao, a national nine-hour exam that tests students on math, Chinese, a foreign language of their choice, and either humanities or science subjects. Without it, students can’t be admitted to a Chinese university. “For these families who are interested in the most selective universities in the world, the only country where they can apply to a full list of schools [is the United States],” Butterly adds.
Visas aside, Butterly expects it may now be easier for international students to gain admission to U.S. colleges because they typically pay full, undiscounted tuition rates. “If you cut a ton of money, even from a very wealthy university, they have several means in which they can make it up. They can drive up donations, they can take out debt, they can dip into the endowment, but a major lever for them is admitting international students who pay full tuition,” he says. “If you eliminate international students from our higher education system, you would see a cascade of universities that are basically insolvent.”
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