Ahead of the fall semester at Oregon’s largest public universities, staff are helping students from around the world navigate challenging visa delays and uncertainty over President Donald Trump and his administration’s immigration policies that are expected to drive down international enrollment.
Oregon’s senior U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat, on Aug. 13 joined two dozen colleagues calling on Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a letter to explain why the senators had been hearing reports that student visa appointments at many embassies and consulates abroad were unavailable during peak application season, and why processing was taking far longer than in the past.
“We urge the State Department to ensure timely processing of … student and exchange visitor nonimmigrant visas, consistent with the approach taken by administrations of both parties in the past, and to implement other measures to avoid diminishing U.S. competitiveness,” they wrote.
Trump travel bans, recent changes to the length of student exchange visas, and the administration’s aggressive approach to immigration enforcement — including arrests of international students at American universities for participating in protests — have led to an estimated 20% decline in foreign student enrollment at U.S. universities this spring as compared to 2025, according to the nonprofit Association of International Educators.
A lawsuit filed two weeks ago is attempting to stop the visa-length changes from going into effect on Sept. 15, which would limit international students to four years of study in the U.S. with the option to seek an extension.
Angela Seydel, a spokesperson for the University of Oregon, said international students hoping to be on campus by the end of September to start classes have reported difficulty getting paperwork processed in time, and have shared concerns about “ever changing federal rules.”
At Portland State University, more than 130 international students that were in the pipeline to study at the school since June 2025 have been unable to do so because of Trump travel bans on several countries in Africa and the Middle East, including 35 Iranian students and 86 Nigerian students, according to university spokesperson Katy Swordfisk. She said anecdotally enrollment staff are hearing from some Serbian and South Korean students who are currently having trouble obtaining visas.
The number of international students enrolling in U.S. universities had been rising for nearly a decade until Trump first took office in 2017. Those numbers declined every year of his first term as he enacted travel bans on several majority-Muslim countries, visa changes and as the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
In Oregon, the number of international students has been declining steadily every year for the last decade, and the number enrolled at one of the state’s seven public universities in the fall of 2025 — just over 4,000 — was half of what it was in 2015, according to data from Oregon’s Higher Education Coordinating Commission.
Some of that is attributable to rising tuition costs, school officials have said, because international students at most Oregon universities pay non-resident tuition that is often two or three times the cost of resident tuition. During the 2023-24 school year, as U.S. higher education institutions enrolled more international students than ever before, Oregon’s public universities continued to see declines.
“Since 2015, international enrollment declines have cost the UO substantially in annual revenue. We also see a major loss of global cultural, linguistic, and perspective difference in our classrooms, clubs, labs and community,” Seydel, of the University of Oregon, said.
Many of the declines have been among students seeking degrees in business, computer science, and other STEM fields, according to Seydel.
International students from more than 100 countries make up nearly 6% of students at Oregon State University’s Corvallis and Cascades campuses and in online degree programs, according to spokesperson Rob Odom.
The university won’t be able to report full fall enrollment numbers until October, he said, but it’s currently home to about 1,900 international students and their families, down from 2,400 in recent years.
He said the declines don’t threaten the future of any degree programs at the university, but the loss of these students runs deeper than the tuition dollars they bring.
“For OSU, as for most U.S. universities, international students bring a wealth of talent and a connection to the world that we would not otherwise have,” he said.
More than 7,300 international students at Oregon’s public and private universities and colleges contribute nearly $264 million to Oregon’s economy annually, and support more than 1,900 jobs, according to the most recent analysis from the Association of International Educators.
The association estimates there are 111,000 fewer international students heading to U.S. universities during this academic year than there were at the start of the 2024-25 school year, before Trump began his second term. Analysts project the number of international students enrolled in the 2026-27 school year could drop by 130,000 to just over 1 million.