Trump and Foreign Engineering Students

From Inside Higher Ed:

"College and university budgets are most heavily dependent on tuition and fee revenue, however. Trump talked about forcing colleges to cut their tuition rates while he was on the campaign trial. His anti-immigration rhetoric has also worried international students and caught the attention of the financial community.

Moody’s Investors Service focused on potential changes in government policies on immigration, student visas and poststudy work by international students in a report on Trump’s proposals. Immigration changes could immediately affect universities’ international enrollment, which has spiked by 73 percent in the last decade, Moody’s wrote.

“Loss of tuition revenue from international students, an important revenue diversifier for some universities, would be credit negative, particularly for universities with less well-known global brands and those that more recently entered the international student market,” according to Moody’s. Experts, meanwhile, wondered what Trump’s economic proposals could do to tuition revenue.

If Trump’s policies like trade protectionism and infrastructure spending end up boosting middle-class families’ fortunes, it could mean a boom for enrollments as families attain a newfound ability to send students to college. Subsequently, that would likely boost college revenues. But if the income gap widens under Trump, or if student aid is cut substantially, enrollments could fall."