Before the Trump administration, there were roughly 1.2 million international students and postdocs in the United States.
Posted by Bulwark Takes, Checked
- Sources
- 5 support1 context
- Said
- 1 time·
- Confidence
- 70%
Bulwark TakesAug 29, 2026
The claim's core figure is supported: Open Doors-based reporting puts international students in the U.S. at about 1.2 million for the 2024-25 academic year, before the Trump administration's 2025 policies took effect.
What was said
… Yeah, why would you study here when you might have opportunities in the UK and Australia and China and all these other places that are, like, welcoming you with open arms? And, by the way, it's working, right? So I just looked up the numbers. You know, before Trump, there were roughly 1.2 million international students and postdocs in the United States. It's all fields, STEM and non-STEM. Just in fall 2025, so before they'd even been in office for a year, the number of new international students was 17% down year-on-year, and just recently, the best data we don't know enrollment numbers yet for the fall, we …
Bulwark Takes · · from the transcriptPost →What we found
Supports. Reuters and Inside Higher Ed report that some 1.2 million international students studied in the U.S. during the 2024-2025 academic year, a period that began before Trump's second administration.[1][2]
Supports. The Open Doors 2025 figures (1,177,766 international students in 2024/2025) and the Boston Globe's report of roughly 1.2 million students for 2024-25 corroborate the headline number.[3][4]
Supports. NBER reports about 65,850 postdoctoral researchers in the U.S. in 2023, and says most postdocs are temporary residents, so adding postdocs makes the combined total only modestly above 1.2 million.[5]
Context. Nature's SEVIS-based count of about 1.3 million students and OPT participants for 2025-26 is a different measure and period, and it is roughly consistent with the claim's rounded figure.[6]
Sources
6 sources: 1 fact-checker, 4 not rated, 1 tier 1
- 1Fewer foreign students, fewer dollars: US colleges feel the ...reuters.com · fact-checker · cited for: supports
- 2Fewer International Students Came to the U.S. This Fallinsidehighered.com · not rated · cited for: supports
- 3Open Doors 2025: International Student Enrollment Dataiie.org · not rated · cited for: supports
- 4As Trump took office, number of international students at Mass ...bostonglobe.com · not rated · cited for: supports
- 5The Economics of Postdoctoral Researcher Positionsnber.org · not rated · cited for: supports
- 6International PhD student numbers in US hold steady — for nownature.com · tier 1 · cited for: context
Where this claim was made
Said in 1 published post
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