Classes began this week for students at the University at Buffalo, a public research university in western New York, but there were about 750 fewer international students on campus than expected.
The new students who did make it gathered for a welcome from the school’s dean of students. “We know you have had to overcome hurdles to be here – especially this summer, with visas,” Tomás Aguirre told the assembled students, representing more than 100 countries. “And I just wanted you to know that we are so glad you were able to make it.”
The sentiment was common among the students, too. “For me, the main thing is that I got here,” says Daria Tofan, a freshman from Romania, who didn’t get her student visa until about a week before orientation. “It was awful.”
Over the last six months the Trump Administration has clamped down on international student visas, temporarily pausing and then revamping the student visa interview process and bringing more scrutiny to the vetting system. That led to long delays and meant many accepted students couldn’t get appointments at embassies or consulates in time for the start of the fall semester.
“I only had one goal from the beginning, it was to go to college here, so if I didn’t reach that goal it would have been very painful,” explains Shivaka Sing, a freshman psychology major from New Delhi. When she got accepted to Buffalo she joined a group chat of other students from India. Many of them couldn’t get a visa appointment in time to start the fall semester with her. “Most of them are now transferring to the U.K. because of the visa situation,” she says. “Some are planning to defer to the spring semester.”
Fewer International students on campuses across the country this fall
At the University at Buffalo, the overall decline of about 15% of international students is happening mostly in graduate programs, especially in the STEM fields. But it’s not just Buffalo. Universities all over the country are experiencing similar drops. Arizona State University reported a fall semester decline for the first time since 2020. Declines have been announced at universities in Texas, Missouri and Illinois. The state of Massachusetts is expecting about 10,000 fewer new international students this year.
“One would describe the situation with international students to be very much in flux with tremendous levels of uncertainty,” says Fanta Aw, who leads the Association of International Educators, or NASFA.
Last year more than a million international students studied in the U.S., contributing about $43 billion into the U.S. economy. But Aw’s organization predicts a drop of about 150,000 new international students this fall, leading to a decline of about 15% overall. If that happens, local economies could lose as much as $7 billion in spending and more than 60,000 jobs.
“The loss of international students will lead to a significant downturn in innovation,” Aw says. “This will affect communities large and small.”
The decline is also happening at a time when other countries, like the U.K. and South Korea have stepped up to fill the gap.
Mixed messages from federal government on student visas
President Trump has said he wants to keep campus safe. The State Department has revoked about 6,000 student visas so far this year, citing threats of academic espionage, support for terrorist groups in Gaza and criminal behavior.
And in May, the State Department said it would “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students and add additional scrutiny for future visa applications from China.
But in recent days Trump has signaled a shift. This week, Trump told reporters he planned to double the amount of Chinese students studying in the U.S. He defended those comments a day later, saying “I like that their [China] students come here. I like that other countries students’ come here. And you know what would happen if they didn’t? Our college system would go to hell very quickly.”
Still, President Trump and conservative leaders have said they want to make sure that foreign students aren’t taking spots that could go to American citizens. But leaders at the University at Buffalo said at least at their institution, that’s not something U.S. families need to worry about.
“We recruit all qualified students to the University at Buffalo and are eager for all of them to attend,” explains Scott Webber, the provost there. “I would assure you that our international students do not take spots, you know for other students who are qualified to attend and would be successful here.” Total enrollment is actually up at the university overall, and there are still 4,000 international students on campus this year.
International students bring money and culture to campuses
“What they bring to the university is this incredibly rich, diverse cultural experience for students who may not have ever been outside of New York state,” says Webber. “They really bring a different flavor to campus.”
International students also contribute financially to universities, as many pay full tuition. That revenue has the potential to benefit American students, by funding things like financial aid or stabilizing tuition costs.
As one of the lucky ones who made it to campus at the University at Buffalo, Shivika Sing, says finally being done with the visa process, and arriving on campus has meant she can focus on finding her classrooms, making sure she has all her books and supplies, and getting her dorm room set up.
“I bought a pink Lilo & Stitch soft toy to sleep with,” she says. It is one of three stuffed animals on her bed. Those toys are key, she says, to warding off the homesickness that comes from being seven thousand miles from home.
Beyond grades, raising humans, not robots, thoughts from the founder of Veritas Learning Circle
The world our children are growing up in no longer resembles the one we were educated for. Traditional schooling models, built around standardized testing, rigid curricula, and a narrow definition of success, are rapidly losing relevance. We are not preparing for the future. We are already in it. And the rules of the game must change.
For decades, academic grades and test scores have been treated as passports to opportunity. Yet research continues to show that academic success is not a reliable predictor of success in the real world. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the very notion of what constitutes meaningful work and learning is shifting beneath our feet. The question is no longer, “What jobs will exist?” but rather, “What kinds of humans will thrive?”
Beyond teachers and textbooks
In countries like Pakistan, concerns about teacher quality have long haunted education. But with the advent of AI, these barriers can be reimagined. A child in Karachi could have access to the same caliber of resources as one in Helsinki or Singapore. Knowledge has been democratized. What will matter now is not what students learn, but how they learn and who they become in the process.
This also means the teacher’s role must fundamentally shift. Teachers are no longer just transmitters of knowledge; they must become facilitators and co-learners, guiding students as they design their own paths and collaborate with technology. This is why the school of the future must evolve into something far greater than a delivery system for content. It must become a community: a place where students, teachers, and parents co-create learning journeys, where technology enhances but does not replace human connection, and where every child is guided to uncover their unique gifts.
Honoring our humanness
We are not here to build robots who outperform machines. We are here to raise humans who can collaborate with machines while staying rooted in empathy, creativity, and self-awareness. The teacher’s role will no longer be to enforce discipline but to cultivate self-discipline, curiosity, and resilience in students.
In an era where children are drowning in screen time, schools must become sanctuaries of presence — spaces where conflict is resolved through dialogue, friendships are nurtured, and young people learn what it means to see and to be seen.
A call to collaborate
I do not claim to have all the answers. In truth, none of us can predict exactly where this journey with AI will take us. But I do know this: we cannot continue working in silos. The education sector has been segregated for too long. To reimagine the future, we need educators working hand-in-hand with scientists, technologists, financial leaders, artists, and parents.
This is not just a “nice to have.” It is our collective responsibility. Because it no longer takes just a village to raise a child — in the age of AI, it takes a global village.
I share these reflections not as definitive solutions but as an invitation. An invitation to dream together, to create together, and yes, even to rebel together against outdated systems that no longer serve our children. The future of education will not be written by one person, or one institution, but by a community of people who dare to believe that a better way is possible. The time to begin is now. This is a call to the rebels, the dreamers, the scientists, and the artists — to come together and redefine the purpose of today’s schools.
This story was reported by and originally published by APM Reports in connection with its podcast Sold a Story: How Teach Kids to Read Went So Wrong.
When voters elected Donald Trump in November, most people who worked at the U.S. Department of Education weren’t scared for their jobs. They had been through a Trump presidency before, and they hadn’t seen big changes in their department then. They saw their work as essential, mandated by law, nonpartisan and, as a result, insulated from politics.
Then, in early February, the Department of Government Efficiency showed up. Led at the time by billionaire CEO Elon Musk, and known by the cheeky acronym DOGE, it gutted the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, posting on X that the effort would ferret out “waste, fraud and abuse.”
DOGE is looking for help from the general public!
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A post from the Department of Government Efficiency.
When it was done, DOGE had cut approximately $900 million in research contracts and more than 90 percent of the institute’s workforce had been laid off. (The current value of the contracts was closer to $820 million, data compiled by APM Reports shows, and the actual savings to the government was substantially less, because in some cases large amounts of money had been spent already.)
Among staff cast aside were those who worked on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — also known as the Nation’s Report Card — which is one of the few federal education initiatives the Trump administration says it sees as valuable and wants to preserve.
The assessment is a series of tests administered nearly every year to a national sample of more than 10,000 students in grades 4, 8 and 12. The tests regularly measure what students across the country know in reading, math and other subjects. They allow the government to track how well America’s students are learning overall. Researchers can also combine the national data with the results of tests administered by states to draw comparisons between schools and districts in different states.
The assessment is “something we absolutely need to keep,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said at an education and technology summit in San Diego earlier this year. “If we don’t, states can be a little manipulative with their own results and their own testing. I think it’s a way that we keep everybody honest.”
But researchers and former Department of Education employees say they worry that the test will become less and less reliable over time, because the deep cuts will cause its quality to slip — and some already see signs of trouble.
“The main indication is that there just aren’t the staff,” said Sean Reardon, a Stanford University professor who uses the testing data to research gaps in learning between students of different income levels.
All but one of the experts who make sure the questions in the assessment are fair and accurate — called psychometricians — have been laid off from the National Center for Education Statistics. These specialists play a key role in updating the test and making sure it accurately measures what students know.
“These are extremely sophisticated test assessments that required a team of researchers to make them as good as they are,” said Mark Seidenberg, a researcher known for his significant contributions to the science of reading. Seidenberg added that “a half-baked” assessment would undermine public confidence in the results, which he described as “essentially another way of killing” the assessment.
The Department of Education defended its management of the assessment in an email: “Every member of the team is working toward the same goal of maintaining NAEP’s gold-standard status,” it read in part.
The National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policies for the national test, said in a statement that it had temporarily assigned “five staff members who have appropriate technical expertise (in psychometrics, assessment operations, and statistics) and federal contract management experience” to work at the National Center for Education Statistics. No one from DOGE responded to a request for comment.
Harvard education professor Andrew Ho, a former member of the governing board, said the remaining staff are capable, but he’s concerned that there aren’t enough of them to prevent errors.
“In order to put a good product up, you need a certain number of person-hours, and a certain amount of continuity and experience doing exactly this kind of job, and that’s what we lost,” Ho said.
The Trump administration has already delayed the release of some testing data following the cutbacks. The Department of Education had previously planned to announce the results of the tests for 8th grade science, 12th grade math and 12th grade reading this summer; now that won’t happen until September. The board voted earlier this year to eliminate more than a dozen tests over the next seven years, including fourth grade science in 2028 and U.S. history for 12th graders in 2030. The governing board has also asked Congress to postpone the 2028 tests to 2029, citing a desire to avoid releasing test results in an election year.
“Today’s actions reflect what assessments the Governing Board believes are most valuable to stakeholders and can be best assessed by NAEP at this time, given the imperative for cost efficiencies,” board chair and former North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue said earlier this year in a press release.
The National Assessment Governing Board canceled more than a dozen tests when it revised the schedule for the National Assessment of Educational Progress in April. This annotated version of the previous schedule, adopted in 2023, shows which tests were canceled. Topics shown in all caps were scheduled for a potential overhaul; those annotated with a red star are no longer scheduled for such a revision.
Recent estimates peg the annual cost to keep the national assessment running at about $190 million per year, a fraction of the department’s 2025 budget of approximately $195 billion.
Adam Gamoran, president of the William T. Grant Foundation, said multiple contracts with private firms — overseen by Department of Education staff with “substantial expertise” — are the backbone of the national test.
“You need a staff,” said Gamoran, who was nominated last year to lead the Institute of Education Sciences. He was never confirmed by the Senate. “The fact that NCES now only has three employees indicates that they can’t possibly implement NAEP at a high level of quality, because they lack the in-house expertise to oversee that work. So that is deeply troubling.”
The cutbacks were widespread — and far outside of what most former employees had expected under the new administration.
“I don’t think any of us imagined this in our worst nightmares,” said a former Education Department employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration. “We weren’t concerned about the utter destruction of this national resource of data.”
“At what point does it break?” the former employee asked.
Every state has its own test for reading, math and other subjects. But state tests vary in difficulty and content, which makes it tricky to compare results in Minnesota to Mississippi or Montana.
“They’re totally different tests with different scales,” Reardon said. “So NAEP is the Rosetta stone that lets them all be connected.”
Reardon and his team at Stanford used statistical techniques to combine the federal assessment results with state test scores and other data sets to create the Educational Opportunity Project. The project, first released in 2016 and updated periodically in the years that followed, shows which schools and districts are getting the best results — especially for kids from poor families. Since the project’s release, Reardon said, the data has been downloaded 50,000 times and is used by researchers, teachers, parents, school boards and state education leaders to inform their decisions.
For instance, the U.S. military used the data to measure school quality when weighing base closures, and superintendents used it to find demographically similar but higher-performing districts to learn from, Reardon said.
If the quality of the data slips, those comparisons will be more difficult to make.
“My worry is we just have less-good information on which to base educational decisions at the district, state and school level,” Reardon said. “We would be in the position of trying to improve the education system with no information. Sort of like, ‘Well, let’s hope this works. We won’t know, but it sounds like a good idea.’”
Seidenberg, the reading researcher, said the national assessment “provided extraordinarily important, reliable information about how we’re doing in terms of teaching kids to read and how literacy is faring in the culture at large.”
Producing a test without keeping the quality up, Seidenberg said, “would be almost as bad as not collecting the data at all.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
In the 1980s, a public interest law group sued the state of New Jersey, saying that the way it funded education left its low-income, urban school districts at a disadvantage compared to wealthier, suburban districts.
The lawsuit, Abbott v. Burke, yielded a number of different decisions, including a requirement that the state offer free, full-day, high-quality preschool for children ages 3 and 4 in 31 school districts.
This new school year marks the 26th since the program was created. Researchers have found that children who attend the preschool program are better prepared for school later on, but enrollment has been dwindling. And with New Jersey leaders now focused on bringing preschool to all districts, supporters worry that the early learning program focused on children in low-income areas may not get the attention it needs.
Park perk for kids
Did you know every fourth grader and their family can get free admission to national parks, monuments and forests? The Sierra Club’s Outdoors for All program launched in 2015 and offers free passes each school year. Vouchers for students can be downloaded through the program’s official website.
This story about free preschool was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the early childhood newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
