How Trump’s Immigration Policies Are Remaking US B-Schools
International enrollment in MBA programs is down and poised to drop further.
Stephen Jenkins, senior director for graduate recruitment and admissions at Texas Christian University’s Neeley School of Business.
Photographer: Desiree Rios for Bloomberg Businessweek
Around a year ago, the admissions team at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business thought they had their incoming fall 2025 MBA class set—about 70 students, give or take. But their plans began to unravel in late May, says Shelbi Brookshire, Smith’s assistant dean of marketing and graduate admissions, when the Trump administration paused interviews for student visa applicants around the world.
The pause lasted three weeks, ostensibly for consulates to implement protocols for screening applicants’ social media use, says Sasha Ramani, head of corporate strategy for MPower Financing, which lends to foreign graduate students in North America. But the backlog the pause created extended through the summer. By the time the next semester started in late August, so many international students were still without visas that the incoming class had been reduced to 36 students. Economic volatility played a small role in halving the class too. “There were domestic and international students who felt anxiety and didn’t want to leave their full-time jobs, so some of them pivoted to working professional programs,” Brookshire says. “But the bulk was the international population.”