Business schools confront Trump immigration policies

US business schools remain hugely popular overseas, at least for now. But while top institutions enrolled more students in their full-time MBA programmes last fall, fewer of them come from other countries, according to Bloomberg. As the Donald Trump administration unleashes a barrage of measures aimed at migration, could this be the start of a waning cycle for foreign students?

According to the Graduate Management Admission Council, which conducts an annual survey of business schools, the majority of applicants for the class of 2026 in the US (who enrolled this past fall), 61 per cent, came from abroad. But 20 of the top 30 US schools as ranked by Bloomberg Businessweek reduced the number of foreign students in the enrolled class, an analysis of class profiles and figures provided directly by schools shows.

The single biggest drop came at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business, where the number of international students fell by more than a third, and their share of the class dropped from 37 per cent to 24 per cent. A spokesman for Georgia Tech, Blair Meeks, said by email the decline wasn’t intentional: “Our enrollment target was similar to the prior year. The drop was simply that yield was lower than we anticipated.” Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago also sharply cut the number of foreign students in their graduate business programs.

In the fall of 2023, Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business and Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business had the largest share of foreign students among top schools: 59 per cent of the class of 2025 came from abroad. Last fall, those shares fell to 49 per cent and 46 per cent, respectively.

Admissions officials at both schools said the moves were meant to rightsize the international population. “Prior to the pandemic, for many, many years, we traditionally had 35 per cent or 36 per cent international,” says Jim Holmen, the director of admissions and financial aid for Kelley’s Full-Time +Flex MBA programme. That changed as fewer Americans applied to MBA programmes -- as Kelley’s classes shrank, the share of international students grew, though their numbers stayed steady, says Holmen. “The growth was because of the smaller domestic population in the class,” he says. Now the goal is to return to having international students comprise 30 per cent to 35 per cent of the class.