The Latest on International Students in the US

( Josh Reynolds/For The Washington Post via / Getty Images )
[MUSIC - Brian Lehrer Show Theme]
Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We begin with a tale of two commencements, Harvard's yesterday and Columbia's last week. What a contrast when the president of each university spoke in support of their international students. Here's the clip you may have heard in the last day being widely played and shared of Harvard President Alan Garber at Harvard's commencement yesterday.
Harvard President Alan Garber: Members of the class of 2025 from down the street, across the country, and around the world.
[applause and cheers]
Around the world, just as it should be.
[cheers]
Brian Lehrer: Harvard President Alan Garber and the student reaction yesterday. What a contrast to when Columbia President Claire Shipman spoke in support of that school's international students last week.
President Claire Shipman: We firmly believe that our international students have the same rights to freedom of speech as everyone else, and they should not be targeted by the government for exercising that right.
Brian Lehrer: Columbia President Claire Shipman after that school had become a symbol to her critics, including many of those booing students, of caving to President Trump, weaponizing antisemitism to attack higher education and liberal values and her failure to intervene in support of recent graduate Mahmoud Khalil and student Mohsan Moussaoui, who was in this year's graduating class. Moussaoui was after a judge freed him from immigration detention.
Harvard's President Alan Garber got cheered by graduates for becoming a symbol of standing up to Trump. Part of what Garber was speaking in defiance of was Trump's new attempts to prohibit Harvard from enrolling international students. It's not just about pro-Palestinian activism, it's also the language of Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week that they will, "aggressively revoke the visas of Chinese students with ties to the Chinese Communist Party," he said, or studying in what Rubio called critical fields. It's also this from President Trump about the sheer number or percentages of any international students.
President Trump: These countries aren't helping us. They're not investing in Harvard and all of our. We are. Why would 31%, why would a number so big, number one, I think they should have a cap of maybe around 15%, not 31%. We have people want to go to Harvard and other schools. They can't get in because we have foreign students there.
Brian Lehrer: Now, some of this is playing out in court. Yet another development yesterday, simultaneous to the graduation ceremony, as it happened, a federal judge in Boston lifted or extended the injunction on Trump's ban on Harvard enrolling international students, at least for now. Let's talk about the escalating battle over Chinese and other international students at Harvard and elsewhere with Liam Knox, who covers admissions and enrollment for Inside Higher Ed and writes their admissions weekly newsletter. His latest article just out this morning is called Attacks on Chinese Students Could Wreak Havoc on Higher Ed. He wrote one in March, which is only getting more relevant, called International Enrollments Precarious Moment. Liam, thanks for coming on. What a time for higher ed in this country. Welcome back to WNYC.
Liam Knox: Thank you, Brian. What a time indeed.
Brian Lehrer: Listeners, help us report this story with your story of being an international student in the United States from China or anywhere else. Why study here rather than your country of origin? Why is it good for you and or good for the United States in your view or your experience? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Help us report this story with your story of being an international student, or if you're a faculty member or a parent, or maybe you think Trump is right that Harvard and some other schools are admitting too high a percentage of foreign students to the exclusion of Americans who should be prioritized more for those seats.
212-433-9692. We welcome your stories, international students, and faculty who supervise international students and teach them or your questions and comments from anyone else. 212-433-9692. Call or text. Liam, I want to start with the Trump clip and the issue he raises. He says Harvard student body is 31% international. I heard 25% in a news report this morning. Either way, that's a lot. Those numbers are pretty close to each other. Trump is raising the issue of if a Harvard education is so coveted and with so few seats each year, less than 2,000 a year, if I have my numbers right, in each freshman class, why shouldn't Americans be prioritized more than they are? The president is arguing. Do you know Harvard's rationale for enrolling that many from abroad?
Liam Knox: Harvard's rationale is very similar to a lot of colleges rationale for enrolling so many international students, which is that they actually, contrary to Trump's claim, they enrolling that many international students who often pay full tuition actually helps the universities subsidize their financial aid for domestic students. This claim that has been going around a lot in the past few months, that international students are supplanting domestic students, taking seats that might otherwise go to them, isn't exactly accurate. There's a huge international student population in the US, not just at Harvard, but also at public universities, even at community colleges.
There are community colleges that have in the double digits percentage of international students in their student bodies. This is a really important population of students in the US in undergraduate programs, and especially in graduate programs. These students are a major source of revenue for universities that helps fund research, it helps fund financial aid, but they're also just a really important source of cross-cultural exchange, intellectual exchange, academic exchange. That seems to be lost in a lot of the Trump administration's policy toward international students.
Brian Lehrer: Yes, I looked up the numbers for not just Harvard, but for the nation. According to the Institute of International Students, which publishes this data in a release last November, they said the percentage of international students nationally is 6%. I'd say it's hard to argue that that's excessive. Trump seemed to say 15% would be okay in the clip. Their release says, "International students accounted for 6% of the total U.S. higher education population and, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, contributed more than $50 billion to the U.S. economy in 2023."
The percentage at elite universities is higher than the national average. You seem to be confirming that. I'm seeing 13% at Penn Undergraduate, around 30% of Columbia students, including grad students, according to U.S. News & World Report. Can you talk a little bit more about what you said in your last answer, that some of that high number is because international students tend to pay the full freight tuition, and that helps subsidize financial aid for more American students?
Liam Knox: Sure. The international students are not-- they don't qualify for federal financial aid, they don't qualify for state financial aid. Obviously, as non-citizens, they pay the full tuition rate, and they also pay full fees. I was talking to a former, a longtime international student advisor just yesterday who has advised students at places like Ohio State and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He brought up what I thought was a very good point, which is that they also contribute a lot to the local economies around these universities.
Regardless, they are really a linchpin of the revenue streams of the economic model of these institutions. As you said, they do often pay full freight. Sometimes they pay two to three times more than domestic students to attend these universities and then to get an undergraduate degree, and then often to stay afterward and get graduate degrees, work in labs, contribute to research. That often helps universities, especially at this current moment when a lot of institutions are facing really serious demographic challenges and enrollment declines, and state funding issues.
If they're a public institution or just general financial issues, if they're a private institution, these international students, without them, there would be a really massive blow to the higher education sector in general. Certainly, a lot of institutions could stop offering the financial aid, even the financial aid, the amount that they've been able to offer for the past five or 10 years, that's going to go down significantly without international students there.
Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Here's Reza in Princeton. You're on WNYC. Reza, thank you for calling in.
Reza: Mr. Bryan, thank you very much for taking my phone call. I just want to correct something with your guest. There is inproportional things for the countries like me. I come from Iran. I had to go to Dubai and get my visa to come here. It's not easy for certain countries to get here because the advisors that are signing for graduate work mostly coming from China and India. There is in proportion. Even in Princeton right now, you have a Chinese department that running by Chinese. I am not agreeing with Mr. Trump on anything.
Let me just clear that today. I agree that we need to have somehow to go to all university, Ivy League universities, colleges. There are certain professors, they get their tenure, they're from China, India, and they fill the department from their own natives. It's hard for some of my friends from the best university in Iran to come to this country because there's nobody matching the scholarship with them, because they don't have a Chinese full professor tenure. Your guests can take over these. He's a knowledgeable person; he knows about the tenure.
Brian Lehrer: He told a compelling story. Have you heard that kind of thing before?
Liam Knox: I have heard that kind of thing before. I'm not sure I have heard some of the details that Reza was alleging there about professors and departments. There's certainly truth to the fact that some countries have a much easier time, have a much smoother short-term visa process, whether those are F1, which are student visas, or J1, which are exchange visas, than others. That actually often, I think, has to do with just how big the demand is.
In China, the demand for student visas has been extremely robust for a long time, and they have a much smoother, a much more lubricated visa process because of it. That's something that actually has happened over time over the past 20 years, as more Chinese students have sought to leave the country to go to the US or to go to the UK or Canada, et cetera.
Brian Lehrer: Yes, I think we're having a slight technical difficulty, folks, but we will try to get that straightened out as soon as we can. We will continue in a minute. We'll take a break. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Thanks for bearing with us. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Sorry for whatever technical difficulties we've been having. We continue with Liam Knox from Inside Higher Ed as we talk about international students at Harvard and nationally, and Donald Trump. Liam, can you hear me?
Liam: Yes, I can.
Brian Lehrer: The release from the Institute for International Students that I read from earlier said US hosts more than 1.1 million international students at higher ed institutions, reaching all-time high. India surpasses China as the top place of origin. Why India as number one, and for that matter, why India and China as the top two?
Liam Knox: These are countries, first of all, with obviously massive populations compared to other countries in the world. That's an important thing just to consider for context. They've both been vying for the top spot for a few years now. In China, there's been a lot of appetite for an American higher education for more than a decade now. For the past around 20 years, that's been a very important part of the relationship between the two countries is this academic exchange.
It's been a part of the diplomatic exchange between the two countries since the early 2000s. There is a lot of research money and especially in STEM fields. There's a lot of opportunity and innovation at American universities, or there has been for many years. There's a lot of appetite to take advantage of that on the part of both Chinese and Indian international students. A large portion of the Indian international student population are graduate students, which is how they really significantly differ from Chinese international students, most of whom historically have been undergraduates.
There's those Indian international students coming into American graduate programs. They're often studying things like engineering and computer science, and really emerging technical fields. Some of the most cutting-edge programs in the world are at American universities. Now, obviously, the Trump administration's policies, both around Chinese students this week and around international students in general, are really throwing a wrench into some of the flow of international students to the US from India, from China, from a lot of countries in the world, I'm sure, from Iran. There's a lot of uncertainty about whether the numbers that you are citing are going to continue to be nearly as high next year or the year after as they've been for the past decade.
Brian Lehrer: I just want to acknowledge that we're getting another call, but I don't think we need to go far down this rabbit hole. I just want to acknowledge another point of view on what the earlier caller from Princeton was saying. Listener writes that she, as a faculty member, never saw what he alleged that Indian and Chinese faculty favor those students over students from Iran and elsewhere. We note that that allegation was stated by one caller and denied by another. I want to stay on the larger issues. Let's take another call. This time, Thomas, who taught at Columbia in the School of International and Public Affairs, he says. Thomas here on WNYC. Hello.
Thomas: Hi, Brian. Good morning. How are you doing?
Brian Lehrer: Doing all right, thank you.
Thomas: Good. Yes. I taught at Columbia for a number of years with international students throughout, and I now teach in Paris at an international affairs school each spring. I've just returned a few days ago. The view from Paris and the view from Europe, where I met with other colleagues, is that America is now a potentially dangerous place for international students to come. One of my students was intending to go to Columbia with a full scholarship and is now frightened because she has been politically active and is by last indication, afraid to come to the United States for fear of perhaps having her visa suspended during maid study or perhaps ending up in ICE detention because she participated in some pro Palestinian demonstration in Paris.
It's viewed as a very, very serious situation where America is no longer safe for international students. I didn't find this, of course, when I was teaching at Columbia with many, many international students for many years who found it sometimes coming from countries where there was very limited free expression as a place where they could truly learn and be able to express their political views and cultural views without fearing the authoritarianism back home. Now, I'm afraid this is our home where we have to fear that authoritarianism.
Brian Lehrer: Thank you for articulating one of the central issues so well. Liam, I wonder if in your reporting or anywhere else in the inside higher ed universe, if you have data yet on international student enrollment for this coming fall. Are so many being scared off, never mind who Trump may succeed in blocking through his will, that international student enrollment is going to be way down?
Liam Knox: We do not have data yet for this fall, but I want to acknowledge that this is a real problem that I'm hearing from a lot of international students from a lot of international recruiters that I talk to who speak with families who are finding it more difficult than ever by a country mile to do their work. We're finding it more difficult to convince students that they won't be subject to an ICE raid if they come to school in the US. Just the media coverage of this alone has done a lot of damage to international students' perspectives on what it's like to study at American colleges.
That's not even to mention the actual ramifications of new policy. Those new policies, especially around really heightening scrutiny of student visa applicants, are going to also have a major effect. We just heard yesterday, Secretary of State Rubio talking about new policies around Chinese international students, both current students and those who will be applying for a visa in the future. There's been a pause on all interviews for short-term visas, both student visas and exchange visas from all countries.
As the State Department puts in place a new policy around vetting applicants based on their social media posts, there's going to be a much more narrow funnel to come into this country as an international student. While we haven't gotten the data yet and should have that in a few weeks or a few months, depending on the source, all signs point to a much smaller or at least a much less stable cohort of international students in the fall.
Brian Lehrer: Let's take a call from another faculty member who I think wants to expand on what the former faculty member from Columbia was just saying in the last call. Daphne in Newark, you're on WNYC. Hello, Daphne.
Daphne: Good morning. Yes, I think I want to expand on what the previous caller was saying because I don't think people understand exactly the implications of this. This is not just about international students. This is about the US. This is about America. One of the main reasons why us, why the US is like the shining city in the hill is because we are free to exchange intellectual ideas. It's not just having students, not having this ability to talk, to have people think differently, has implications to NASA, has implications to cancer, has implications to all kinds of things.
I'm to the opinion that we actually should do the opposite. We should allow students to stay if they want to, or allow an easier path. We can still maintain this incredible, incredible intellectual freedom that we have here. This is pretty dramatic. I don't think the average person understands. This is not just about accepting international students. It's really about being number one in engineering and medicine, so on and so forth.
Brian Lehrer: As well as open society, as the previous caller was saying.
Daphne: Absolutely.
Brian Lehrer: Daphne, thank you very much for your call. All right, Liam, let's get into some of the Harvard news specifically. We'll get into this new Marco Rubio statement about aggressively revoking the visas of many students from China. First, what happened in court yesterday regarding Trump's attempt to ban international enrollment at Harvard altogether?
Liam Knox: Actually, there was some potentially promising news yesterday on the Harvard front, or at least for Harvard. Harvard had initially been subject to an immediate decertification of its ability to enroll international students. That would have been and would be, if it continues down this road, totally devastating for the university. You mentioned something like a quarter of their student body are international. Yesterday in court, the Trump administration appeared to signal that it was willing to follow more of a gradual process.
This is at least a 30-day process to have approval for the decertification happen. This is typically a more involved bureaucratic process than the Trump administration has been pushing for, involving an agency called the Student Exchange and Visitor Program, which is housed under ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. These things typically take at least a month, if not many months, to investigate, to get approved stripping a university of its certification to enroll international students, which by the way, is something that historically and traditionally the US Government only does for schools that are offering maybe shady or phony programs pay for offering educational where their educational offerings are not up to par and students maybe are paying for the opportunity to apply for a student visa because it's a little bit quicker and a little bit easier.
That's very rare and certainly isn't the case at Harvard. These kinds of investigations take a while. What happened in court yesterday was a little bit of acknowledgement of that process. There's also been in courts some victories for Harvard. They filed a challenge to the Trump administration's decertification very shortly after the news broke, and a judge pretty immediately granted them a temporary restraining order as they adjudicate the case. There's a lot going on in the courts with Harvard and international students. Nothing is a done deal, and we're just going to have to see how it plays out.
Brian Lehrer: I heard a couple of commentators, not Trump supporters, but analysts on this issue, say Trump has more cards to play and Harvard's going to pay a price here, no matter what happens in court. I don't mean just on the enrollment of international students, but all these ways that Trump is now trying to play hardball with Harvard because Harvard is so publicly standing up to him. Does it look like that to you?
Liam Knox: It's certainly possible. I think there has been some of the architects of this attack on Harvard, including Christopher Ruffo, who is a longtime conservative activist in the higher education space, partially responsible, very much involved in Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida's campaign against that state's higher education sector a couple of years ago. There's plenty of evidence out there that the Trump administration's inner circle does believe that they have a lot of cards in their hand, that there is a plan to escalate this battle quite a lot more than it already is. The decertification of international students is the most extreme example we've seen so far. Even if the court--
Brian Lehrer: I wonder if even more extreme, depending on how you want to rank things that are extreme, is the threat to take the nonprofit status away from Harvard. Yes?
Liam Knox: Yes, absolutely. That would be a very extreme step, but it's certainly not impossible. A lot of the process of reporting on this, whether it's Harvard or Columbia or universities in Maine, a lot of the process of reporting on the Trump administration's higher education policies, their agenda for me, has been a process of talking to folks about possibilities that seem radical, that seem totally out of the question, that experts, people who have been involved in education policy for many, many years, say there's no way it's going to happen, and then watching it happen. We really don't know just how many more arrows the administration has in their quiver. I think it would be a mistake to underestimate that.
Brian Lehrer: Does it look to you like the Trump administration is actually going harder after Harvard on any of these in any of these directions compared to Columbia, which decided to try to play ball with them more? We heard, of course, the relative reactions by the student bodies at graduation to Harvard's president and Columbia's president. It was, I think, because of that comparison. Is Colombia any better off, as far as you could tell, in terms of what Trump still wants to do to it?
Liam Knox: Columbia is still able to enroll international students. They haven't been threatened with that, and they haven't had quite as much damage as now. Harvard has had to its federal grant money, which has been totally decimated or could be. Those are the threats there. The Trump administration seems to be playing a little bit more of a negotiation game with Colombia, whereas their position regarding Harvard seems to be more of a trading blows, basically.
Honestly, Colombia has, Colombia's position in trying to negotiate for itself hasn't won it nearly as much as I think administrators there hoped it would. There's still a lot on the table that could be taken away from Colombia, that they could be punished with. I think that is a lesson that Harvard administrators took to heart when they decided to really offer up some resistance that they're playing ball wasn't necessarily a winning strategy for Colombia, and that's still the case.
Brian Lehrer: Abby in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Abby.
Abby: Hi, Brian. Just to say I don't agree with Trump on anything. My husband teaches at NYU, and for several years now, his classes are almost entirely students from South Korea with very few local kids. I think it's because of the cost of a lot of these "elite schools" has become out of reach for American kids. The problem, of course, I think, is that Trump is not actually interested in getting more American kids, say, of all classes and colors. Probably it's a white supremacist playbook to get less international students and make America great again by getting the white elite back into the schools. I do see it as a problem that kids in the US can't afford these schools.
Brian Lehrer: Abby, are you willing to say what department your husband teaches in?
Abby: I won't say what department, but he's teaching art. I don't see any reason why South Korea specifically would need to have a bigger role in the field he's teaching in.
Brian Lehrer: Yes, Abby, thank you very much. NYU is another school, I'm sure, Liam, you would confirm this, that has a relatively high percentage of international students. Another listener write reacting to that caller. That point is very important. It means it's not about international students, it's about loyalty to Trump, period. On the economics that Abby is pointing up that you mentioned earlier, is there no alternative to having enough money for financial aid for those American students who are admitted to having so many full-fee paying international students as such a percentage of the student body? What about all these endowments? Harvard has the biggest endowment of any university in the country. I don't know what NYU's is. I imagine it's not small. If people want to have that debate, what about alternatives to getting more Americans in those seats as a percentage?
Liam Knox: It's a good question. Endowments are very difficult to tap into for that kind of thing. There's a lot of misunderstanding about what an endowment really is, just how wealthy it makes a university, and how much of it is liquid. I think there is a lot of the issue here, and not for NYU, which is a private university, but which, yes, enrolls an enormous amount of international students, I think almost 30% of their student body, but similar to Harvard. The way that schools subsidize their financial aid for domestic students has changed a lot over the past few decades.
It used to be that there was a lot more public money going into those efforts, especially at public universities. There was just a lot more funding for these kinds of access and financial aid initiatives. That has either stagnated or really dried up over the years. At the same time, enrollments are flagging, other sources of tuition revenue are flagging. The interesting thing here is that the Trump administration at the same time is saying they want more American students to be filling these seats has also been launching a broadside on the very idea of higher ed's viability and value in general, saying that more students should be entering the workforce right away, more students should be going to trade school.
You can argue the merits of those arguments, but those seats, that is a little bit of, on its face, a hypocritical stance to take if you're also saying that more American students should be making up a higher percentage of universities. I also think an important point to make here is that it's not a zero-sum game that international students, whether it's at NYU or at Portland State University, are a really crucial piece of the higher ed ecosystem in this country.
It's not really even just about financial aid and money. The students I talk to, the faculty I talk to, plenty of them have a lot of appreciation for the fact that in this country, there is this kind of transnational, cross-cultural, academic, and intellectual exchange. That goes away if there really is this kind of really severe attack on international students' ability to enroll in American colleges. I would say that it's not one or the other.
Brian Lehrer: By the way, to the last caller, listener writes, "I also teach at NYU and only have a smattering of international students each semester, so be careful about generalizing." Another listener writes, "While I find Trump's transactional xenophobia abhorrent, we should remember that the business model of America's private universities has fed a debt bubble that has trapped millions of Americans in a spiral that is often inescapable. Breaking that model apart from disingenuously or not, wouldn't be the worst thing Trump's arsonist inclinations could do, and should be handled separately from his attacks on the First Amendment," writes another listener.
Before we run out of time, I want to go specifically to Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, and Chinese students again. His statement this week said that he would "aggressively" revoke the student visas of many students from China if they were connected to the Chinese Communist Party or were in areas of critical study. What does connections to the Chinese party mean in that context?
Liam Knox: It's extremely vague, Brian, and I think that's part of the reason why so many folks I speak to are concerned. In China, it's not exactly easy to avoid some kind of affiliation with the Communist Party, whether that's participating in youth groups or just participating in civic society. It's obviously the political party in power. It's not clear whether the State Department is taking-- whether they mean formal membership in the party or some kind of affiliation.
Spokespeople for the State Department have declined to answer my questions about it. They've declined to answer plenty of reporters' questions about it. A spokesperson at a press conference yesterday said that they have to keep it broad in order to really give the administration the ability to protect national security. I think that kind of vagueness, that kind of broad scope, has a lot of people fearing that this is going to be a very sweeping dragnet, both for Chinese students and then potentially setting a precedent for other international students.
Brian Lehrer: Do you think they're looking for something specifically in terms of connections to the Chinese Communist Party that could pose a national security risk or an intelligence risk to the United States, or is this just another way for getting as many people as possible who aren't born here out of the country?
Liam Knox: I hesitate to make a value judgment there. I really have no idea. I did speak to people in higher ed this week who really believe it's the latter. I think there is some pretty good evidence for that. That evidence is just that we already have a vetting process. We have a pretty strict vetting process for student visas. Institutions have their own standards. Embassies and consulates have their own processes that they go through these new steps, these new stricter scrutiny that Rubio and the Trump administration are imposing do appear to be kind of just piling on top of what is already a pretty secure system. It's hard not to see it as, at least to some extent, just kind of a way to really narrow the funnel for international students to the point of almost closing it off.
Brian Lehrer: What does studying in critical fields mean when Rubio says that would be another criterion by which he would kick some Chinese students out, revoke their visas?
Liam Knox: That's a question I also asked some people at the State Department yesterday, and could not get a straight answer. There was State Department spokesperson who gave a press conference yesterday about this, who said that the critical fields, when they say critical, they mean fields related to national security. She said the nature of how we keep America safe and secure and more prosperous, but it is important to keep a broad base because that could mean many things, and that it's going to be up to the folks who make the decisions.
This language sounds extremely vague and difficult to hook your teeth into. I think that it does to me as well. I think that that is not an accident. It is very vague. There's going to be a lot of scrambling among universities and among students and applicants to figure out just what the State Department means by this new policy unless they clarify it. That's that could have a very sweeping impact on international enrollment in the US for Chinese students, who make up still the largest portion of international applicants and enrollees in the US, and for other international students who fear that the same policies are going to apply to them soon.
Brian Lehrer: Last question, your article on this is headlined Attacks on Chinese Students Could Wreak Havoc on Higher Education. Why wreak havoc?
Liam Knox: Like I said, Chinese students make up the largest portion by far of the international student body, just followed by India. They also, especially, make up the largest portion of full-paying international students. At a time when higher ed is really struggling financially, both because of the very recent Trump administration withdrawal of grants, but also because of enrollment troubles, because of just the sector shuddering a little bit in the midst of a lot of big economic and social change, that is a straw that might break the camel's back for a lot of institutions.
That's especially true of research universities where students, not only it's not just about students who pay tuition, but make up the backbone of a lot of labs, of a lot of high-need emerging fields, especially in STEM. The capacity for universities to produce the kind of research they have been in the past is going to be decimated if the number of Chinese students is even halved in this country, and especially if the ramifications of the past few months of the Trump administration's international student policy lead to a much smaller international enrollment in the fall.
Brian Lehrer: Liam Knox covers admissions and enrollment for Inside Higher Ed and writes their admissions weekly newsletter. Thanks so much for joining us today. Really informative. I appreciate it.
Liam Knox: Thank you, Brian.
Brian Lehrer: Callers, thank you. Texters, thank you. Obviously, so much to cover with respect to the changing landscape of the conflict between President Trump and really all of higher education in America. We will continue to discuss it on this show.
Copyright © 2025 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.
New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.