The American campus served as a launchpad for global ambition for decades. The promise was as follows: gain a degree from a U.S. university and you might as well be holding a passport to a better life, lined with prestige, prosperity and the occasional patent. Yet in 2025 that proposition is looking like an expensive gamble. Students the world over are turning their backs on the American higher education system. Nepalis, always late to global shifts but quick to embrace their consequences, may soon follow.
The Chinese were the first to sour. Once the largest cohort of international students in America, they are now deserting it in droves. In 2019-20 nearly 372,000 Chinese students were enrolled in American colleges. By 2023-24 that number had slumped to 277,000. Pandemic travel bans were the immediate cause, but the deeper rot runs through geopolitics and economics. American degrees still impress on paper but they no longer guarantee a foothold in an unforgiving job market. Many haigui—those who return from study abroad—now find their foreign credentials met with suspicion at home, but mostly by employers fearful of espionage. Not for nothing did the boss of Gree Electric recently declare she would not hire them.
Nor is the scepticism confined to Beijing. The number of Nepali students in America peaked at 23,435 in March 2024. By January 2025 it had tumbled to 16,933, down 28% in under a year. A casual observer might blame tighter U.S. visa policies. In May Washington announced it would begin “aggressively” revoking student visas for those in sensitive science and technology fields or with nebulous links to Communist Party entities. But although the rhetoric is targeted squarely at Chinese nationals, the effect is broader. Prospective Nepali applicants—particularly those eyeing STEM degrees—now find themselves in a world where visa approval is no longer predictable, and post-graduation prospects increasingly bleak.
This is a problem for America, whose universities rely on foreign students for their solvency. At elite institutions nearly a third of students are foreigners. At public universities—bereft of generous endowments and burdened with ever-thinning state subsidies—the dependency is more existential. Foreign students pay higher tuition fees, and in some cases, keep entire departments afloat. As interest wanes, budget shortfalls loom.
It is also a problem for Nepal, whose middle class has naturally seen American education as a form of educational arbitrage: borrow locally, earn globally. The logic is tidy. Nepali students, willing to endure overstretched finances and underheated dorms, would gain access to high-wage labour markets unavailable at home. After a few years abroad—perhaps via the Optional Practical Training (OPT) route, perhaps via marriage or Silicon Valley serendipity—they would send back remittances or better yet, never return.
But that model is fraying. The American job market has cooled, and immigration pathways are tightening. The travel bans of the Trump era have returned with bureaucratic polish and strategic focus. Nationals of countries deemed high-risk now face restrictions not for who they are but for what they might become. A master’s student in artificial intelligence could be seen less as a promising researcher than a possible threat. It doesn’t help that overstayed student visas have become a political bogeyman. Nepalis, who historically maintain one of the highest visa overstay rates, are unlikely to be spared scrutiny.
Meanwhile alternatives are rising. Britain, with its two-year post-study work visa and relatively stable immigration policies, is still popular. Canada has courted international students aggressively, providing permanent residency pathways and abundant part-time work opportunities. Australia and New Zealand, once dismissed as too far and too niche, now look positively pragmatic. Even regional hubs—Singapore, Japan, even the UAE—confer English-language instruction, credible degrees and proximity to home without the moral panic of Western border politics.
Crucially, cost is reasserting itself as a deterrent. A four-year undergraduate degree in America can easily cost $200,000, a sum that dwarfs the GDP per capita of most rich and developing countries. Scholarships exist. For many middle-class families, sending a child to study in America requires a combination of bank loans, land sales and high-stakes hope. If the post-graduation payoff is no longer assured the risk-reward equation breaks down.
Nepali students, always practical beneath their ambitions, are beginning to reassess. The U.S. still retains some gravitational pull in specific fields: elite STEM programmes, liberal arts education, business schools with deep alumni networks. But even here cracks are visible. OPT extensions for STEM graduates, long a reliable stepping-stone to H-1B visas, are becoming harder to navigate. University rankings, though still dominated by American institutions, are seeing encroachment from rivals in Britain, Asia and the Middle East. At the top the hierarchy remains. But the floor beneath it is shifting.
America’s universities built their global reputation on openness: intellectual, cultural and geographic. Now in their attempts to protect national interests they risk closing the very doors that made them great. For prospective Nepali students the American dream degree used to symbolised escape from local mediocrity and inherited limitations. Increasingly, it looks like a trap door.
A few may still go, armed with scholarships, exceptional CVs or sheer grit. But the herd is thinning. As one Kathmandu counsellor said, “Parents are asking different questions now. Not only ‘Will he get in?’ but ‘Will he get out?’” ■
