New State Department data has shown a 34% year-on-year drop in F-1 visa issuance in 2025, including a shocking 76% decline in study visas issued to Indian students compared to 2023.
While a contraction was widely anticipated amid Trump’s broad anti-immigration crackdown and major visa barrier’s including last year’s interview freeze, the magnitude of the fall was larger than what experts on the ground in India had foreseen.
Founder of MSM Unify education agency, Sanjay Laul, said he had been tracking interview capacity and processing predictability erode for over a year and was expecting a decline.
“[But] a 76% drop in one market in two years is a different order of events. That’s not a market cooling,that’s a pipeline nearly shutting off for a stretch of months,” he told The PIE News.
Laul said applicant interest did not fall “anywhere close to that rate” across his network. “When issuance falls off a cliff in a single month while interest stays roughly level, that’s a capacity signal and processing signal, not a demand signal,”
The data showed less than half the number of F-1 visas were issued in June 2025 compared to the previous year, reflecting the impact of the near month-long visa interview suspension. Among Indian students specifically, visa issuance fell by 60% during this time.
Laul’s reports matched those from ForeignAdmits, an India-based study abroad platform backed by Crizac, which found visa barriers to be the primary driver of the trend, outweighing the impact of students turning away from the US.
“The major challenge we saw was with the visa slots and the increase in rejections. The slots were not available on time and were available in very few quantities, and at the same time rejections are high right now,” said ForeignAdmits founder Nikhil Jain.
Institutions can’t advertise their way out of an interview backlog
Sanjay Laul, MSM Unify
But that’s not to say students and their families aren’t paying attention. Jain said that while undergraduate and MBA students are still looking at the US, they are applying to more countries as backup options.
He added declines were most evident among master’s students weighing post-study work opportunities who are increasingly going elsewhere, while MBA students are looking to “wait it out” or turning to Europe and the UK.
Contrarily, EdWise founder Sushil Sukhwani highlighted demand as the primary issue. “There has been a loss of appetite for the US, although it varies across different segments of the market,” he said.
“Harvard will never go empty, and NYU will not go away, but those students represent the classes, not the masses.”
Sukhwani named Singapore, New Zealand, France and Germany as the beneficiaries of this trend, attracting greater interest from Indian students. “However, the growth of these emerging destinations cannot compensate for the decline across the ‘big four’”.
He highlighted the increasing perception of the US as an unwelcoming destination, driven by the mishandling of policies such as the pausing of Curricular Practical Training (CPT) programs and the incoming ending of duration of status.
At the same time, Sukhwani acknowledged the undeniable impact of visa barriers, highlighting the unpredictability of visa refusals and the scarcity of appointments, which he claimed was partly due to agents using bots to book as many as 90% of available slots to sell them on.
“There is also no consistency in how visa decisions are being made. We saw an IIT Bombay student with a scholarship to attend a top university still have their visa rejected. There is a method to the madness, but it is the madness of inconsistency.”
For Laul, it is the volume and concentration of the Indian student market that caused such a steep decline compared to other top sending nations like China and South Korea, where visa issuance dropped by 37% and 45% since 2023 respectively.
“India sends more F-1 applicants through a smaller number of intake windows than most other markets, so consulate capacity is already stretched thin before any disruption hits.”
“When a freeze or slowdown lands during peak season, a market with that kind of concentrated demand absorbs a disproportionate share of the damage,” he said.
On top of volume, Jain said a strained US-India geopolitical relationship could have also played a role, alongside students being underprepared for visa interviews, noting an increase in 21.4(b) refusals when students are unable to demonstrate their stay in the US will be temporary.
And if US immigration barriers ease? Laul and Jain warned that trust would be slow to rebuild.
“Institutions can’t advertise their way out of an interview backlog. What rebuilds trust is a predictable cycle: admit, interview, visa, arrival, repeated enough times that families stop treating a US offer as a coin flip,” said Laul.
He advised US colleges to “diversity within India, not just beyond it” focusing on underserved tier two and tier three cities where interest remains.
What’s more, he said the prospect of worsening declines would largely depend on whether competitor nations capitalise on the interest shifting away from the US, warning that even if processing stabilises, that share would become structurally harder to win back.
