Overview

• President Trump’s nine-page “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” was sent to nine universities, including MIT, Dartmouth, Penn, Brown, Vanderbilt, USC, Texas at Austin, Arizona and Virginia.
• The proposal ties benefits to compliance and sets penalties that include loss of preferential federal funding for one to two years and repayment of funds during any period of noncompliance.
• Beyond enrollment caps, the memo outlines merit-only admissions, required standardized tests, administrative neutrality, gender-category restrictions, civics instruction for foreign students, disclosure of foreign gifts and information-sharing with DHS or the State Department upon request.
• International inflows were already shrinking before the memo, with August 2025 entries at just over 313,000—down 19% year over year—and campus data showing declines this fall, including a 1% dip at Illinois and 19% at Buffalo with steeper drops in graduate intake.
• Financial strain is emerging as DePaul University moved to austerity after roughly a 30% fall in international enrollment, while NAFSA and JB International project a 30–40% drop in new international students, nearly $7 billion in lost spending and more than 60,000 jobs at risk.