Where Do We Go From Here? A decade in Illinois, and What I'm Holding onto

I arrived in Illinois in the fall of 2014, an international student at a small liberal arts college where everything was new and most things were slightly overwhelming. I was learning a campus, a country, and a version of myself all at once, on the steep and unforgiving curve that every new international student knows. I did not understand half of what was happening around me. I only knew it was exciting.
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Two years later, in November 2016, I walked past a protest on the quad after the election results came in. I remember registering that something significant was happening and not fully understanding what. The gravity of that moment arrived for me later, in pieces, over years.

What I did understand, even then, was that a handful of people on that campus were paying close attention to students like me. The Dean of Students who noticed when my energy shifted. A DSO who explained a form three times without making me feel small. A residence life staff member who asked a real question and waited for a real answer. I didn't have language for it yet, but I was watching a profession at work, and it was the first time I thought: people do this for a living, and I want to be one of them.

International Educators of Illinois was one of the first professional conferences I ever attended. I remember how close-knit it felt, how much knowledge people gave away for free, and how the folks in the room were interesting not only because of their expertise but because of their obvious sense of purpose. That combination is rare. It made the work look worth doing.

What a decade changed
The numbers from that period still surprise me when I look them up.

The year I arrived, Illinois hosted 46,574 international students, fifth in the nation, up 9.5 percent from the year before. Nationally, enrollment hit a record 974,926 that year, growing at the fastest rate in thirty-five years. That was the water I was swimming in. Growth felt like the default setting.

For a while it held. In 2024/25, Illinois hosted 66,635 international students, still fifth in the country, with the second-largest numeric increase of any state that year. Nationally, 1,177,766 students, another record.
 
Then the direction changed. The IIE Fall 2025 Snapshot, drawn from more than 825 institutions, reported an overall enrollment decline of about 1 percent, the first drop after four years of growth, with new enrollment down 17 percent and graduate enrollment down 12 percent. A Chronicle analysis of State Department data found roughly 97,000 fewer F-1 visas issued ahead of the 2025-26 year, a 36 percent decline, with drops from India exceeding 60 percent. Common App reported international applicants down 10 percent for the 2026-27 cycle, the steepest decline on record. In August, NAFSA and JB International projected that fall 2026 could bring up to 111,000 fewer international students, roughly a 9.5 percent decline, with $3.4 billion in lost economic contribution and nearly 40,000 jobs at risk.

The policy environment moved just as fast. A September 2025 proclamation attached a $100,000 payment to certain new H-1B petitions, a requirement that has since moved through litigation and remains contested. In July 2026, DHS published a final rule ending "duration of status" for F and J nonimmigrants, replacing it with fixed admission periods capped at four years, effective September 15, 2026, with extensions requiring a $420 filing to USCIS. Reports in July and August indicated DHS is weighing a six-figure fee on OPT, though nothing has been formally proposed. Every one of us has spent this year explaining rules that changed while we were explaining them.

And students noticed. In ApplyBoard's spring 2026 survey, the share of prospective students describing themselves as extremely interested in the U.S. fell thirteen points year over year, while the share with zero interest doubled. A Keystone poll presented at NAFSA ranked the U.S. last among the big four destinations on affordability, visas and entry, cultural appeal, and safety. Bloomberg ran the whole thing under a headline about a fading American dream.

I want to be careful here, because I've never believed the American dream was quite what it advertised. It was always a meritocracy story with a lot of fine print, and upward mobility has been narrowing for domestic and international students alike for a long time. But the version of it that pulled brilliant, ordinary, hopeful young people from everywhere toward this country was real in its effects, and something in it has cracked.

Closer to home, this is not abstract. Illinois Tech laid off roughly 160 faculty and staff this August, citing demographic decline, research cutbacks, and severe restrictions on international students; 42 percent of its student body came from abroad. DePaul lost about 755 international students in fall 2025 and has since laid off 114 staff. Eastern Illinois and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago have both pointed to international enrollment declines in explaining budget pressure. The pipeline that carried people like me from a campus quad into a career in this field is narrowing, and the institutions that built that pipeline are pulling back from it.

So: where does that leave us?

The particular weight of this work
Almost everyone I know came into this profession through love. A study abroad semester that rearranged them. The friends they made as an RA. A senior seminar conversation about global cultures that wouldn't let go. A stubborn curiosity about the world.

That's a beautiful reason to choose a career and a difficult one to sustain when the news arrives weekly and lands on the exact thing you care about. For some of us, myself included, the news isn't only professional. It's about people who look like us, hold the same documents we held, and are living the version of the story we lived. There is no clean separation between the case and the self.

I don't have an answer. I have three things I'm practicing.

Keep the long view, and let it be a real one. Not a shrug. A long view. Look at the last fifty years of migration policy in this country, or the last hundred. Look at the sky on a clear night in central Illinois. The only constant is change, and the politics of welcome have never held still in either direction. Knowing that a period is temporary is not the same as pretending it isn't happening. It's what makes it possible to stay in the room for the next decade instead of crashing out at every headline.

Keep expanding influence, even in small rooms. We are, as a group, passionate and articulate people, and there are more people willing to listen to us than we assume. A family member. A colleague in another division. A dean who is thoughtful and simply uninformed. You don't need to deliver the full regulatory briefing. You need one person's story, told with permission and without a data dump. I have a friend who is really struggling right now because of what changed this summer. Here's what it means for her. That's the whole speech. Small conversations compound in ways we don't get to observe.

Guard against burnout, and don't confuse your worth with a line item. It is no secret that positions in our field have been eliminated and restructured. When that happens, it is not a verdict on the value of your work. Institutions make decisions under temporary budget conditions and shifting federal directives, and those decisions are not an assessment of you. Know what you're worth. Remember what brought you here in the first place. That thing is precious and it is yours.

Roots
I keep coming back to an image of a tree that has been rooted somewhere for a few hundred years. A hard drought comes and takes the leaves, then the small branches, until what's left is bare structure. It looks like loss because it is. But the root system is intact, and it goes deeper than the weather.
Our roots are the reason each of us walked into this field: the study abroad trip, the friend, the advisor who noticed. Keep feeding that. Keep it alive through this season, in each other and in the students who are still here and still arriving.
The blossoms come back. I'd like us to still be standing here when they do.
 
Stella Wang
Senior Assistant Director of Academic Programs
Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, The University of Chicago
Rep, International Enrollment Management, IEI