President Donald Trump’s recent move to bar Harvard from enrolling new international students and threaten Columbia University's accreditation highlights a growing clash between the White House and elite U.S. universities, amid broader efforts to tighten control over international education, especially targeting Chinese students. 

The Trump administration continues to implement policies that could drastically reduce international student enrollment, a vital financial lifeline for many U.S. colleges, particularly public universities, and the state economies they support.

Chinese students—and the tuition they pay—have become vital for state universities, particularly after the financial crisis of 2008, when state governments were forced to cut education budgets, according to Yingyi Ma, professor of sociology and author of Ambitious and Anxious: How Chinese Undergraduates Succeed and Struggle in American Higher Education.

“Chinese students, for many, many years have been full-pay students, if not more,” she says. “Some places charge additional fees for international students…and so the tuition provides a very important buffer for American universities. Many of them are really cash-strapped, especially the state universities.”

Read more in the South China Morning Post article, “Trump’s crackdown on international students affects far more US schools than Harvard.”