Manuj Mittal (MBA '21) most recently served as an assistant director and career consultant at the University of Rochester's Benet Career Services Center, where he advised graduate finance students, and is currently a doctoral candidate at the Warner School of Education. He trained in accountancy in India, and after his MBA from Simon Business School, he worked at Morgan Stanley in New York. His students are still deciding whether a U.S. degree still leads anywhere.
"Students used to ask me which employers sponsor visas," Mittal said. "Now they ask whether employers will provide visa sponsorship when they graduate."
Enough are answering it themselves to register nationally. NAFSA: Association of International Educators and JB International projected on 11 August that U.S. campuses could enroll up to 111,000 fewer international students this fall, about 9.5 percent, costing $3.4 billion in direct spending and close to 40,000 jobs.
They are reconsidering at a moment when federal borrowing is accelerating. Federal debt outstanding passed $40 trillion on 19 August, two years earlier than the Congressional Budget Office projected in 2023. The most recent trillion took five months. The borrowing limit is $41.1 trillion, which CBO expects the Treasury to reach in 2027.
The Washington Post attributed the early arrival in part to revenue lost when courts voided the administration's tariffs. Operation Epic Fury, meanwhile, began 28 February and appeared in neither the fiscal 2026 defense budget nor the fiscal 2027 request. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated the campaign at $34 billion to $42 billion. The White House asked Congress in June for $87.6 billion, after both chambers had passed resolutions opposing the war.
The Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 on 20 February that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize a president to impose tariffs, voiding every IEEPA tariff from the date it took effect. The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimated the government could owe up to $175 billion in refunds.
The baseline assumes a workforce that policy is narrowing
CBO published its 10-year outlook on 11 February, nine days before the ruling. In it, higher tariffs reduce projected deficits by $3.0 trillion. The same baseline charges immigration policy with adding $500 billion, and assumes faster productivity growth from artificial intelligence will offset slower labor force growth.
That last assumption is doing the most work. Federal Reserve Board economists found in an April 2 note that labor force growth is near zero, and that any increase in potential output will have to come from productivity. July payrolls fell by 23,000, and unemployment dropped to 4.1 percent because 264,000 people left the labor force.
The student and work visa systems are separate but connected. A foreign graduate typically moves from a degree to Optional Practical Training to an employer's H-1B petition, so a smaller entering class narrows the pool of U.S.-trained workers years later. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved 406,348 H-1B petitions in fiscal 2025, about 62 percent for computer-related occupations. The cost of those petitions has been in litigation for a year. A September 2025 proclamation imposed a $100,000 payment on certain new filings. Courts voided it in June and refused to reinstate it in July. Homeland Security proposed a $103,265 fee on 25 August under separate authority.
The litigation has now run longer than most graduate programs.
AI complicates the economic case for maintaining the technology talent pipeline at its previous scale. Researchers at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, using ADP payroll records through June 2026, found employment of workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations running 19 percent below where it would have been had it tracked less-exposed peers. Experienced workers showed no comparable decline. Indeed's Hiring Lab found software development postings up about 15 percent over the year, with senior roles accounting for 71 percent of the increase.
"The tasks that used to justify hiring an entry-level role are the tasks software does now," Mittal said. "What's left is judgment, and that's hard to teach and harder to prove on a resume."
The restrictions fall hardest where substitution does not apply. A JAMA study published 12 August found 47.2 percent of the internal medicine workforce was born outside the United States. A quarter of the teachers in Allendale County, South Carolina, come from other countries.
Mittal describes the choice as arithmetic rather than politics. Students price tuition and lost earnings against an immigration system that may look different when they finish.
Net interest on the debt was $970 billion in fiscal 2025 and passed $1 trillion this year. CBO projects it will reach nearly a fifth of federal spending by 2036. The outlook was built partly on tariff revenue that has since been voided and productivity gains from AI that remain more assumption than certainty.
The students deciding against enrolling for further education this fall will not show up in any of those numbers for years.
Figures are attributed in the text to the Congressional Budget Office, the Washington Post, NAFSA and JB International, the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the Federal Reserve Board, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, Indeed's Hiring Lab and JAMA. Quotations are from an interview with Manuj Mittal.
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