President Trump on Wednesday suggested a 15 percent cap be imposed on the percentage of foreign students that Harvard University and other U.S. higher education institutions can admit.
The president, while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, suggested that foreign students take up too much of the student body and raised issues over some of the foreign students he called “troublemakers.”
“These countries aren’t helping us. They’re not investing in Harvard … we are. So why would 31 percent — why would a number so big,” he said. “I think they should have a cap of maybe around 15 percent, not 31 percent.”
“We have people [who] want to go to Harvard and other schools, [but] they can’t get in because we have foreign students there. But I want to make sure that the foreign students are people that can love our country. We don’t want to see shopping centers exploding. We don’t want to see the kind of riots that you had,” Trump said. “And I’ll tell you what, many of those students didn’t go anywhere. Many of those students were troublemakers caused by the radical left lunatics in this country.”
He also said, without elaborating, that he doesn’t want “radical people” coming to U.S. as students and “making trouble in our country.”
The remarks come as Trump expressed renewed frustrations with Harvard University on Sunday, arguing that foreign students were taking up spots that should go to U.S.-born students. Trump also suggested the university hand over a list of all of its foreign-born students.
In the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump reiterated that notion.
“I don’t have a problem with foreign students. But it shouldn’t be 31 percent. It’s too much, because we have Americans who want to go there, and to other places, and they can’t go there because there’s 31 percent foreigners,” Trump said.
The number of foreign students at Harvard for the 2024-25 academic year accounts for 27 percent of its total enrollment. Additionally, foreign students at U.S. universities like Harvard tend to pay full tuition, providing an economic boost to the U.S. and effectively subsidizing costs for U.S. students.
Harvard sued the Trump administration Friday after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revoked its certification to admit foreign students days prior. Trump has also threatened to cut off Harvard’s federal grants over the university’s response to his directive for the school to end all diversity, equity and inclusion programs and address pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations last year.
The DHS has targeted foreign students who were involved in campus protests — or even some who merely wrote letters to the editor in support of the people of Gaza — by moving to deport them.