Trump’s Anti-Harvard Campaign Fuels Interest in UK Universities

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Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s government has stopped short of actively encouraging such efforts, in contrast to the European Union, which recently announced a €500 million ($586 million) plan to lure research scientists after the Trump administration started slashing such funding. 

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In fact, facing political pressure from Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party, whose popularity has surged in opinion polls to overtake his own Labour Party, Starmer has been weighing steps that could discourage international enrollment. His government is considering imposing a 6% levy on university income from tuition fees from such students, as well as cutting the amount of time that students can stay in the country after graduating to 18 months from two years.

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Yet those are fairly small disincentives compared with the steps taken by the Trump administration. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who earlier this year moved to expel some foreign students who were engaged in anti-Israel demonstrations  — said last month that the government is planning to “aggressively” rescind the visas of Chinese students who have ties to the Communist Party or are studying in “critical fields.” He also instructed embassies worldwide to stop scheduling interviews for student visas ahead of the US government’s decision to implement stricter reviews of applicants’ social-media profiles.

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Amer Mourad, the London-based chief executive officer of Global Study UK, said that has been particularly worrisome to students in the Middle East. Last month, he was contacted by the mother of an Egyptian student who was trying to make fallback plans, worried the US would block his enrollment due to politically oriented social-media posts. Mourad has recently seen other prospective students from countries in the region switching their focus to UK universities instead of those in the US.

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“Clearly there is fear,” he said. 

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Ewen Nemeth, an 18-year-old from Chester, in northwest England, was accepted to Edinburgh and Warwick universities but had planned to take a gap year and apply to Harvard, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania for the next year.

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Now, he’s opting for a backup plan — taking an offer from Warwick to start this fall at the school in Coventry, about 95 miles northwest of London. He’ll avoid the hassle of working on US applications, and skip the uncertainty of heightened visa scrutiny.

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“I would have to devote my entire summer to it and then maybe be rejected because of my social media — that’s insane to me,” he said.

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For Americans, interest in the UK had already been on the rise, with US undergraduate applications up 12% by the January deadline for the upcoming academic year. 

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City St. George’s, in London, has been among the beneficiaries. Mattias Frey, deputy dean and department head of media, culture and creative industries, said the number of US graduate students applying to its creative writing program more than tripled in 2025 and he’s expanding staff to accommodate them. He said the students haven’t been directly citing US politics as a driver of their decisions “but there’s something in the air about it.” 

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“I would call it a safe space that maybe they’re not feeling right now in the United States,” he said.

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McMillan, the Boston admissions consultant, said he’s been picking up on that, too. He said roughly half of the Middle Eastern students he has been advising are planning to apply to an English-speaking university outside the US in the next application cycle, a sharp in increase from just one in five in previous years. For his American clients — who were almost always focused on US schools — it has shot up to 15%. “I expect this number to rise,” he said.

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Since Trump’s return to the White House, McMillan has spent more time researching and visiting campuses in Europe, where his company already has consultants in Italy and France. This month, the 18-person firm hired someone in the UK for the first time, anticipating it will become a more prominent destination.

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“There’s a real gap between the administration and the vast majority of Americans who value and understand the importance of this intellectual richness that’s coming to the US,” McMillan said. “We’re concerned about the brain drain.”

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