From Inside Higher Ed: After international student enrollment crashed in fall 2025, a report from Shorelight, an international education firm, illuminates one factor that led to that decline: a bump in F-1 visa rejections, especially for students from a handful of countries that typically supply large numbers of international enrollees. Shorelight’s annual report on visa refusals showed that denials reached a decade high of 35 percent worldwide in 2025, exceeding the previous peak in 2020. Those refusals were mainly concentrated in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of all F-1 visa requests from Africans were rejected, up from 43 percent in 2015 and up five percentage points from the previous year. A few countries, including Sierra Leone and Somalia, reached rejection rates over 90 percent. And India, previously the largest provider of international students to the United States, jumped from a refusal rate of 36 percent in 2023 to 61 percent in 2025.
Meanwhile, visa refusal rates for South Americans have actually decreased in the past four years, from a peak of 31 percent in 2022 to 22 percent in 2025—though that rate is still higher than they were a decade ago. The student visa denial rate among European applicants has remained steady over the past 10 years, sitting at 9 percent in 2026...
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