By Lindsey Kundel, Editor-in-Chief, InGenius Prep
When we published “Resilience by Region” this spring, the headline underneath the headline was a divergence: new international enrollment fell 17% in fall 2025, but not evenly — graduate enrollment down 12%, undergraduate up 2%. This divergence between the graduate and undergraduate markets is, we think, the most interesting part of this story — and three independent data sources now confirm it points the same direction: SEVIS registration data, IIE’s Fall 2025 Snapshot, and State Department visa issuance figures all show the same decline, concentrated the same way, hitting the same countries hardest.
In our previous journal, we argued the two markets had decoupled because the graduate degree functions as an on-ramp to American employment, and H-1B policy was rebuilding that on-ramp in real time. What we didn’t unpack then is that “H-1B policy” doesn’t affect sending countries equally. It is, overwhelmingly, an India story, with a distant secondary story in China and only faint echoes everywhere else.
This installment updates the policy mechanics since spring — several of which have moved substantially, including a lawsuit filed in mid-August — and adds the country-level lens that explains why the fall 2025 declines hit India’s applicant numbers so much harder than almost anyone else’s.
The third pillar: visa issuance confirms it, with numbers sharper than SEVIS or IIE show on their own. State Department data — released in March after an unusual reporting gap since the previous July — shows F-1 student visa issuances fell 35.6% worldwide between May and August 2025, compared with the same months in 2024: roughly 97,000 fewer visas, down to 186,160 issued that summer, more than 100,000 below the year before. That’s the steepest of the three data sources, sharper than IIE’s 17% enrollment decline or SEVIS’s registration figures — because visa issuance sits furthest upstream. It captures the students who wanted to come and couldn’t get through the door, before any of them show up in a fall headcount.
The country breakdown confirms everything in the regional analysis below, with more precision than we had before. Indian F-1 issuances fell 62% that summer, to just over 22,000 visas — the single largest driver of the aggregate number. Nepal fell 72%, Nigeria 52%. China fell a comparatively modest 35%, South Korea 21%, Vietnam 25%. India and China together accounted for 42% of all student visa approvals in summer 2023; by summer 2025 that combined share had fallen to 23%. Worldwide F-1 refusal rates hit a decade high of 35% in 2025, and India’s individual refusal rate jumped from 36% in 2023 to 61% in 2025 — nearly double, in two years. Several African countries, including Sierra Leone and Somalia, saw refusal rates exceed 90%.
The proximate cause was a nearly month-long freeze on student visa interview scheduling the State Department imposed in late May 2025, layered onto expanded social-media vetting requirements. Issuances partially rebounded elsewhere once the freeze lifted; in India specifically, they stayed sluggish through the rest of the summer — down 66% even in August, the one month most other sending countries saw improvement.
One live development, current as of this week: thirty U.S. senators, led by Alex Padilla, sent a letter to the State Department on August 11 raising concerns about F, M, and J visa appointment delays threatening Fall 2026 start dates — this fall, the one beginning now. The letter asks the Department to explain appointment allocation, processing-priority changes since 2025, and average processing times at the five highest-volume posts, with a 30-day response window. This doesn’t establish a new rule and isn’t evidence of a repeat freeze — it’s lawmakers responding to reported appointment shortages — but it means the visa-issuance pillar of this story isn’t a fall-2025 artifact. The same bottleneck may be recurring right now, for students trying to arrive this month.
Why this is structurally an India story. In fiscal year 2024, 71% of all approved H-1B petitions went to India-born beneficiaries — roughly 283,000 of about 399,000 approvals. China was a distant second at 11.7%, or about 46,700. No other country of birth reached 2%.
| Country of birth | Share of FY2024 H-1B approvals |
| India | ~71% |
| China | ~11.7% |
| Canada | ~3% |
| Taiwan | ~1.3% |
| South Korea | ~1.3% |
| Mexico | ~1.2% |
| Nepal, Brazil, Pakistan, Philippines | ~0.8% each |
Source: USCIS FY2024 H-1B Characteristics report. A separate Bloomberg/Reuters figure for FY2020–2023 puts India at 73.7% and China at 16% over that longer window — a different data year, not a contradiction, but worth citing separately rather than blended with the FY2024 numbers above.
That concentration compounds with a second bottleneck that predates any 2025–26 policy change: federal law caps employment-based green cards for natives of any single country at 7% of the annual total. India supplies 71% of the H-1B pipeline but is eligible for the same 7% ceiling as every other country. The result is a backlog now estimated at over one million Indian nationals waiting in the EB-2 and EB-3 employment-based categories, with current processing reaching back to petitions filed in 2013 — wait times exceeding 12 years. This is the structural fact sitting underneath everything else in this piece: for an Indian student, the H-1B lottery was never the last hurdle. It was the entry point into a queue that, for most, runs into the 2030s regardless of what happens with any single rule this year. Chinese applicants face a version of the same bottleneck, though the queue is shorter given China’s smaller share of the flow.
This is worth naming because it reframes the divergence in “Resilience by Region.” India’s international applications fell 14% in the 2025–26 Common App cycle — the steepest decline among major sending countries after Africa. China’s fell only 2%. We described that gap in terms of destination diversification — UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia absorbing Chinese demand. That’s still true. But it understates how much of India’s decline is a rational reassessment of a pipeline that was already the most oversubscribed and backlogged in the system, now facing a lottery that weights against exactly the wage tier most new graduates enter at.
The registration collapse predates this year’s rules. H-1B registrations fell from roughly 442,000 unique beneficiaries in the FY2025 cycle to roughly 339,000 in FY2026 — before the weighted lottery existed in any form. New graduate international enrollment had already fallen 15% in fall 2024. Given India’s 71% share of the pipeline, this earlier contraction was disproportionately an Indian story too, well before this year’s headlines.
The weighted lottery is live, and its weight falls hardest on the country with the least room to absorb it. The wage-weighted rule — four lottery entries for a Level IV wage offer, three for Level III, two for Level II, one for Level I — took effect February 27, and FY2027 was the first cycle run under it. USCIS hasn’t published an official, program-wide breakdown of selectees by wage level yet. One immigration firm’s own client data shows selection rates beating DHS’s original projections at every level — Level I at 24.5% against a projected 15.3%, Level III at 69.2% against a projected 45.9% — which is a single firm’s sample, not a government statistic, and likely reflects the shrinking overall applicant pool more than the mechanism being gentler than designed. Directionally, the system is doing what it was built to do: privileging senior, higher-wage hires over the entry-level roles that new master’s graduates fill. Because Indian nationals occupy such an outsized share of the entry-to-mid-level STEM pipeline specifically, this mechanism concentrates its effect on Indian applicants far more than the aggregate “graduate enrollment down 12%” figure suggests on its own.
The fee is currently not being collected — a bigger update than “in litigation.” The $100,000 supplemental fee was vacated by a federal district court on June 8, briefly reinstated by an administrative stay on June 12 while the government appealed, and then — the development our spring reporting hadn’t caught — the First Circuit denied the government’s request to keep that stay in place on July 24. The June 8 vacatur now controls; USCIS is not currently requiring the fee on covered petitions. This isn’t resolved — merits briefing concludes October 16, and Supreme Court review remains possible — but as of this writing, the single most-quoted policy of the fall 2025 cycle is not in effect.
The Duration of Status rule is final — and now formally under legal challenge, with real-world harm already on the record. DHS published the final rule July 17, replacing “duration of status” for F, J, and I nonimmigrants with a fixed admission period — generally capped at four years — plus a formal extension-filing requirement and a grace period shortened from 60 to 30 days. It’s scheduled to take effect September 15. But on August 18, eight organizations — including NAFSA and the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration — sued DHS in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, arguing the rule violates the Administrative Procedure Act: that DHS’s cost-benefit analysis quantified billions in costs but zero benefits, and disregarded “the greatest harm of the Final Rule — the foreseeable decline in international student enrollment.” The plaintiffs are seeking both vacatur and a preliminary injunction to block the September 15 effective date, and their filing cites declarations from institutions reporting that international students have already withdrawn fall 2026 enrollment over the rule, and that application numbers “tanked this year” at some schools. DHS’s response, in a statement to Inside Higher Ed: “The performative outrage is incredible.”
The rule text applies uniformly across sending countries, but its practical weight won’t fall evenly even if it survives the injunction motion: it adds a mandatory extension-filing step precisely for students who will now also need visa services from consulates that are, in several regions, already the primary bottleneck. In “Resilience by Region” we noted that visa appointment backlogs — not academic qualification — were the dominant constraint for African and South Asian applicants, with Ghana’s applications down 40% and the broader African decline hitting 16%. A fixed admission period with a shorter grace window and a required extension filing adds friction exactly where consular capacity was already strained, for students from exactly the regions least equipped to absorb it.
Where this leaves each region.
India carries the structural core of this story on every axis — largest H-1B share, longest green-card backlog, heaviest exposure to the wage-weighted lottery’s entry-level penalty, and now the steepest visa-issuance collapse of any major sending country. Nothing in this update changes that; if anything, the fee’s current suspension is the one piece of near-term relief for Indian graduate applicants budgeting for fall 2027.
China remains comparatively insulated. Its 2% application decline and 35% visa-issuance drop are both meaningfully smaller than India’s, reflecting a longer-running diversification toward the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia rather than acute exposure to any single 2026 rule — though Chinese STEM graduates competing for the same entry-level wage tiers face the identical lottery mechanics as their Indian counterparts.
Latin America, Vietnam, and the broader Southeast Asian pipeline remain largely outside this story, as they were in “Resilience by Region” — undergraduate-heavy, not graduate-and-OPT-dependent, and therefore structurally distant from H-1B policy regardless of how it resolves. Vietnam’s 25% visa-issuance decline is notable but sits well below India’s, and South American refusal rates have actually improved over the past four years even as they’ve worsened elsewhere.
Sub-Saharan Africa is the region worth watching most closely going into September. It has no meaningful H-1B exposure in the aggregate numbers, but it now carries the worst visa-refusal environment of any region — 64% of F-1 requests from African applicants denied, with several countries above 90% — and the Duration of Status rule’s extension-filing requirement, if it survives the pending injunction motion, lands on top of that same bottleneck. It’s a compounding friction with no upside to offset it.
Where this leaves the thesis. Bifurcated, not dead, still holds — a Level IV wage offer still clears the lottery at high odds, and the fee’s current suspension is real near-term relief. But the divergence we described by degree level in the spring is, underneath, substantially a divergence by country of origin: this is an India story first, a China story at a much smaller scale, and barely a story at all for most of the rest of the applicant pool. What we don’t yet have is whether the court grants the preliminary injunction against the Duration of Status rule before September 15, whether the fee’s suspension survives October’s merits briefing, or how the Padilla letter’s Fall 2026 appointment concerns resolve. All three belong in the next installment — and given the injunction motion, the first of those three may resolve within days, not months.
What to Expect Through the FY2028 Cycle
The above is reporting. This is forecasting — our read of where the current data points, not a claim about what will happen.
The fee’s suspension likely holds through this fall’s enrollment decisions, but not because the legal fight is over. The First Circuit didn’t just decline to intervene — it found the government unlikely to win on the merits, which is a stronger signal than a procedural stay would be. Full resolution is unlikely before the October 16 merits briefing closes, and a Supreme Court petition could extend that further into 2027. Families and programs planning around the FY2028 lottery (spring 2027) should treat “currently suspended” as the operative fact, not “resolved.”
The Duration of Status rollout is now the more volatile of the two fights, and we’re revising our read from three weeks ago: a quick injunction is more plausible than we originally suggested. We’d previously argued that because this rule went through full notice-and-comment rulemaking — unlike the fee, implemented by proclamation — it had firmer legal footing and a quick vacatur was unlikely. The plaintiffs’ APA theory is different from a simple “wrong process” argument, though: they’re arguing DHS’s cost-benefit analysis itself was defective, quantifying costs while disregarding the rule’s own foreseeable enrollment harm. That’s a substantive-review argument courts have credited before in similar higher-ed immigration cases, and the plaintiffs already have declarations documenting real institutional harm in hand — a stronger evidentiary posture at the injunction stage than most challenges start with. We’d now put real odds on an injunction before September 15, though we wouldn’t call it more likely than not. If it doesn’t happen, expect the operational rollout itself to be rocky regardless — DSOs and USCIS working out extension-filing mechanics in real time, with the earliest visible effects showing up as processing delays and status confusion.
We’d expect India’s application numbers for the 2026–27 cycle to keep softening rather than stabilize, even if the fee stays suspended and the Duration of Status rule is enjoined. The fee was never the only signal — the weighted lottery, the green-card backlog, and a visa-refusal rate that’s nearly doubled in two years are all structural, not litigation-dependent, and none of them are going away regardless of how either court fight resolves. Family decision-making tends to lag the underlying policy environment by a cycle or two, so the full effect of this year’s changes on Indian applications may not show up completely until the 2026–27 Common App data lands next spring.
The undergraduate/graduate divergence from “Resilience by Region” is likely to narrow — not because graduate enrollment recovers, but because undergraduate stops being untested, regardless of how the injunction motion resolves. Even an enjoined rule leaves behind the uncertainty that’s already driving the withdrawals cited in the lawsuit’s own declarations. If the next Fall Snapshot shows undergraduate growth flattening rather than continuing at 2%, that’s the signal this prediction is playing out.
And we’d expect the gap between India and China to persist or widen rather than close. China’s diversification toward the UK, Hong Kong, and Australia is a multi-year trend with its own momentum, largely independent of anything in this piece; India has no comparable alternative absorbing its graduate STEM population at scale, which leaves Indian applicants more exposed to whatever the lottery, the backlog, and consular capacity do next, for longer.
The genuine uncertainty sitting underneath all of this: none of us — including USCIS — yet knows what the official, program-wide FY2027 wage-level selection data actually shows, we don’t yet know how the State Department will respond to the Padilla letter, and as of today we don’t know whether a judge will enjoin the Duration of Status rule before its September 15 effective date. All three could move this piece’s conclusions within the next month.
Sources
USCIS, “Characteristics of H-1B Specialty Occupation Workers,” FY2024, https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/ola_signed_h1b_characteristics_congressional_report_FY24.pdf (loads in-browser but returned bot-detection errors on automated fetch — verify manually before citing to a reporter)
Pew Research Center, “US H-1B visa program data and key facts,” https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/04/what-we-know-about-the-us-h-1b-visa-program/
LegalClarity, “H-1B Visa Statistics by Country: Approvals and Trends,” https://legalclarity.org/h-1b-visa-statistics-by-country-approvals-and-trends/
The Business Standard, “Which nations dominate US H-1B visa approvals?,” https://www.tbsnews.net/world/which-countries-rule-h-1b-visa-list-1240736
Manifest Law, “H1B Weighted Lottery: How FY2027 Wage-Level Selection Works & Your Real Odds,” https://manifestlaw.com/blog/h1b-wage-level, and “Analyzing Our H-1B Selection Results FY2027,” https://manifestlaw.com/news/analyzing-our-h1b-selection-results-fy2027
Law Office of Paul Szeto, “USCIS Completes FY 2027 H-1B Initial Selection: The Dawn of the Wage-Weighted Lottery,” http://www.szetolaw.com/content/uscis-completes-fy-2027-h-1b-initial-selection-the-dawn-of-the-wage-weighted-lottery
AILA, “CA1 Denies Government’s Request for Stay on Order Finding $100,000 H-1B Fee Unlawful,” https://www.aila.org/library/ca1-state-of-california-v-mullin-7-24-26
Goel & Anderson, “Is the H-1B $100K Fee Still in Effect? What Employers Need to Know,” https://www.goellaw.com/first-circuit-h1b-100000-fee-stay-denied/
Federal Register, “Establishing a Fixed Time Period of Admission and an Extension of Stay Procedure for Nonimmigrant Academic Students, Exchange Visitors, and Representatives of Foreign Information Media,” published July 17, 2026, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/07/17/2026-14439/establishing-a-fixed-time-period-of-admission-and-an-extension-of-stay-procedure-for-nonimmigrant
Study in the States, “Final Rule: Establishing a Fixed Time Period of Admission and an Extension of Stay Procedure Quick Facts,” https://studyinthestates.dhs.gov/final-rule-establishing-a-fixed-time-period-of-admission-and-an-extension-of-stay-procedure-quick (bot-detection error on automated fetch — verify manually)
AAU, “New Data Show Significant Declines in International Student Enrollment,” https://www.aau.edu/newsroom/new-data-show-significant-declines-international
Inside Higher Ed, “New Student Visas Dropped 35.6% Last Summer,” https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/international-students-us/2026/03/10/new-student-visas-dropped-356-last-summer, and “Lawsuit Challenges New Length-of-Stay Limit for International Students,” https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/international-students-us/2026/08/19/lawsuit-seeks-vacate-rule-ending-duration-status
The PIE News, “US visa issuance fell by 36% last summer,” https://thepienews.com/us-visa-issuance-fell-by-36-last-summer/
Day1CPT, “U.S. Student Visa Delays Threaten Fall 2026 Start Dates,” https://day1cpt.org/news/u.s.-student-visa-delays-threaten-fall-2026-start-dates
Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, “Coalition Files Federal Lawsuit Challenging Rule Ending Duration of Status,” https://www.presidentsalliance.org/press/coalition-files-federal-lawsuit-challenging-rule-ending-duration-of-status/