“Anytime you’re down in enrollment, there is a budget impact,” MacKinnon said. “Generally, international students ... would pay higher tuition as well. So, when you’re using one international student, the budget impact actually is higher than one domestic student.”

An international graduate student pays $1,029 per credit hour, while a resident graduate student pays $829 per credit hour, according to CMU’s website.

This semester, CMU welcomed 1,210 international students. In comparison, there were 1,659 international students in 2024 and 1,726 in 2023, according to the enrollment report data.

Despite the drop in international enrollment, there are 117 more domestic students. Central’s total preliminary enrollment is 14,135, which is a 2.29% decrease from last year.

Joe Garrison, the executive director for the Financial Planning and Budgets Office, said he’s working with the Academic Planning and Analysis Office to determine what that budgetary impact would look like exactly for CMU. He said he will be able to learn that in the next couple of weeks.

Some of the factors that would have an influence on the budget are how many credits those international students would have taken and whether they had any university scholarships, Garrison said.

“Obviously, fewer students, fewer semester credit hours, would mean fewer net tuition,” Garrison said. “There are some mitigating factors on the expense side of the equation. But that being said, the cost of not having those students outweighs the savings.

“So there is going to be a bit of a gap. We’re trying to identify exactly what that gap is, and then saying, how much of that gap could be mitigated.”

Garrison said that the university has some savings and that it has been “conservative” with planning how much it would receive from the state. Some other things that can mitigate that gap are the attraction of transfer students, employee turnover and reduced travel expenses.

“A budget is a plan,” he said. “Every year, no matter the situation, we actively monitor how did things occur against the plan. ... I don’t think that we will ever see a year where we have a budget of x, and our actuals come in exactly what the budget was.”

But while CMU has some options to mitigate the lost revenue for this year, the big questions are what this international decline means moving forward, and whether international students would be able to come to CMU as usual, Garrison said.

“It’s hard to understand if this will continue or if this will be an isolated incident,” he said.

MacKinnon said at the Academic Senate meeting on Sept. 9 that he hopes the 618 students who wanted to come to CMU but weren’t able to, would join the campus community next semester.

Jennifer DeHaemers, vice president of Student Recruitment and Retention, told CM Life last month that some of the reasons for the international student decline were outside of the university’s control, such as increased wait times for visa appointments and changes in procedures.

“But the biggest problem for international students is just their ability to get that appointment to get their visa and then actually receiving it,” DeHaemers said. “Just because they apply, just because we admit them and give them the appropriate documentation, it doesn’t mean that ... the consulate would give them the visa to come here.”

This situation isn’t unique to CMU.

For example, Western Michigan University enrolled 1,830 international students this semester, compared to 1,983 in 2024, according to its enrollment data. Grand Valley State University is home to 579 international students this semester, while it had 625 of them in 2024, according to its website.

But for CMU, international students mean more than tuition dollars, Garrison said.

“I’m very hopeful that we will continue to have a decent amount of international students because they add a lot of value to the institution, and I’m not just talking about on the financial side,” he said. “It makes it a more rich and robust environment when you have people from different backgrounds connecting with one another.”