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Welcome to The Student Funnel, a monthly higher ed sector newsletter from Hybrid, a leader in student marketing and recruitment strategies. We highlight news, trends, and behaviours that impact the sector and share insights on how to better connect with your audiences.
You’ll likely be aware of the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to stamp out Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives over the past couple of months - and March has been no different. Here’s what you need to know:
Trump signs executive order to dismantle the Department of Education
We’ll start with the biggest story, which will most likely come as no shock. President Trump has signed an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin shutting down the US Department of Education “to the maximum extent permitted by law”.
It’s important to point out that only Congress can formally eliminate the Department of Education, which was established 45 years ago. So, at this stage, the executive order sets the stage for reduction but not outright closure.
This move comes only weeks after Secretary McMahon laid off nearly half of the department’s 4,000+ staff, leaving some offices, including the National Center for Education Statistics, gutted. The administration says critical services like civil rights enforcement, student loans, and Pell Grants will continue. However, it remains unclear how these will be managed as the department is dismantled.
Trump has also argued that the department is not a bank and wants the current $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio managed elsewhere. At this stage, no agency has agreed to take on the job.
While some conservative policymakers see the move as restoring control to states and families, most higher education organisations argue it could harm students, increase fraud, and jeopardise access to college.
While the Trump administration continues to cut funding to higher education institutions and the sector as a whole, further financial headaches seem to be on the horizon. Congress has discussed proposals to make colleges pay the government through substantial expansions of a tax on endowments.
While taxing endowments is not a new practice, many institutions with much lower profiles than Ivy League schools could get taxed if lawmakers broadened the threshold for paying. It’s worth noting that most colleges rely on endowment spending to subsidise tuition for lower-income students.
If this proposal passes, such a tax would ultimately alter the relationship between the government and many nonprofit colleges, as well as between those institutions and their donors. Students, research programmes, and day-to-day college operations will also be affected.
Trump has vowed to expel international student protesters from the US and block federal funding for institutions allowing “illegal protests” to go ahead. While there was no specific mention of pro-Palestinian protests in his post on Truth Social, Trump did previously sign an executive order to combat anti-semitism.
This comes with the announcement that the government is considering halting over 51 million USD in federal funding to Columbia University over the institution’s “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students.” In response to this threat, the university claims that it is “fully committed to combatting anti-semitism and all forms of discrimination” and that “promoting or glorifying violence or terror” has no place there.
A newly created federal task force is in the midst of visiting college campuses like Columbia University to investigate incidents of anti-semitism. Institutions include: George Washington University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Northwestern University, UCLA, Berkeley, the University of Minnesota and the University of Southern California.
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The ongoing TikTok saga in the US is reaching a critical deadline. Under the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, the popular app must be sold to a US-owned company by April 4 in order to continue operating domestically.
President Trump, who extended the sell-off deadline after taking office (despite legal questions around that move), has now said a deal is close. “There’s tremendous interest in TikTok,” he told reporters, claiming the final decision will rest with him under powers granted by Congress.
While it sounds like an agreement isn’t far off, there are a few factors that could still complicate the deal, including China’s opposition to forced US ownership and the conditions set by both the US and Chinese governments.
Trump has also floated the possibility of tariff reductions to smooth negotiations with China and has suggested he may further extend the deadline for TikTok to be sold off if needed.
For higher ed marketers leveraging TikTok, this continued uncertainty could impact platform strategy and advertising decisions, as well as student engagement efforts in the US market.
We’ll continue monitoring the situation closely and keep you updated with the latest developments.
With Q1 now behind us, early 2025 enrolment data is coming in hot - and it’s a mixed bag. Here’s our roundup of the latest in international student demand and enrolment from across the globe:
The US
Despite the US’s ongoing political turmoil and its effects on higher education, the general interest of students wanting to study there hasn’t seen much of a decline. IDP Chief Partner Officer Simon Emmett confirms that there is still strong interest from prospective students and applicants due to the country’s high quality of education and job prospects. However, if Trump’s travel ban comes to pass, 27% of Chinese respondents and 23% of Pakistani respondents in IDP’s study indicated they would no longer consider studying in the US.
Although, when specifically looking at international student interest for Postgraduate study in the US, this has taken a sharp dive under Donald Trump’s second administration, falling by more than 40% from January-March 2025. Interest in postgraduate on-campus programmes fell most dramatically among Iranian and Bangladeshi students, by 61% and 54%, respectively. Meanwhile, interest from India, Pakistan and Nigeria declined by more than a third, according to new StudyPortals data.
The UK
Across the pond, findamasters.com and findaphd.com have revealed that searches for MRes courses in the UK accounted for 49% of all international student enquiries in Jan- Feb 2025. This is an increase of 23% from the previous year.
International demand for MRes courses now outpaces all other UK Masters study options on these particular sites, including qualifications such as MSc, MA and MBA.
A key driver behind this spike appears to be the classification of MRes courses as postgraduate research programmes, which makes them eligible for dependent visas. This comes in the wake of tough government measures in 2024 that largely removed the right for most international students to bring family members to the UK on study visas.
Generally, the UK's stance on international students remains welcoming and optimistic, although a Director at the Department of Business and Trade has recently insisted that the significant economic value that international students provide needs greater public recognition.
Canada
In Canada, the higher education sector has been affected by unprecedented limits on study visas and individual provider caps. Mark Carne, Canada’s current Prime Minister, is expected to continue implementing stricter controls on international student admissions during his tenure but has expressed his interest in building stronger ties with India.
Should Carne win in the upcoming election on April 28th, this will be good news for Indian students who are eyeing Canada as a study destination.
More global trends:
Chinese students are applying to a wider range of universities, with less expensive destinations in Asia gaining popularity. Many Asian destinations charted 10% growth from China, such as Japan, with 11% growth.
Despite a dip in the overall number of Indian students studying abroad in 2024, destinations outside the “Big Four” are seeing growth in countries like Russia (+34%), France (+14%), and Germany (+49%). New Zealand also saw a sharp surge, with the number of Indian students climbing from 1,605 in 2022 to 7,297 in 2024.
South Korea is becoming an increasingly popular destination for American students, driven by the global rise of Korean pop culture and a growing number of English-taught programmes. The number of US students studying in South Korea has grown eightfold since the early 2000s, rising from just 834 in 2002/03 to 5,909 in 2022/23.
With its outbound student mobility ratio at 19%, nearly 10 times that of India and China, Nepalese students are attracting international universities. Bigyan Shrestha, Executive Chairman of SoftEd Group, claims that over 1.1 million Nepalese students have recently left the country to study abroad.
The data reflects that many students are looking at options outside of the “Big Four” for education abroad. Many are motivated by recent news outlining government policy shifts, unwelcoming quotes from officials, or sector challenges like the housing affordability crisis that limit mobility. As a result, these students are looking to destinations that are either more welcoming or are easier to apply to.
Instagram has announced a new school partnership program, which is designed to help teachers and educators report potential safety issues. The platform is aware of its popularity as a key connective tool for many children and teens, which also, unfortunately, makes it a focus for cyberbullying, a point highlighted in Netflix’s recent series “Adolescence”.
Schools that are Instagram school partners will be able to issue prioritised reports to the platform’s moderation team, ensuring they are fast-tracked for review. Additionally, Instagram will provide educational resources to help support efforts to improve digital literacy and keep young people aware of online dangers. School partner participants will also be able to display a new banner on their profile, showing parents and students that they have made this a focus.
TikTok, despite its looming ban in the US, has launched AMBER Alerts to its American users as part of a collaboration with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). According to TikTok, the move will bring "critical, time-sensitive information directly to people's For You feeds to raise awareness of missing children and leverage the power of the US TikTok community to help reunite them with their families."
Whether this is a preventive measure to avoid or help with the imminent ban in the US remains to be seen.
Meta is slowly but surely integrating more and more AI bot creation and interaction features across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp in varying forms.
Since last year, the company has highlighted its plan to bring millions of AI characters into its apps – these characters will post, comment, and engage like real people on Facebook and Instagram, and many users will likely be unaware that these are not actually real people.
Apps like Messenger now come with an “AI Studio”, allowing users to find AI characters to converse with or create their own character to use for chats.
Instagram has also been building its AI creation tools for some time, enabling customisations to generate user-defined characters for varying purposes. While still in the early stages, the platform also offers AI voices, encouraging users to chat with characters through audio calls.
Meanwhile, X continues to push Grok - its generative AI chatbot, which now offers the option to edit specific elements of an image. Users can now ask Grok to edit a specific element of an image, and it will be able to customise that chosen segment. Instagram is also gearing up to launch a similar offering.
While image generation can be done in dedicated visual generation tools like Dall-E and Midjourney, this new chapter introduces this possibility within social apps. The next step for Grok could be full video generation, which X is reportedly also working on, after recently acquiring Hotshot to power its video creation tools.