It was three months into the second presidential administration of Donald Trump when a small group of New England university administrators convened at a 1902 Beaux-Arts mansion owned by Boston University, just a few blocks from the main campus on an unobtrusive treelined side street in Brookline. 

They filed into a high-ceilinged conference room in a one-time steel magnate’s estate turned events center, with huge picture windows overlooking the sleepy residential neighborhood. Representatives of the international student recruiting company that was hosting the meeting strategically positioned themselves at the entrances, handing out agendas.   

The peace and quiet were a stark contrast to the growing chaos in the broader world outside. Billions of dollars of federal research funding for many of the universities where these administrators worked was being cut, and investigations and sanctions were being fired at them by the Trump administration. Soon budgets would be slashed, programs shut down, and employees laid off. This day-long event was about a group that seemed to be facing yet another threat — one with equally grave implications for these schools and the larger Massachusetts economy: international students. 

Just days earlier, masked agents had arrested a Tufts University doctoral student on a street in Somerville and whisked her to a detention center in Louisiana. Thousands of student visas were being revoked. International students already admitted to US universities faced a slowdown in appointments for required consular interviews and would soon be required to provide their social media histories. The administration would later try blocking Harvard from enrolling international students at all, limit the proportion other elite schools others could admit, restrict the time these students could stay in the country, and increase the cost of the follow-on visas many have historically used to remain and get jobs here. 

A succession of speakers broached these topics at the conference, which was sponsored by the Norwegian international student recruiting company Keystone Education Group. Some triggered nervous laughter, and there were anxious whispers between sessions and over the buffet lunch, from which some attendees had to excuse themselves to take phone calls from colleagues helping international students worried they might also be detained or wouldn’t be allowed to return to the US if they went home for the summer. 

The message of the gathering was grim. The seemingly ceaseless flow of international students so critical to Massachusetts universities and colleges would almost certainly slow — probably dramatically. 

“You cannot pretend that students from X countries are going to be coming to us in Y numbers anymore,” Vera Grek, director of graduate and international enrollment at Wentworth Institute of Technology, told the meeting. 

That’s a $4 billion-a-year problem for Massachusetts alone, which ranks fourth among states  — after California, New York, and Texas  —  in the number of international students at its universities and colleges. More than 82,000 international students studied here last year, supporting an estimated 35,849 jobs. 

But there was something else the officials in this room knew. The institutions that they represented largely had themselves to blame for becoming so financially dependent on international students. Many schools in Massachusetts recruited higher proportions of international students than colleges and universities almost anywhere else, federal data show, increasing their numbers year after year to help fill each successive class. That’s largely because of a demographic decline in the number of domestic students in the Northeast, and the comparatively high cost of higher education here, which makes it less appealing to American applicants from places in the country where the number of 18-year-olds is steady or rising.