By Giselle Lee | Staff Writer
Earlier this month, the U.S. government increased travel bans and the suspension of immigration processing for students from 39 countries. According to an analysis by the New York Times, the number of international students entering the U.S. in 2025 dropped by 19% compared to 2024.
Despite this, Baylor’s international student population is rising. Statistics from the Center of Global Engagement recorded 963 international students enrolled in Baylor last semester, an increase from the 895 international students in 2023 and 2024.
In a recent conference, Vice President of Student Life Dr. Sharra Hynes noted that Baylor not only welcomed one of its academically strongest freshmen classes, but also “the largest number of international students that we’ve ever had in an undergraduate class.”
Saiah Lee, a freshman from South Korea, said Baylor’s continued commitment to global, faith-based education is what drew him into applying.
“This university has a good Christian community, and it really helped me a lot to get used to this new country I’m in,” Lee said. “Also when I was [researching] Baylor, I heard there are various people from other countries, and I think those are true because when I went to the Global Bears Week in the first semester, there were a lot of various people from other countries, and [that] really encouraged me to learn about other cultures.”
Lee’s journey to Baylor was not simple. While finishing his high school education and applying to Baylor from the Philippines, he faced great difficulty in getting his visa when the U.S. government paused new student visa interviews for a month in May. Lee had to interview to get his visa, and the interviews suddenly closed when visas froze.
“I was in the Philippines at that time, but it just randomly opened, and by God’s grace, I was able to take it and have an interview in Korea,” Lee said. “I think after my interview, they closed it again. If I failed to do that, I might not [have] managed to come to Baylor, or definitely [would have] came here late.”
Many international Baylor students remain optimistic that the U.S. is more advantageous for building their future careers. Mauricio Escorcia, a freshman neuroscience major from Barranquilla, Colombia, is one of them.
“In the U.S., there are a lot of opportunities, especially for research opportunities,” Escorcia said. “And for instance, my major was not available in my home country.”
Escorcia mentioned that he had wanted to study in the U.S. since he was young. However, Baylor stood out to him not only as a good university in neuroscience research, but also with a welcoming community atmosphere.
“Once I got all of my acceptance letters from different universities, I decided to go and visit them, and I liked Baylor because it has a great campus, is great at research and the atmosphere is also very warm, [which is] just not something that I felt in some of the other universities,” Escorcia said. “You still have some small classes where you can meet a lot of people and talk to them and make a lot of friends.”
While Escorcia acknowledged that Baylor seemed a lot larger at first, forming connections with fellow students was easier than he expected.
“I thought that because it was so big that it was going to be hard to find people in your classes who you really connected with, that shared similar interests to you, but I noticed that that’s not the case at all,” Escorcia said. “It’s very easy to do.”
Hynes said the increase in international students at Baylor is encouraging.
“It says a lot in the climate that we’re in right now, where we know international students sometimes have challenges getting visas to come, so we’re really pleased with that,” Hynes said.
