‘Is It Safe?’ Foreign Students Consider College in Donald Trump’s U.S

At a college fair on Wednesday at the Le Méridien hotel here, 20 American universities made their pitches to aspiring students, many of whom had long hoped to study in the United States. But as the students checked out presentations from colleges ranging from the State University of New York at Binghamton to Abilene Christian University in Texas, several expressed concerns about going to America under a Donald J. Trump administration.

“It’s the main topic of conversation among my friends,” said Palak Gera, 21, who is applying to graduate programs in pharmaceutical science in North Carolina, Illinois and North Dakota. “They don’t want to apply to the U.S. under Trump.”

Aman Kumar, 18, who is looking at universities in California, said, “In his campaign, he’s discriminating against Muslim and other brown and black people,” adding, “I’m thinking of applying to Canada.”

This year, the number of international students in United States colleges surpassed one million for the first time, bringing more than $32 billion a year into the economy and infusions of money to financially struggling colleges.

College admissions officials in the United States caution that it is too early to draw firm conclusions about overseas applications, because deadlines for applications are generally in January and February. But they are worried that Mr. Trump’s election as president could portend a drop in international candidates.

Canadian universities have already detected a postelection surge in interest from overseas.

“We have seen an increase in applications from the U.S. and from international students in the last week,” Jocelyne Younan, the director of global undergraduate recruitment at McGill University in Montreal, wrote in an email. “We’ve also seen an increase in students inquiring about McGill on social media.”

Traffic on a University of Toronto website for international applicants surged the day after the election, officials there said — and most of it came from Americans. “Visits to our recruitment website from the U.S. are typically around 1,000 a day,” said Ted Sargent, the university’s vice president, international.