Trump will Destroy Film Schools
Top US Film Schools rely bigly on international students
The Trump Administration’s war on international students will decimate American film schools. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced on FoxNews yesterday that the Administration’s demand that Harvard ban international students is only “a warning to every other university to get your act together.” This warning should terrify US film schools, and by extension, all of Hollywood.
According to publicly available statistics, the top 50 US film schools are at institutions with as high as 50% international student attendance. Some of the top film schools are at universities with especially high international student rates, like USC (27%), NYU (34%) and Columbia (39%). Film and arts-specific institutions have among the highest rates: AFI (40%), CalArts (31%), ArtCenter College of Design (48%), School of Visual Arts (50%), New York Film Academy (48%), RISD (37%), SCAD (22%), Ringling College (21%) and Pratt (36%). (see below for detailed list)
If Noem and Trump get their ways, many film programs and even entire film schools could shutter in the fall.
As I’ve written before, the Trump attacks on academia (and Hollywood) are an existential crisis for American film schools. While it’s hard to get public numbers on international participation at specific film programs within broader institutions, I can tell you anecdotally that film professors and administrators are shaking in their boots. Many graduate level classes at some of the top 10 film programs easily approach 50% international participation (even if their bigger institutions have percentages in the single digits).
Harvard is already fighting the initial Trump demands and US District Judge Allison Boroughs just issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump Administration from carrying out their plan. But as we’ve seen, these court cases can go on for months or years before they reach the Supreme Court. Even then, it’s still an open question if Trump will abide the Court (just ask Kilmar Abrego Garcia about how well Trump follows a SCOTUS decision).
In the meantime, the question is how many of these students (and their parents, who are usually paying full-tuition at these programs) will want to risk coming back in the fall with such an uncertain future ahead of them? Already, you’re seeing international schools (like the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) inviting displaced Harvard students to come there.
It’s only a matter of time before top international film schools like Beijing Film Academy, HFF Munich, London Film School and NFTS in the UK, FAMU in Prague, Toronto and Vancouver Film Schools in Canada, and Lodz Film School in Poland start poaching international film students currently in the US. And why stop there? They may start poaching some of our top American film professors, a majority of whom in non-tenure protected adjunct positions (anyone know how to say “mise-en-scène” in Mandarin or Polish?)
Even if institutions with top film schools bow down to Trump’s demands on issues as varied as DEI, anti-Semitism and cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party (yes, Noem’s letter to Harvard was a swirl of paranoid conspiracy theories), what will that mean for film schools at those universities? Will USC short films have to pass muster with DHS censors? Will NYU scripts get redlined by Kristi Noem? Will AFI cinematographers have to get color corrected by ICE agents? Notably, USC, NYU and AFI were among the universities whose leaders still haven't signed the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) open letter to defend basic academic freedom. These are schools that have already shown their inclination to cave to the Trump Administration, so we shouldn’t be shocked when they keep bowing down. If they won’t stand up for their own academic freedom, why would international students expect those schools to stand up for them?
Note: List of Top 50 Film Schools is based on my own aggregated data from the most recent list of “Top Film Schools” from The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, The Wrap and MovieMaker Magazine, all of which use slightly different criteria. Most of the International Student percentages are sourced from Reuters, which got its data from the National Center for Educational Statistics. Others are sourced from institutions’ own websites.
Finally, huge thanks to Ted Hope who let me take over his Substack today!