Universities and employers are eager to tap the pool of international talent that helps them stay competitive globally, and graduate programs have a financial incentive in attracting them: Demand from abroad is so high, administrators don’t see a need to offer as much tuition assistance.

There’s concern, though, that the current climate around immigration could jeopardize that flow of talent. Incidents of xenophobia, hostile political rhetoric and President Trump’s attempts at banning travelers from some Muslim-majority countries may be weighing on the minds of potential applicants.

Image For Vibhati Joshi, from Mumbai, India, graduate study in the United States paid off. Credit... Yana Paskova for The New York Times

The Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth, for example, saw a 30 percent decrease in international applications to its professional master’s program for this semester, according to the dean, Joseph J. Helble. Dr. Helble surveyed more than two dozen engineering deans earlier this year, and three quarters of them said they, too, had seen significant drops in international graduate applications. But enrollment, he said, was not off.

Still, trends are not clear.

“If there are one or two more years of comparable 20 to 30 percent decreases in international applications, we’re very concerned about our ability to conduct research and spin off and start companies,” he said. “We’re concerned from a competitive perspective.”

Dan Spaulding, who oversees human resources at Zillow Group, the online real estate company, said that in specialized areas like machine learning and artificial intelligence, his company favors graduate degrees, but for the vast majority of its technical jobs, a bachelor’s degree in computer science is adequate. He said he has heard concerns from students and managers about an international chill, but for now the supply of students with computer science skills hasn’t been affected.

“A great many of them are coming in with programming skills first and looking to radiate out into other business disciplines, product management, product design,” he said. “I just think going deep academically is not a priority for as many computer science students today.”