For Pouya Seifzadeh, an associate professor at SUNY Geneseo in Western New York, this year’s mass killings of protesters in Iran brings back memories of oppression he and his peers faced while speaking out against the same regime 27 years ago.
Back then, Seifzadeh joined his undergraduate classmates in Tehran in calling for more civil liberties. He took part in the 1999 protests that began after Iranian officials banned the newspaper, Salam, for writings that criticised the country’s authoritarian government. Although the protests were peaceful, the country’s security forces attacked students in their dorms for taking part, killing at least four and wounding over 300, according to Human Rights Watch. Seifzadeh remembers hearing about students being thrown from their residence halls, falling several stories.
Since then, the Iranian regime has stepped up its crackdown on dissent. In January, security forces and militias killed thousands – possibly tens of thousands by some estimates – of people during demonstrations that started over the collapse of Iran’s currency. That included killings at student-led demonstrations, according to The Guardian.
“When I see so many students killed in the streets, I feel that there’s a greater degree of resentment of the regime that existed ever before among this generation,” he said.
After that came the war, now entering a fifth week, which started after US and Israel airstrikes killed Iran’s supreme leader – followed by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, assuming the role. Khamenei has been criticised for having hardline views similar to his father.
Political oppression is one reason why many of Iran’s brightest students choose to study abroad and eventually emigrate, Seifzadeh said. One poll found that 93% of Iranians surveyed have considered leaving the country – with higher percentages among students and university graduates. Iran Open Data, an organisation aiming to promote transparency in Iran, conducted that poll on social media to gauge the extent of Iran’s brain drain.
Seifzadeh left Iran in the early 2000s for a PhD program in business strategy in Ontario, Canada. He then moved to the US with his wife, also Iranian, for work as university faculty members. He said most of his classmates in Iran expressed a desire to leave, amid a lack of opportunities, gender inequalities, and other challenges.
“Iran is notorious for its brain drain and, for many Iranians, higher education is one of the most straightforward paths to immigration,” he said.
More than 110,000 Iranians are currently studying abroad. However, for most students in Iran, studying in the US is no longer an option because of President Donald Trump’s travel ban. Instead, Iran’s top academic talent is heading to other western countries, meaning that the US can’t capitalise on Iran’s “brain drain” like it once did.
“Many [Iranians] major in STEM fields. They very quickly adjust to US values and a lot of them turn into entrepreneurs,” Seifzadeh said. “Cutting them off, obviously, is going to affect the US economy in science.”
Access to new opportunities
For Iranian women, studying abroad can give them freedom to explore fields they’re barred from studying in their country, said Ramesh Sepehrrad, a cybersecurity and political science author and visiting fellow at George Mason University in Virginia. In 2012, women were banned from 77 majors at Iranian universities, mostly engineering or accounting fields.
Sepehrrad moved from Iran to Buffalo, New York, as a teenager in 1985 with her family seeking protection. Several family members were kept as political prisoners in Iran, she said, over their support for opposition groups. That included her sister, a student activist who was arrested at age 13 and imprisoned for two-and-a-half years.
Soon after moving to the US, Sepehrrad began studying computer science at the University of Buffalo. As a US student, she remembers having access to writings from multiple viewpoints and freedom to choose any career path for the first time.
“I was among the lucky ones to be afforded the opportunity to leave the country, to be here, safe, and to choose my own field of study,” she said.
In Iran, laws also prevent women from working in certain fields or traveling outside the country without permission from a male guardian – either a relative or their husband. In addition, women are prohibited from serving as judges or high-ranking government positions and have been imprisoned or flogged for violating the country’s dress code.
These laws, Sepehrrad said, have led some of Iran’s brightest female doctors and students to emigrate in search for better opportunities. In Iran, women make up around 60% of university graduates, but only 14% are in the workforce, according to 2025 data from the World Bank.
Sepehrrad also cited decades of violent crackdowns as a culprit for Iran’s brain drain. Video from this year shows security forces going into hospitals and allegedly preventing medical staff from treating injured protesters. Sepehrrad said that, when police target doctors, nurses, and professors, there’s little incentive to stay. In 2022 alone, 6,500 physicians, including 2,300 specialists, left Iran, according to Iran Open Data.
“This brain drain is going to lead into some sort of health crisis because there are not enough physicians and doctors and nurses to deal with the public health situation there,” she said.
For many Iranians, higher education is one of the most straightforward paths to immigration
Pouya Seifzadeh, SUNY Geneso
New destinations for international students
For Iranian international students, Canada, Turkey, Germany, Italy, and the US have been some of the top destinations this decade.
During the 2024 academic year, before the travel ban restarted, the US hosted around 12,600 students from Iran, according to the latest data from Open Doors. That number pales in comparison to the 51,300 Iranians the country hosted in 1980.
In the mid-1970s and early 1980s, the US hosted more international students from Iran than any other country, according to US State Department data. Those numbers have been falling ever since the 1979 revolution that installed Iran’s theocratic government. While Iranian student enrolment has shrunk in the US over the decades, it’s been growing in other countries.
Canada hosts more than double the number of Iranian students compared to the US – around 26,300, according to the Canadian government’s latest data. In Germany, the number of Iranian students has tripled in the past 15 years, exceeding 13,000 in 2023, according to Germany’s statistical office.
During the Trump administration’s first term, Iranian students were still allowed to study abroad in the US. His first two travel bans impacting Iran lasted only 90 days each and his third ban made an exception for admitted students. Now, in Trump’s second term, his travel ban on Iran includes nonimmigrants such as students, unless they already had a visa before the ban came into effect.
Seifzadeh believes that the most recent travel ban could have been better structured to focus on vetting people instead of banning Iranians altogether. He’s worried about the US depriving itself of highly educated Iranians who want to escape the regime and would turn into patriotic Americans.
“That’s where I think the US could have done a better job, not painting everybody with the same brush,” he said.
However, he’s also concerned about pro-regime Iranians coming into the US and spying on local Iranian communities. Some of Seifzadeh’s friends who studied internationally were arrested upon returning to Iran, he said, because someone in their circle was informing the regime.
Ultimately, Seifzadeh hopes for a future where Iranians are free from oppression and free to study wherever they choose. While his immediate family lives in the US, he fears for relatives who are still living in Iran amid the war.
“A lot of the policies that the regime has pursued has isolated itself. That’s really had an impact on Iranian students,” he said.
While many Iranian students have decided to study internationally, others have stayed home and become leaders in the resistance movement. For decades, university campuses have served as foundations for the pro-democracy movement, Sepehrrad said. Many of her favourite slogans that protesters have been chanting originally started on campuses.
“I think professors and university students have a very strong role to play for the movement for a free Iran, for rejecting any form of tyranny and saying we want a secular republic,” she said.
