The opinions expressed below are Jon Keller's, not those of WBZ, CBS News or Paramount Global.

Funding cuts and immigration policies may keep many international students out of Massachusetts and the United States this fall.

One new study predicts it could cost the national economy $7 billion. Foreign students account for about five percent of college students nationally. The study from NAFSA: Association of International Educators suggests new international student enrollment in the U.S. could drop as much as 40 percent this fall.

International students impact in Massachusetts

"We'll lose more than 12,000 students in this state," Jon Marcus, the higher education editor of the Hechinger Report, said of Massachusetts.

He said the projected drop-off is a much bigger threat to the colleges and universities that help drive the Massachusetts economy.

"Massachusetts is fourth among all states in the number of international students at its universities and colleges. This is a huge hit," Marcus told WBZ-TV.

"In universities in Massachusetts, you're talking overall 35% undergraduate and graduate at Northeastern, 34% at Clark University, Babson College 35%, 31% at MIT, 29% at Berklee College of Music, 27% at Brandeis."

"Your viewers' neighbors work at a college. Almost without doubt, somebody on their street works at a college, and that's going to soon become a problem for us," Marcus said.

What could happen next?

There could be tens of thousands of lost jobs, pressure on schools to raise their prices for American students, and the erosion of a longtime pillar of our innovation-reliant, entrepreneurial economy.

"International students that come here for universities, especially graduate students, stay to fill jobs, especially in tech companies that fuel our economy in Massachusetts. Or they start their own companies disproportionately which employ other people, including Americans. We're discouraging them from doing that," Marcus said.

So, what can these schools do about it?

"I don't know what they can do about it, I wouldn't want to be a university president right now because this is just compounding everything else that's happening," Marcus said.

Earlier this summer, a federal court temporarily halted two efforts by the Department of Homeland Security to stop Harvard University from enrolling international students.