More than a dozen University of Massachusetts Amherst students who were preparing for careers in science, the humanities and other fields, saw their goals take a sudden turn when their legal status to live and study in the U.

The United States has revoked the visas of four international students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and 13 students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, university officials confirmed. WPI learned of the students’ visas being revoked “through its daily monitoring of a government database known as SEVIS,

They included three students and two recent graduates at Harvard, five students at UMass Amherst, and two students and five others at UMass Boston.