The New York Times carried an article on May 27 listing 50 American colleges and universities whose foreign student enrollment was 15% or higher. One — Illinois Tech — had the majority of its student body (51%) coming from abroad.
The Times doesn’t ask, What’s wrong with this picture? It ran the piece as part of its continuing attacks on the Trump administration for rescinding Harvard’s eligibility to enroll international students. Schools can’t take foreign students unless they are part of the federal registration network for international students — SEVIS — and Trump just kicked Harvard out. It justified its position on the grounds that Harvard discriminates (Harvard went all the way to the Supreme Court — and lost — in defense of its racially biased admissions policy) and fails to protect its Jewish students (the Ivies once even excluded them).
The liberal arguments for international students are that they “enrich” and “diversify” the student body and bring talent to America, elevating the status of our universities.
Let’s ask about some of the downsides to the rosy picture the Times paints. I tap my experience as a retired Foreign Service officer, former faculty member and administrator in higher education, and father.
As a Foreign Service officer, I served abroad in consular (visa) roles. My last post abroad was Shanghai. I’d make two observations. First, as one of China’s biggest cities and a key hub for expatriates, we received our fair share of U.S. college recruiters. That included the “prestige” schools, because many Chinese parents have a “label” fetish: I remember a counselor at Shanghai American school once beginning an evening for parents of high school juniors getting ready to apply to college with “your life won’t be over if you don’t get into Stanford...or Harvard.” A college recruiter once told me she could fill her freshman class right there in Shanghai but didn’t because her school valued “diversity.” Second, we had floods of Chinese students applying each year for visas. I was also struck that most of them were declaring they would study STEM or business (the latter certainly in graduate programs).
The college recruiter’s remark got me thinking. If a school can get a foreign student who will pay full freight for tuition, room, and board, how does that disincentivize it from prioritizing Americans who can’t or from controlling its sticker prices? There are Chinese parents who send their kids to college with a suitcase of cash to pay tuition.
The Times tries to spin that by claiming that foreign students are subsidizing American students: They pay more so Americans can pay less. Somehow, that strikes most Americans as convincing as Joe Biden claiming that “Bidenomics is working” or Janet Yellen yelling, “Inflation is transitory.”
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