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.”
But there’s one other aspect to the college recruiter’s comment that deserves consideration: “I could fill my freshman class in one trip.” It means that first year class sizes are fixed. There are only so many slots, and every seat taken by a foreign student is one unavailable to an American student. I am not hearing colleges say, “Hey, those foreign students pay so well that we’ll grow the size of our freshman class!” Even if they did, where would the incentive then lie: using the money to “subsidize” U.S. students, or getting more lucrative international ones? Would an expanded class size prioritize U.S. students for the extra slots?
As a former university faculty member and dean, I also observed the “diversity” mania. When most people think of “diversity,” they usually imagine racial discrimination — i.e., different cutoff thresholds for admissions eligibility according to race. But diversity assumes many more variants than that. There are all sorts of categories du jour of which we want more of or, in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s immortal words, “populations we don’t want too many of.” Sex. Sexual preferences. Abilities. Disabilities.
But let me offer an even more pedestrian example: the local folks.
Once upon a time, many schools understood their mission as serving the community where they were. My alma mater, Fordham, gladly served the New York metropolitan area and the Catholic Church in the tristate area. My first employer, St. John’s, was so enmeshed in New York back then that it didn’t even provide dormitories. Seton Hall had dorms but was both a commuter and a “suitcase” school — many on-campus kids went home on the weekend across New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut.
But in the 1980s and 1990s, administrators decided: Local school “bad.” We need “diversity.” Accreditors abetted it. Students from Portland, Oregon were more interesting than students from Perth Amboy, New Jersey. It was justified in the name of “diversity” and “raising educational standards.” Truth is, importing Oregonians meant you were also getting room and board alongside tuition, so it paid better. And having a “national reputation” in U.S. News and World Report beat being the beloved source of teachers, nurses, businessmen, and other professionals in Staten Island and Brooklyn. And once a school shifts largely to residential students, overall costs tend to go up.
The question is, what metrics show that the quality and caliber of students have gone up proportionate to the costs? And for all the social justice warriors of the world, how have we shafted the working and middle classes by making the kid from Perth Amboy go to school in Oregon so the Oregonian can come to New York?
As a father, I have seen the consequences. The annual frenzy from September to May of high school senior year is caught up in applications, “perfect” essays, balanced portfolios, interviews, campus visits, exquisitely detailed financial aid forms, etc., etc. When I applied to college 48 years ago, most of my class made three applications: dream school, wanted school, safety school. Most kids’ applications today are in the double-digits (adding up usually to triple-digits in fees). And it’s not assured that the more competitive the application list is, the more successful the student will be in getting into a majority of schools. He might even get into none. Given that, I think it honest to ask: Why are we putting American kids through such competitive expense and stress to get into an American college when some of our top-rated schools are competing them against classes made up of one fifth or more foreigners?
Harvard claims that it is fighting the President to protect “academic freedom and institutional independence,” a narrative the Times echoes. Maybe we should ask the counter-narrative: Are colleges fighting to protect their right to discriminate and to make oodles of money at the expense of American students?
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