International Students in America
A good thing
On May 27th, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent a cable instructing all U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide to cease interviewing foreign students applying for student and exchange visas. This became the latest salvo in the Trump Administration’s war on higher education. The pause, especially if it’s long-lasting, could have deleterious effects across all of American higher education. Unlike most of the Trump policies attacking universities, it isn’t focused on elite institutions like Harvard or Columbia. Instead, it’s going to have the most damaging impact on non-exclusive schools.
Given that elite universities have a disproportionate share of foreign students, this sounds counterintuitive. Wouldn’t the schools with the highest share of foreign students suffer the most if foreign students are no longer being issued visas? Not necessarily. Elite institutions enroll a lot of foreign students, but they don’t rely on them. The foreign students help keep elite universities’ SAT averages and other admissions standards high, but these schools don’t rely on international enrollment for funding. Elite schools will be able to replace every foreign student with a domestic one, and domestic ones paying the same tuition, without breaking a sweat. These are schools that have admissions rates of under 10 percent. Their prestige may take a bit of a hit, but financially the schools will be just fine. The schools that will suffer the most are the schools that don’t deny admission to tens of thousands of students every year. The colleges and universities that rely on international students to make ends meet.
One of the most frustrating aspects of the current discourse of higher education is that it revolves entirely around institutions that are not the norm. Whether or not all of the claims and counterclaims about culture war issues on elite campuses are true or false are important in that these are important institutions that millions of Americans aspire to attend, but are relatively unimportant to academia writ large. There are 8.8 million students currently enrolled in bachelor’s degree programs in the United States. The Ivy League only enrolls 63,000 of these. Include a few other top institutions like MIT, Chicago, Stanford, etc., and it’s still less than one percent of all undergraduates at four-year colleges.
These schools are made to feel like the norm, with billion-dollar endowments, beautiful campuses, with children of the rich and powerful walking across the quad, but they are not. Treating elite schools as typical institutions is like watching “Succession” or “White Lotus” and thinking it reflects American middle-class life. It’s an absurdity that somehow is accepted by almost all journalists. A recent op-ed in The New York Times is just one of many that act as if the internationalization of elite schools has relevance for most Americans. Undoubtedly, this is because a massively disproportionate share of journalists are coastal elites, and probably believe that graduates from schools like Michigan State or Baylor are destined to be, at best, nameless cogs in the gears of corporate America. Never mind that a degree from a school like Baylor puts someone well within the top 10 percent of their cohort! It’s easy in to lose sight of the fact that a majority of millennials, easily the most educated generation in history, do not have four-year degrees. A four-year degree from any reputable institution puts a graduate in pole position for at least a middle-class life.
Is it harmful on net to have a large percentage of international students at elite American institutions? No, but there are downsides, especially given the amount of tax money poured into these schools. But that’s not the relevant question. The focus shouldn’t be on whether decreasing international students at top schools would be helpful are harmful. It’s whether decreasing international students across the board would be. After all, that is what the current administration is doing. Given what’s transpired over the last six months, the entire higher education system of the United States is going to have fewer international students enrolled this fall compared to last fall. That is unequivocally bad.
The typical American college is not Harvard. It’s a regional public or private school that most people have never heard of. It’s a school that doesn’t win national championships or win Nobel Prizes. These schools provide the backbone of American higher education. While every school likes to drone on and on about minting the leaders of tomorrow, the reality is the leaders of tomorrow need people to lead to be effective. Leaders need employees and subordinates who are capable of taking direction and executing a vision effectively. For every good leader, a successful society needs dozens, if not hundreds, of people in the trenches. This is what the typical American college provides. Obviously movers and shakers can come from any school. Who would guess little Eureka College, a school 20 minutes outside of Peoria, Illinois with under 600 students, would be the alma mater of one of the most influential people of the second half of the 20th century? But Ronald Reagan is the exception. The average university isn’t about rejecting most applicants and educating the best teenage minds in the world who will go on to become presidents and billionaires. It’s about providing solid training to the professional class of tomorrow. It’s a school that accepts most applicants, not rejects almost all of them.
For typical colleges and universities, an international student doesn’t “take the spot” of a domestic one. Far from it. On the contrary, international students subsidize local students. International students pay tens of thousands in tuition, enabling schools to give out scholarships and create programs and places for more American students. This may be surprising. After all, it’s not like higher education is cheap for domestic students. But the reality is that without international students, the typical American college will suffer. Without international students, that loss in revenue is going to have to be offset somewhere. A foreign student shouldn’t be seen as someone taking the place of an American student, they should be seen as someone helping pay for one. Critics of American higher ed are right to point out that those cuts could come from administration or a general streamlining of operations. But when faced with increasing tuition or cutting staff, university administrations will choose the former.
Suspending or hindering the ability of universities to recruit foreign students is yet another own-goal by the Trump administration. No other industry is being put in this position. Nobody is talking about putting tariffs on American exports. The US government isn’t telling Ford they can’t sell cars in France or that Google can’t operate in India. And for good reason. Those policies would hurt American firms and make America poorer. Yet American universities are being told they must do just that.
This reflects the common denominator of Trump's economic policy: the false belief that the world is zero-sum. That if someone wins, someone else must be losing. This, and it must be said loudly and clearly, is false. In any economic transaction, not only can there be two winners, there usually are. American students, American universities, and foreign students all benefit from being educated in America. It’s not something that should be thrown away.