American universities have become the finishing schools for the elites of nations that openly compete with, and in many cases threaten, the United States. Rival powers like China send their brightest and most capable STEM students to American institutions specifically because the US has the world’s best research infrastructure, laboratories, and faculty, and because we are foolish enough to admit them. These students then return home to strengthen state-backed industries, military research programs, and strategic technologies that directly compete with American interests on the global stage.
What was initially taken as a benign act of neighborly altruism has become a pressing national security risk. Universities increasingly place foreign students in sensitive labs, including (but not limited to) nuclear engineering and physics, AI, quantum computing, aerospace, semiconductors, nanotechnology, and biotech. For example, China exports around 300,000 students to the US in a typical year, and a majority of those students enroll in the aforementioned concentrations of study. Essentially, the US is strengthening a competitor at its own expense. Federal agencies have repeatedly issued warnings to universities about the threat of research exfiltration, but these warnings are often disregarded.
The warnings are disregarded even when cases of foreign research-affiliate malpractice have become a “pattern of criminal activities,” according to United States Attorney Jerome F. Gorgon, Jr. Gorgon made this distinction in a statement regarding a case in which three Chinese nationals affiliated with a University of Michigan laboratory were charged with conspiring to smuggle biological material into the United States. The three researchers, Xu Bai, 28, Fengfan Zhang, 27, and Zhiyong Zhang, 30, are recent perpetrators of malicious foreign-linked misconduct that federal authorities are warning is rising in prevalence. In several other instances, Chinese graduate students were caught photographing military sites, such as Yanqing Ye at Boston University, as well as military equipment on federal training grounds.
The situation has grown dire enough that the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) was compelled—this year—to release the Safeguarding Academia bulletin in partnership with the FBI, NIST, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, and multiple military counterintelligence agencies, instructing universities to look out for foreign adversaries exploiting American universities to extract sensitive research and intellectual property.
The menace of espionage leaves America’s top universities vulnerable. For example, on December 1st, the Stanford Review reported that Stanford’s Earth Sciences Chair and Deputy Director of the Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, Wendy Mao, also held a position at China’s nuclear weapons program, alias “HPSTAR.” Mao’s roles allowed her direct exposure to extremely sensitive “high-pressure measurements and theoretical work” that are core to modern nuclear and advanced weapons design. The Stanford Review also mentioned that Mao has published “at least 50 publications with HPSTAR,” and that “Mao has trained at least five HPSTAR employees as PhD students in her Stanford and SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) labs.” Mao is not only working with China, but she is also training more Chinese students in her labs, all while being subsidized by federal agencies such as, but not limited to, the Department of Energy (DOE), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Defense (DOD), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Not only is America training its enemies, but we’re subsidizing them too.
Foreign nationals also displace American students in strictly numerical terms. Universities often present the idea that domestic and foreign admissions operate in separate pools, but internal data tells a different story. When the University of California system increased foreign enrollment by roughly 18,000 students, the number of in-state acceptances was offset by more than 8,000. This is a policy intentionally displacing America’s students. These universities, governed by raw economic interests, prefer foreign students, who pay higher tuition than natives. These higher-paying foreign students end up substituting domestic students in universities, which is especially damaging at public universities that were founded to educate residents of their own state, not the entire world. The system ends up prioritizing revenue over the educational needs of American citizens.
Universities have also become a driving mechanism for the legal immigration racket, taking in students from foreign countries and spitting out permanent residents. The F1 visa, followed by Optional Practical Training (OPT), and then the H-1B visa, has carved out a pathway for foreign students to remain in the US long after graduation. OPT programs by themselves harbor hundreds of thousands of foreigners in America at any given time. Many of those foreigners end up transitioning into long-term residents. This means that university admissions offices, motivated by tuition revenue, end up producing a large chunk of the demographic change of the country by serving as de facto immigration gateways.
Reliance on foreign students to keep failing universities alive also violates the basic principles of a capitalist economy. In any normal sector, any business that loses customers, cannot balance its books, and inflates administrative spending beyond capacity is forced to shut down. Buoyed by the heavy tuition contributions of foreign students, elite universities—in particular—have long avoided this outcome. Foreign subsidization presents the university with a perverse incentive, without which it would be forced, like any other business, to change—meeting the demands of the consumer—or die. Higher education remains insulated from the possibility of bankruptcy, the only incentive that could command a more competitive approach. Accordingly, wastefulness, chronic inflation, and sclerotic inefficiency have become endemic to higher education. This is because the university is free to consume as many resources as it can, while producing little in return as it wishes.
This dependence on foreign enrollment contributes directly to tuition inflation for American students. Foreign students willing and able to pay exorbitant amounts of tuition per year without complaint have driven up the sticker price of tuition for ordinary American students. Between 2000 and 2020, tuition at many universities rose by more than 150 percent, far outpacing inflation and wage growth. Amenities have ballooned to attract this moneyed international clientele. A university that spends ~120 million dollars on a luxury dorm complex does not do so to accommodate local middle-class families, but for an ever-increasing global market. These costs, however, are baked into tuition for everyone. If a university allots 10 million dollars per year to international recruitment, global marketing campaigns, and specialized staff, American students absorb the cost. Confronted with a rising price floor, American students naturally take on more debt for a degree that is only less valuable than it used to be.
America should not maintain a system where failing universities survive only because they have access to an inexhaustible global market of foreign tuition, pinning American students against the entire world for competitive scholarships and admission spots. The United States should cut off the tap—not only in order to secure national security or geopolitical prowess, but to boost opportunity at the modest levels of state and locality. The short-term shock of bankruptcy and insolvency would ultimately yield long-term effects to benefit the people the American university was initially established to educate.
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