And another thing more generally about foreign students. My son is in a graduate program w/substantial numbers of foreign students, mostly Chinese. His program went out of their way to also recruit American students too. However, large % of foreigners whether in academic programs or the workplace (think tech) have displacement effects that push smart American students away. The fact that they pay "full fare" tuition may have some benefits, but also inculcates in them a 'tude, which we also see WRT immigration. Like w/immigration generally, we need less of this.
Here in Canada the source of the problem was circa 2010 when Conservative PM Harper basically took the Romney approach of easily granting permanent residence to graduates of Canadian colleges and universities. This created a gold rush of mostly Indian students who would sign up for pretty much any program anywhere, including the Canadian equivalent of junior colleges in the middle of nowhere. Some rural colleges even set up satellite campuses in the big city run by private contractors.
The results were countless bogus foreign students who barely put up the pretence of studying and mostly focused on driving Ubers and so on. They flooded the unskilled job market and crammed into rental housing, driving up rent. A total disaster. One is currently going on trial for murdering a couple in a home invasion after less than a month in Canada. Now they are closing the barn door by taking away the promise of permanent residence after graduating. We are getting protests from these fake students, collapse in enrollment and lots of bogus refugee claims.
Lessons for the US: 1. Don’t trust colleges to uphold standards when money is involved. 2. There are a limited number of high quality students who can pay. After that point you just get immigration rackets and some real dregs, mostly from India and Pakistan. I don’t think this promise of vast numbers of Chinese students is realistic.
"Who is allowed to study in [y]our country ... is inherently a matter of public policy. Yes, but of what is the decision to go to your country to study inherently a matter?
I have no strong views, but I thank you for insight into something I've not especially dwelt on. I recently read a review in The Nation, a major Kenyan newspaper, which criticises the "consultancy research" of foreign-based scholars whose colonialist viewpoints get repeated parrot-fashion in Africa "based on books authored elsewhere with little relevance to local realities ... Consultancy research is generally pre-determined. It cannot pretend to change local circumstances because, if it resolves the problem, it will erase the reason for its existence."
What Wavinya Makai is saying there about scholarship in Kenya is that Africa suffers under a colonial programme that did not cease upon the grant of independence. The solutions to Africa's problems are regurgitated from the colonial playbook.
I just wondered whether this might have a bearing on why America is keen to host Chinese scholars.
No, we do not need 600,000 Chinese students. I attended a Big Ten engineering school back in the early 80's before the US opened up to China. There were plenty of foreign students even then. We suffered with TAs and graduate advisors who were often unintelligible. I was too naive and timid back then. Today admin would get an earful.
First of all the best Chinese students go to school in China where the best universities are. Our best Universities are second choice for the children of affluent Chinese parents, third choice is a nice State school somewhere that has decent academics.
English ability is measured with a TOEFL test before students are accepted to a university. After coming to the US most can read and listen to lectures at university level or they wouldn't have been accepted. When I taught in China students needed a 1500 word English vocabulary to be accepted to high school. Yes, high school. Many, perhaps most, Chinese students are fluent in 2 completely different Chinese languages, Mandarin, and either the local language in Shanghai, Hong Kong, or elsewhere, English is often their third language and many go on to learn a fourth or fifth.
Chinese make great American citizens, we should hope they stay. Chinese Americans have an extremely low rate of criminality, they have high earnings, are great at business, and best of all they adapt to becoming American easily. Chinese are ideal immigrants. One started the richest company in the world, Nvidia.
We do not need low wage uneducated laborers using social services. We would be well served to accept a million Chinese students and to do everything we can to get them to stay here.
A very valid point - which I would underline as someone who attended university in Germany: the host language you need to be able to understand the verbal tuition and to read the research materials is passive. Passive knowledge is quickly obtained. It is acquiring active language ability that is slower in coming.
You cannot just talk about "language ability" without specifying whether that is writing, reading, speaking or listening. Easiest is reading, then listening, then writing, then speaking. In my experience.
Actively speaking is near impossible it seems, except by immersion. Coming here and being forced to speak. With a very large vocabulary and years of grammar it seems to come quickly, accent is often horrid forever, but altogether plenty to take active participation in group projects. Not great as TAs or Assistant profs as no one can understand them, often the case for Indians too. The Euros, especially Germans and northern Euros, for whatever reason are often much easier to understand. I think a lot of English is some sort of German. Norman Conquest for which I'm still awaiting reparations.
After the STEM degree a lot of the work is in very small groups, collaborating over short text or verbally and writing isn't as important. Before AI even very bright Asian students had a hard time writing things and would struggle for hours on things a US undergrad could crank out in a couple hours. If it's vitally important to publish they often have collaborators to clean it up without distorting meaning.
Native language ability is itself learned through immersion, and learning any foreign language requires dedication as well. For each of my four foreign languages, I know there came a point where, from one day to the next, I suddenly could do it, almost without thinking. Like riding a bike or driving a car.
A Belgian friend of mine years ago would talk English very fast, but make tons of errors. The errors became his dialect, and people learned to accept them and even expect them. He could've spoken much more accurately, but that would have been slower and people lose interest if you speak slowly. Better to speak fast and wrong than slow and accurate.
You want reparations for the Norman Conquest? That, I like.
The Channel Islands are of course closer to Normandy than to England. They were Norman before England was, and the Islanders joke about how England is their conquest, whereas England maintains them as Crown Dependencies: you think you own us? We own you.
Now, there are enough trust funds in Jersey and Guernsey to make a claim for reparations worth the bother, especially with that anecdotal admission of guilt. However, it’s the “Crown Dependency” thing that would probably scupper any attempt to enforce the claim …
I was in a graduate program that was 80% Chinese nationals.
They put up large posters like "There is only ONE China". Basically a middle finger at the USA. Btw, the school was Princeton. And you taxpayers paid for their tution, room, food, health insurance, and cash stipends.
Your piece is thoughtful and well-argued, but it understates the gravest risk posed by the large-scale admission of Chinese foreign students into America’s most prestigious institutions of advanced learning and cutting-edge research. While many Chinese students are genuine net contributors to U.S.-based research efforts, we cannot ignore the reality that they are here with the approval—and, in many cases, the obligations—imposed by the Chinese Communist Party. Under Chinese law, citizens are required to cooperate with state intelligence services, including the transfer of information and technology to the state upon request.
This reality fundamentally alters the risk calculus. China is not a neutral academic partner; it is our most formidable adversary in an ongoing race for geopolitical, military, and economic dominance. Academic openness—once treated as collective good—has become a strategic vulnerability when it enables the systematic extraction of sensitive research, intellectual property, and in particular, dual-use technologies.
The United States cannot afford to underestimate the threat posed by China to U.S. national security. Failing to account for this risk is not generosity or confidence—it is strategic negligence.
I have attempted to address this concern directly in my essay published on Medium.
There is nothing wrong with universities selling a valuable service, but the main reason to admit foreign students is that it is a good way to recruit immigrants that will contribute to economic growth for citizens and earlier immigrants.
Consider the possiblity that among these hundreds of thousands of Chinese Students are thousands that were born to Chinese mothers sent to the US by the CCR to deliver a chilld that gained American Birthright Citizenship. Returned after birth to China they are educated to hate America and return here as students and vote for our downfall by electing Progressive/Socialists. They are then the "Enemy Within" that Cicero warned us about 2000 years ago that led to the fall of the Roman Empire.
Having been on the BOT of a liberal arts college in Southern California there's immense pressure to provide funding for those who can only go so far with loans as tuition keeps increasing. Much of how this is made up is admitting Chinese students (and a mix of foreign students who can afford the steep tuition (Nigerian, Indian). It's an important model which arguably can allow American students of lesser means to attend and graduate. It's called foreign subsidisation. Quite simple.
“Most parents still want their children to spend college making American friends and contacts, not struggling through group projects with people who barely speak English.” Really? That really says a lot about you. I mentor kids all over the country and the vast majority are really excited about the kids they’ve met from overseas. They travel with them, learn from them. Get a passport!
The benefits of massive numbers of Chinese students is today clearly not in excess of the liabilities.
Watching a program today on the high crime, drug addiction and suicide rate impacting urban and rural young men being directly related to the lack of economic opportunity. Foreign students displacing our own young men exacerbates these problems. The colleges and universities owe their mission commitment to helping to advance the socioeconomic outcomes of the people of their country before admitting a single foreign student.
Why is the boundary of a university the boundary of the nation? For example, if Boston College discerns that their Jesuit values leads them to serve Americans and other nationalities, it is not your business.
Boston college can expand to open a campus in those other countries, but while the employees and financial contributors of America-located Boston College benefit from its US location and existence, the charter of that school should be exclusively to benefit American students. And having a small population of foreign students benefits the American students. However, having a large population of foreign students that limit the admission of American students, should not be supported.
Why? Does General Motors have an obligation to only sell cars to Americans? Do Broadway Theatres have to prefer Americans over French or Swedish visitors when selling tickets? Does that really hot single lady down the street from me have an obligation to only date Americans?
Why does BC have to conform to some nation-state boundaries rather than its Jesuit mission?
The more I think about his post, the inaner and likely intellectually dishonest it is.
I am sure that you understand the privilege in human status hierarchy and socioeconomic outcomes provided by a college education. I am guessing if I looked back in your history of posts you are one telling all the displaced blue collar workers from globalism to learn how to code, etc.
So, to use analogies of theater entertainment and selling automobiles, well that is so far off the range that either you are not a good critical thinker (which I think you are) or you are throwing crap at the wall trying to deflect from points that you should accept as being true and rational.
Libbies practically pray to the God of academic accomplishment and credentialism... and so to claim that it isn't harmful to exclude existing American students because there is not room after admitting hundreds of thousands of foreign students because they pay more... well that is a pile of crap that anyone with half a brain can see from a mile away.
Would you be good importing foreign healthcare customers and face rejection from domestic doctors to accept you as a patient because of the lack of capacity?
If the college wants to provide service to foreign students, it can open a campus in that country. Otherwise, it is leveraging the benefits of the country it is blessed to do business in to profit from it at the expense of the people of the country it is blessed to do business in.
You really seem to think the powers of the federal government are unlimited and that every private organization must exist to serve that government. Each of these schools should be able to discern for themselves what their mission and purpose is. Telling, for example, a Jesuit college to put nationalistic demands ahead of its Jesuit and religious principles is just wrong.
Why are so many of the pieces on this Substack based upon anecdotal, first-person accounts? I was looking forward to a thorough exploration of the issue.
It’s a magazine, not an academic journal. For that, you should read American Affairs. Magazines are full of articles that rely on anecdotes and first person narratives.
I think the author complicated the story of all foreign students with the question about Chinese students. It seems like the answer is no but not really proven other than “China is enemy”
While I think there are some points that have merit here, I am not comfortable with the narrative of "do we need" and "America’s international student programs." At the end of the day, it is for the particular university to decide. Let Georgetown and Boston College discern based on their Jesuit values, let Harvard and MIT decide if they are a world wide institution or a New England institution or whatever.
And another thing more generally about foreign students. My son is in a graduate program w/substantial numbers of foreign students, mostly Chinese. His program went out of their way to also recruit American students too. However, large % of foreigners whether in academic programs or the workplace (think tech) have displacement effects that push smart American students away. The fact that they pay "full fare" tuition may have some benefits, but also inculcates in them a 'tude, which we also see WRT immigration. Like w/immigration generally, we need less of this.
But with luck, many of those foreign students will become Americans.
Are you kidding?
??? No. Lots of peole who come to study, if allowed, stay and eventually become citizens.
Here in Canada the source of the problem was circa 2010 when Conservative PM Harper basically took the Romney approach of easily granting permanent residence to graduates of Canadian colleges and universities. This created a gold rush of mostly Indian students who would sign up for pretty much any program anywhere, including the Canadian equivalent of junior colleges in the middle of nowhere. Some rural colleges even set up satellite campuses in the big city run by private contractors.
The results were countless bogus foreign students who barely put up the pretence of studying and mostly focused on driving Ubers and so on. They flooded the unskilled job market and crammed into rental housing, driving up rent. A total disaster. One is currently going on trial for murdering a couple in a home invasion after less than a month in Canada. Now they are closing the barn door by taking away the promise of permanent residence after graduating. We are getting protests from these fake students, collapse in enrollment and lots of bogus refugee claims.
Lessons for the US: 1. Don’t trust colleges to uphold standards when money is involved. 2. There are a limited number of high quality students who can pay. After that point you just get immigration rackets and some real dregs, mostly from India and Pakistan. I don’t think this promise of vast numbers of Chinese students is realistic.
"Who is allowed to study in [y]our country ... is inherently a matter of public policy. Yes, but of what is the decision to go to your country to study inherently a matter?
I have no strong views, but I thank you for insight into something I've not especially dwelt on. I recently read a review in The Nation, a major Kenyan newspaper, which criticises the "consultancy research" of foreign-based scholars whose colonialist viewpoints get repeated parrot-fashion in Africa "based on books authored elsewhere with little relevance to local realities ... Consultancy research is generally pre-determined. It cannot pretend to change local circumstances because, if it resolves the problem, it will erase the reason for its existence."
What Wavinya Makai is saying there about scholarship in Kenya is that Africa suffers under a colonial programme that did not cease upon the grant of independence. The solutions to Africa's problems are regurgitated from the colonial playbook.
I just wondered whether this might have a bearing on why America is keen to host Chinese scholars.
No, we do not need 600,000 Chinese students. I attended a Big Ten engineering school back in the early 80's before the US opened up to China. There were plenty of foreign students even then. We suffered with TAs and graduate advisors who were often unintelligible. I was too naive and timid back then. Today admin would get an earful.
First of all the best Chinese students go to school in China where the best universities are. Our best Universities are second choice for the children of affluent Chinese parents, third choice is a nice State school somewhere that has decent academics.
English ability is measured with a TOEFL test before students are accepted to a university. After coming to the US most can read and listen to lectures at university level or they wouldn't have been accepted. When I taught in China students needed a 1500 word English vocabulary to be accepted to high school. Yes, high school. Many, perhaps most, Chinese students are fluent in 2 completely different Chinese languages, Mandarin, and either the local language in Shanghai, Hong Kong, or elsewhere, English is often their third language and many go on to learn a fourth or fifth.
Chinese make great American citizens, we should hope they stay. Chinese Americans have an extremely low rate of criminality, they have high earnings, are great at business, and best of all they adapt to becoming American easily. Chinese are ideal immigrants. One started the richest company in the world, Nvidia.
We do not need low wage uneducated laborers using social services. We would be well served to accept a million Chinese students and to do everything we can to get them to stay here.
A very valid point - which I would underline as someone who attended university in Germany: the host language you need to be able to understand the verbal tuition and to read the research materials is passive. Passive knowledge is quickly obtained. It is acquiring active language ability that is slower in coming.
You cannot just talk about "language ability" without specifying whether that is writing, reading, speaking or listening. Easiest is reading, then listening, then writing, then speaking. In my experience.
Actively speaking is near impossible it seems, except by immersion. Coming here and being forced to speak. With a very large vocabulary and years of grammar it seems to come quickly, accent is often horrid forever, but altogether plenty to take active participation in group projects. Not great as TAs or Assistant profs as no one can understand them, often the case for Indians too. The Euros, especially Germans and northern Euros, for whatever reason are often much easier to understand. I think a lot of English is some sort of German. Norman Conquest for which I'm still awaiting reparations.
After the STEM degree a lot of the work is in very small groups, collaborating over short text or verbally and writing isn't as important. Before AI even very bright Asian students had a hard time writing things and would struggle for hours on things a US undergrad could crank out in a couple hours. If it's vitally important to publish they often have collaborators to clean it up without distorting meaning.
Native language ability is itself learned through immersion, and learning any foreign language requires dedication as well. For each of my four foreign languages, I know there came a point where, from one day to the next, I suddenly could do it, almost without thinking. Like riding a bike or driving a car.
A Belgian friend of mine years ago would talk English very fast, but make tons of errors. The errors became his dialect, and people learned to accept them and even expect them. He could've spoken much more accurately, but that would have been slower and people lose interest if you speak slowly. Better to speak fast and wrong than slow and accurate.
I wrote about "fluency" here - it is something that you can claim, and even possess. But I defy you to define it: https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/what-is-fluency
Great essay, and true.
You want reparations for the Norman Conquest? That, I like.
The Channel Islands are of course closer to Normandy than to England. They were Norman before England was, and the Islanders joke about how England is their conquest, whereas England maintains them as Crown Dependencies: you think you own us? We own you.
Now, there are enough trust funds in Jersey and Guernsey to make a claim for reparations worth the bother, especially with that anecdotal admission of guilt. However, it’s the “Crown Dependency” thing that would probably scupper any attempt to enforce the claim …
I was in a graduate program that was 80% Chinese nationals.
They put up large posters like "There is only ONE China". Basically a middle finger at the USA. Btw, the school was Princeton. And you taxpayers paid for their tution, room, food, health insurance, and cash stipends.
Why do we do this?
Your piece is thoughtful and well-argued, but it understates the gravest risk posed by the large-scale admission of Chinese foreign students into America’s most prestigious institutions of advanced learning and cutting-edge research. While many Chinese students are genuine net contributors to U.S.-based research efforts, we cannot ignore the reality that they are here with the approval—and, in many cases, the obligations—imposed by the Chinese Communist Party. Under Chinese law, citizens are required to cooperate with state intelligence services, including the transfer of information and technology to the state upon request.
This reality fundamentally alters the risk calculus. China is not a neutral academic partner; it is our most formidable adversary in an ongoing race for geopolitical, military, and economic dominance. Academic openness—once treated as collective good—has become a strategic vulnerability when it enables the systematic extraction of sensitive research, intellectual property, and in particular, dual-use technologies.
The United States cannot afford to underestimate the threat posed by China to U.S. national security. Failing to account for this risk is not generosity or confidence—it is strategic negligence.
I have attempted to address this concern directly in my essay published on Medium.
https://medium.com/a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it-civic-virtue-and-the/chinas-hypersonic-breakthrough-was-enabled-by-america-s-own-institutions-d351e76d89d8?sk=afb6526e9ba5b52e378439459fab65c1
I would welcome your review and any comments you may have.
What an excellent article on such an important matter.
Who is "we"? The We of the colleges that want (need?) the money? Or the We of the USA?
There is nothing wrong with universities selling a valuable service, but the main reason to admit foreign students is that it is a good way to recruit immigrants that will contribute to economic growth for citizens and earlier immigrants.
Consider the possiblity that among these hundreds of thousands of Chinese Students are thousands that were born to Chinese mothers sent to the US by the CCR to deliver a chilld that gained American Birthright Citizenship. Returned after birth to China they are educated to hate America and return here as students and vote for our downfall by electing Progressive/Socialists. They are then the "Enemy Within" that Cicero warned us about 2000 years ago that led to the fall of the Roman Empire.
Having been on the BOT of a liberal arts college in Southern California there's immense pressure to provide funding for those who can only go so far with loans as tuition keeps increasing. Much of how this is made up is admitting Chinese students (and a mix of foreign students who can afford the steep tuition (Nigerian, Indian). It's an important model which arguably can allow American students of lesser means to attend and graduate. It's called foreign subsidisation. Quite simple.
“Most parents still want their children to spend college making American friends and contacts, not struggling through group projects with people who barely speak English.” Really? That really says a lot about you. I mentor kids all over the country and the vast majority are really excited about the kids they’ve met from overseas. They travel with them, learn from them. Get a passport!
The benefits of massive numbers of Chinese students is today clearly not in excess of the liabilities.
Watching a program today on the high crime, drug addiction and suicide rate impacting urban and rural young men being directly related to the lack of economic opportunity. Foreign students displacing our own young men exacerbates these problems. The colleges and universities owe their mission commitment to helping to advance the socioeconomic outcomes of the people of their country before admitting a single foreign student.
Why is the boundary of a university the boundary of the nation? For example, if Boston College discerns that their Jesuit values leads them to serve Americans and other nationalities, it is not your business.
Boston college can expand to open a campus in those other countries, but while the employees and financial contributors of America-located Boston College benefit from its US location and existence, the charter of that school should be exclusively to benefit American students. And having a small population of foreign students benefits the American students. However, having a large population of foreign students that limit the admission of American students, should not be supported.
Why? Does General Motors have an obligation to only sell cars to Americans? Do Broadway Theatres have to prefer Americans over French or Swedish visitors when selling tickets? Does that really hot single lady down the street from me have an obligation to only date Americans?
Why does BC have to conform to some nation-state boundaries rather than its Jesuit mission?
The more I think about his post, the inaner and likely intellectually dishonest it is.
I am sure that you understand the privilege in human status hierarchy and socioeconomic outcomes provided by a college education. I am guessing if I looked back in your history of posts you are one telling all the displaced blue collar workers from globalism to learn how to code, etc.
So, to use analogies of theater entertainment and selling automobiles, well that is so far off the range that either you are not a good critical thinker (which I think you are) or you are throwing crap at the wall trying to deflect from points that you should accept as being true and rational.
Libbies practically pray to the God of academic accomplishment and credentialism... and so to claim that it isn't harmful to exclude existing American students because there is not room after admitting hundreds of thousands of foreign students because they pay more... well that is a pile of crap that anyone with half a brain can see from a mile away.
Well first, this is service not products.
Would you be good importing foreign healthcare customers and face rejection from domestic doctors to accept you as a patient because of the lack of capacity?
If the college wants to provide service to foreign students, it can open a campus in that country. Otherwise, it is leveraging the benefits of the country it is blessed to do business in to profit from it at the expense of the people of the country it is blessed to do business in.
You really seem to think the powers of the federal government are unlimited and that every private organization must exist to serve that government. Each of these schools should be able to discern for themselves what their mission and purpose is. Telling, for example, a Jesuit college to put nationalistic demands ahead of its Jesuit and religious principles is just wrong.
Why are so many of the pieces on this Substack based upon anecdotal, first-person accounts? I was looking forward to a thorough exploration of the issue.
Blogs just happen to be anecdotal, first-person accounts of issues, unfortunately. Or fortunately, as the case may be. I like them.
Not true. Commonplace bills itself as a magazine, which to my thinking means journalism with a certain level of depth and exploration.
It’s a magazine, not an academic journal. For that, you should read American Affairs. Magazines are full of articles that rely on anecdotes and first person narratives.
Well, according to you, this one is.
I think the author complicated the story of all foreign students with the question about Chinese students. It seems like the answer is no but not really proven other than “China is enemy”
While I think there are some points that have merit here, I am not comfortable with the narrative of "do we need" and "America’s international student programs." At the end of the day, it is for the particular university to decide. Let Georgetown and Boston College discern based on their Jesuit values, let Harvard and MIT decide if they are a world wide institution or a New England institution or whatever.