Brad Pearce: Do We Really Need 600,000 Chinese Students?

America’s international student programs should be about more than making a quick buck.

Pam Duran, the retired former director of Washington State University’s Intensive American Language Center, saw a major shift in the approach to foreign students during her career. She worked at the IALC from 1988 to 2021, helping students with weaker English skills reach a level of proficiency that would allow them to enter the university. The program worked well during her tenure, she told me, and often received transfer students from more commercialized programs that used what Duran described as “fast food” models.

But over the course of her career, Duran saw finance become a bigger concern. Eventually, after she’d spent 16 years as director, the university switched over to a contracted commercial program. As she put it, the university said, “you’ve been operating like grandma’s kitchen: high touch, high personal contact, high individual attention...it’s time to think fast food.” It wasn’t a good fit for her and she was moved to another position; ultimately, the partnership between the IALC and the private company failed, but Duran was not involved in rebuilding the program.

What is striking about this story is that a society where students are treated like interchangeable economic units and rushed through a for-profit program is likely the impression much of the world already has about America, whereas the “grandma’s kitchen” model gave enrollees the support they needed while presenting the U.S. as a gracious and caring host, leaving a lasting good impression.

Yet fast food is the model we appear to have settled on, one that President Trump says should serve even more customers in the future. According to Trump, the number of foreign students—and specifically Chinese ones—on American campuses should be far higher than it is today. He has suggested increasing student visas so that as many as 600,000 Chinese nationals would sit in college classrooms across America. The alternative is that “half the colleges in the United States go out of business.”

Many of his supporters, who tend to view universities as overpriced and ineffective centers of Leftism, have questioned whether that would be a bad thing. Regardless, Trump, as is his wont, said out loud what is usually kept quiet: that foreign students are propping up many of our universities.

A Question of Priorities

While international students have been a feature of American university life for the better part of a century, now that the topic is making the news only one thing is clear: we don’t agree on the purpose of international student programs and thus have no way to measure their success.

I’ve had misgivings about international student programs since my own undergraduate days at WSU 15 years ago. I grew up 15 miles up the highway and still live in the area. The university is a major feature of the local economy and the public tends to follow what goes on there, including the large number of international students that it, and the nearby University of Idaho, bring to the region.

WSU is in most ways a fairly typical American land grant university, hosting roughly 1,550 international students a year, or just under 6% of the student body. Outside of a few high-profile programs in agriculture and electrical engineering, it’s a rural university and not the most obvious place for foreigners to come to study in America. However, the small-town atmosphere and renowned natural beauty of the region tend to make a good impression—one quite different from the America they’ve seen on TV their whole lives.

But these basic facts fail to reveal much about the ultimate purpose of the programs, either at Washington State or anywhere else: What exactly is the goal? Is it serving foreign students, domestic students, the universities themselves, or some combination of the three? Is it to achieve larger political goals? What is the right number of foreign students in the U.S., and what’s the impact of that population on American students? And, do we really need 600,000 Chinese students walking campuses in America?

Another school official I spoke with, Dr. Paul Whitney, WSU’s interim vice president for international programs, agreed that the issue is usually discussed in rather shallow terms. He views international students as an overall positive for America’s global position, while also acknowledging that these students, who pay full out-of-state tuition, are a tremendous financial asset to our universities, and he feels it’s unfortunate that this is often the main thing mentioned when the media discusses these programs.

Whitney said that since his career began, all universities have effectively become “semi-public” because states have cut back on funding, leaving them to find new revenue sources that will close the gap. International students are one option they have found, and proponents argue that these high-paying foreign students prevent tuition from becoming even higher than it already is for their domestic counterparts. However, critics of universities, myself included, feel that much of this funding is actually spent on administrative bloat rather than on savings for American students.

Whitney had many positive things to say about WSU’s international students, including that they are thoroughly tested for language competence, have a higher retention rate than their domestic counterparts, and that their presence can benefit American students both personally and professionally.

“By rubbing shoulders with people from other countries, our own domestic students learn a lot more,” he told me. “If you ask Human Resources [officials], which I have, they understand that people from different places in the world approach problems differently...they negotiate differently, and that’s a big asset when our companies are sending people out in the world to do business.”

As to why international students are so eager to study here in the first place, particularly given the high cost, Whitney said that the United States has a well-deserved reputation as “one of, if not the, best higher education systems in the world.” The prestige and marketability of American degrees are powerful abroad.

Demographics are another factor. The United States has relatively fewer college-age students but many educators, while in countries such as Nigeria the median age is below 20 years old and there often simply aren’t enough instructors and classrooms to teach the students.

So, given these disparate justifications, what is the federal government’s overall goal with international student programs? That too isn’t always clear, as it’s usually treated like a self-evident good for which justification is not needed.

How Did We Get Here?

While American universities have always had some small number of foreign students, it was after World War II when the federal government began establishing programs like the Fulbright Scholarship to exchange students with other nations. The original idea had little to do with keeping the doors open at our lesser universities. Instead, exchange programs were seen as an important way to compete with Soviet and Chinese communists during the Cold War, a fact that piles even more scrutiny on Trump’s plan to bring hundreds of thousands more Chinese nationals on campus.

In 1961, William Lederer, whose book The Ugly American helped inspire the Peace Corps, wrote a text called A Nation of Sheep which explained the various ways he felt American soft power policies were failing, including its international student programs. The view at the time was that if we brought foreign students to the U.S., they would learn to love freedom and America, and when they returned to their home countries they would use their skills to develop the local economy, all of which would help prevent the spread of communism.

Lederer wrote, “If we are sensible and thoughtful…we can have an unlimited number of young foreigners from every nation around the world enthusiastic about America.” His view remains dominant. To give just one example, in July of 2021 the Department of State and Department of Education departments released a joint statement titled “Reengaging the World to Make the United States Stronger at Home: A Renewed U.S. Commitment to International Education.” It’s an incredible example of uninspiring government-speak:

International education benefits the national security of the United States. It supports U.S. diplomacy by promoting people-to-people ties that create goodwill and mutual understanding, while also advancing the security of the American people...these activities strengthen our ability to build alliances and lasting relationships in government, business and trade, science, and innovation, as well as the arts and culture.

This is typical of arguments in favor of international student programs in that it lists plausible but untestable benefits. The statement does provide impressive economic numbers, however, saying that in 2020 international students contributed $39 billion to the U.S. economy supporting an estimated 415,000 jobs, making higher education our nation’s sixth-largest services export. So while the nonfinancial goals are nebulous, the monetary benefits are clear.

In my own time in college, I encountered a wide variety of foreign students. A pretty Danish girl in my French class was perhaps the type of international student people thought of 40 years ago, but some other students I took French with included very quiet Chinese students, two Vietnamese students who had previously lived in Paris and already spoke French, and, the most memorable to me, a guy from Turkmenistan who spoke excellent English and is still the only person I’ve ever met from that country.

Another instructor I spoke to, who requested anonymity owing to job security concerns, took a more negative view of international students, especially in recent years. This person said that he often learns on the first day of class that Chinese students don’t speak English and thus he is left pretending he doesn’t know that their papers are written by AI. A separate professor I previously interviewed mentioned working with a foreign teaching assistant who did not speak English well enough to perform the job.

Yet the concern among those who promote international programs is that the U.S. is not pursuing international students aggressively enough and is losing out to Britain, Canada, and Australia. Dr. Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired professor of immigration practice at Cornell Law School, wrote in November that, “Every fall, millions of students around the world look at their options. They see Canada’s efficiency, Britain’s clarity and Australia’s openness. Increasingly, they see America’s storm clouds.”

This argument ignores the reality that Britain has seen a drop in international enrollment similar to that of the U.S. and is also limiting the ability of students to transition to work visas after graduation. Meanwhile, Canada’s now-former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reduced student visas by 45% starting in 2024. Australia’s ruling Liberal Party has been making pledges to limit international enrollment as well. The evidence is that, far from laying in wait, our competitor countries are themselves working to limit international enrollment. Perhaps we should consider why.

Many of the nebulous goals outlined by proponents of international programs are dubious. When it comes to a populous developing country like Nigeria, there may be a good match between our supply and their demand. The value our universities and international programs provide as long-term economic assets can benefit our country for decades or even centuries if properly managed. This model—international programs as a sort of national hospitality business—can provide a real benefit, but it requires focusing on true education quality instead of using our country as a glorified diploma mill.

While it may seem unlikely that undergraduates from China would collect information of interest to their government which couldn’t be scraped from social media, it still isn’t wise to help train the workforce of our main global competitor. At a higher level of specialized technology, concerns over spying and intellectual property theft are more valid, and there have been a few high-profile cases of Chinese researchers trying to enter the U.S. with banned hazardous materials, though this seems to be more about personal ambition and lack of caution rather than malicious intent. The largest international student spy case of the last decade was the Russian International Relations graduate student Maria Butina, whose attempt to make “people to people” connections was interpreted as spying.

In that vein, it’s not clear why we want Chinese nationals to make close connections with Americans, particularly in high-level research laboratories with national security implications. Furthermore, such a high concentration of people from one country will make teaching more difficult, discourage interactions between Chinese and American students, and do nothing to improve the quality of education. It’s especially peculiar that Trump would suggest this at the same time that other countries are limiting international enrollment owing to public backlash, suggesting that in this case he’s simply a businessman sniffing an opportunity.

It is a small wonder that the public is left mostly nonplussed about our international programs. They were never asked for their opinion on it, and advocates are loath to admit the programs carry any negatives whatsoever. Pointy-headed think tankers may love the idea of educated immigrants holding high-prestige jobs in the U.S., or of every country boasting its own class of liberal international Atlanticists, but those ideas are not appealing to “America First” conservatives. 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. We are past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to the value that international students provide to American ones.

Who is allowed to study in our country, and whether or not they’re allowed to stay here afterward, is inherently a matter of public policy, and it is past time that this policy be set with meaningful public input. Our country should agree on a clear plan for how to best use our vast higher education assets, and it needs to be something better than doubling Chinese students to squeeze the universities for a quick buck.