On the menu today: We turn away from the fires of Los Angeles for a deep dive into one of the economic engines of America’s colleges and universities, both public and private: foreign students who are paying full freight. The College Board survey found the average annual cost of college in 2024–2025 was roughly $30,000 at in-state public universities, $49,000 for public universities out of state, and $63,000 at private colleges. For the Ivy League, you’re looking at about $83,000 to $89,000. A few weeks ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the Trump administration will move aggressively to revoke visas held by certain Chinese students in the U.S. as part of an effort to crack down on research theft. No wonder the universities are howling; forget the national-security risk, they’ve got a small fortune at stake.
American Colleges Have Come to Rely on Foreign Students Paying Full Freight
At the beginning of the month, Princeton University history professor David Bell wrote an op-ed for the New York Times expressing the once-unthinkable: that ever-higher numbers of foreign students on American college campuses might not be an unalloyed good thing, and might have some drawbacks. After pointing out the potential advantages to increasing student knowledge, helping U.S. economic growth, and as instruments of American soft power and international understanding, Bell pointed out the aspect that academia prefers not to mention:
Many of the most elite American universities have not raised their overall enrollments significantly since the 1970s, even as the U.S. population has risen by 50 percent, making admissions far more competitive. The more slots that go to foreigners, the more challenging the process for homegrown applicants.
As in the case of the Chinese students in Ohio, foreign students tend to come from considerable wealth and privilege; this is what allows them to pay the full U.S. tuitions. They have often graduated from elite schools that prepare them for the grueling American application process and, when necessary, teach them fluent English. So these students make U.S. universities look even more elite and possibly out of touch, at a moment when populist resentment of these institutions has facilitated the Trump administration’s destructive assault on the scientific research they conduct.
Furthermore, while foreign students bring one sort of diversity to U.S. universities, it may not be as great as the diversity provided by Americans of different social backgrounds. A graduate of an elite private school in Greece or India may well have more in common with a graduate of Exeter or Horace Mann than with a working-class American from rural Alabama. Do we need to turn university economics departments into mini-Davoses in which future officials of the International Monetary Fund from different countries reinforce one another’s opinions about global trade?
There are two distinctions that are key to this discussion. The first is the distinction between private universities and public, state-funded colleges and universities. The second is the distinction between hostile states like China and allied countries or those with no animus towards the United States.
As long as a student qualifies for a student visa to enter the U.S., it is not the job of the federal government to tell private colleges and universities which students they can and cannot admit. If Columbia University and Northeastern University want student bodies that are 40 percent foreign students, or Carnegie Mellon wants one that is 44 percent foreign students, or Illinois Tech wants a student body that is 51 percent foreign students, that’s their right. (All percentages from this New York Times chart, which got the data from the National Center for Education Statistics.)
But public universities get a significant chunk of their funding from state governments, and if you’re going to get taxpayer money, it is fair to ask that you prioritize the education of American students. Yes, foreign students are often paying more — one of the reasons colleges and universities love them — but they’re also taking up a spot in a classroom that otherwise could have gone to a qualified student who is an American citizen. We are giving a finite resource — access to our best professors, laboratories, libraries, etc. — to wealthy foreign students at the expense of an American student who probably will need loans and scholarships.
If you’re a California resident undergraduate accepted to a University of California school, living on campus, your total cost in 2025-2026 is estimated to be $45,234. If you’re a non-California resident undergraduate accepted to a University of California school, living on campus, your total cost in 2025-2026 is estimated to be $80,638. Most of that is the difference in tuition cost; resident students get charged $14,934, while nonresident students pay $50,328. No wonder University of California schools love foreign students, as well as out-of-state students: they get an extra $35,000 on each one.
The University of California system received a total of $5 billion in ongoing state General Fund support for core operations in the 2024-25 fiscal year; frustratingly, the California legislature’s legislative affairs office doesn’t break down the funding by campus. But we know that 15 percent of the student body at UC-Davis is foreign students; that figure is 16 percent at UC-Irvine, and 18 percent at UC-San Diego.
Taxpayers in the state of Michigan provided the University of Michigan system $420 million in 2024 — $365.6 million for the Ann Arbor campus, $32 million for UM-Dearborn, and $26.9 million for UM-Flint. At the University of Michigan, 17 percent of their students, undergraduate and graduate, are foreign students.
In 2024, the Maryland state government appropriated $210 million to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, about one-third of the school’s operating revenue. (This figure is just direct funding from the state government, separate from any grants.) Twenty percent of the 11,523 students at UMBC are foreign students.
For the current fiscal year, the New Jersey Institute of Technology is slated to receive $52.8 million in direct state operating aid from the New Jersey state government. Almost a quarter of the 10,388 students at NJIT, 23 percent, are from overseas.
The same percentage of the student body is foreign at the University of Texas at Dallas; that school is allocated $16.2 million from the state of Texas through the TEXAS Grant program.
In this fiscal year, Georgia Tech is budgeted to receive approximately $527.9 million in state appropriations from the state government of Georgia. The student body at Georgia Tech is also 23 percent foreign students.
For fiscal year 2025, the University of Illinois system will receive an operating budget appropriation of $710.6 million from the state of Illinois. Twenty-three percent of the 47,118 students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are foreign students.
As recently as 2006, the U.S. hosted a bit more than a half million foreign students. Within a decade, that figure doubled to more than a million; it dropped a bit, to 914,000, during the pandemic, but quickly rebounded. The total number of international students at U.S. colleges and universities reached an all-time high of more than 1.1 million (1,126,690) international students in the 2023–2024 school year, a 7 percent increase from the previous academic year.
More than 331,000 are from India, and more than 227,000 are from China. Remember, almost all of them are paying full tuition; they contributed $44 billion to the U.S. economy in the last academic year.
More than 17 colleges and universities have more than 10,000 foreign students on campus; New York University has more than 27,000.
American high school students who want to get into top-tier schools today need to not just stand out from their peers across the country; they must stand out from their peers across the world, including all those children of wealthy foreign elites who sent their kids to prep schools.
Now, if private schools like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (30 percent) the University of Chicago (31 percent), CalTech (32 percent) or Johns Hopkins University (39 percent) want a campus that’s full of the offspring of Middle Eastern oil barons, Chinese millionaires, Indian tech moguls and European aristocracy, that’s their right. (Somebody out there is going to object to that characterization, but if you live on campus, it costs $89,340 for a year at MIT, $91,830 at Johns Hopkins, $93,633 at the University of Chicago, and $93,912 for CalTech. You’re not getting middle-class families if you’re expecting them to pay full freight on that. Note that those costs are all about $10,000 more than the median household income here in the U.S.)
“Home of the world’s rich kids” is not really the image that those institutions attempt to showcase to the world, now, is it?
Do you recall anyone asking you, as a state taxpayer, if you wanted more international students at your state’s public university? Did anyone ever get a sense of what percentage of international students made the right “mix”? Does one in five, or one in four, seem a little high for an institution that gets a significant chunk of its budget from the state taxpayers?
(Public schools also get funding from the federal government, but the overwhelming majority of that funding is in the form of research grants and contracts. In other words, they’re getting paid to do work for the federal government. We can argue whether a particular research project is worthwhile, but the federal government isn’t just handing over a pile of money to keep the place operating. State governments, however, are doing just that, which means they should get some say in how those places are run.)
Then there’s the matter of China. The pattern of Chinese foreign students reflects that of foreign students overall — 50,000 to 100,000 each year throughout the 1990s and 2000s, tripling during the Obama years, and remaining close to 400,000 per year from 2017 to 2020. Since the pandemic, it’s dropped to a bit below 300,000 per year.
In 2017, the Chinese government passed the National Intelligence Law, which declares all Chinese citizens are required to “support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts,” regardless of their location. So if the Chinese Ministry of State Security comes along and demands that Chinese students start reporting on what’s being researched in the labs at the university they’re attending, any Chinese student who doesn’t cooperate can be arrested. Or, in quite a few cases, the target’s family can be threatened. The Chinese MSS relies heavily on “nontraditional collectors” — foreign students, emigrants, and Chinese-Americans with family back in China — who can be threatened, strong-armed, coerced, or bribed into becoming spies.
Back in 2018, FBI director Christopher Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee, “the use of nontraditional collectors, especially in the academic setting, whether it’s professors, scientists, students, we see in almost every field office that the FBI has around the country. It’s not just in major cities. It’s in small ones as well. It’s across basically every discipline. And I think the level of naïveté on the part of the academic sector about this creates its own issues. They’re exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have, which we all revere, but they’re taking advantage of it.”
(Keep in mind that the Chinese government is more than happy to bribe non-Chinese citizens with access to American secrets or other sensitive information. Back in 2023, Charles Lieber, the former chair of Harvard University’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department, was convicted of lying to federal authorities about his affiliation with the People’s Republic of China’s Thousand Talents Program. Lieber’s program did research for the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health. The Wuhan University of Technology paid Lieber $50,000 per month, living expenses of up to $150,000, and approximately $1.5 million to conduct joint research at WUT. Yes, the trail always leads back to Wuhan.)
Whether we like it or not, there is a significant security risk with Chinese students that does not exist for any other country. Again, this is a matter of national origin, not ethnicity. There is no particular espionage risk from Taiwanese foreign students.
Finally, a significant portion of the Chinese students studying in the U.S. are the children of high-level Chinese Communist Party officials.
Xi Jinping’s daughter, Xi Mingze, enrolled at Harvard University in 2010 under a fake name. By 2023, 20 percent of the CCP’s Central Committee members — the 370 most powerful party officials in China — had some foreign education, mostly at Western universities.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
“If we were to rank the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘overseas party schools,’ the one deserving top spot has to be Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in the U.S.,” said a 2014 commentary published by Shanghai Observer, an online platform run by the city’s main party newspaper.
. . . While Harvard Kennedy School hosted Chinese students as early as the 1980s, Beijing started sending officials for mid-career training there in a more organized manner in the following decade, according to Chinese media reports. One program, launched in 1998, offered fellowships and executive training courses to around 20 senior officials each year.
In the early 2000s, Harvard launched another program, “China’s Leaders in Development,” through which Chinese officials would undergo a weekslong training course split between Harvard and Beijing’s prestigious Tsinghua University.
Why are we giving coveted slots in Harvard University, or any other elite U.S. school, to the offspring of Chinese government officials?
What do their entrance essays say? “What I learned from watching my dad imprison Uighurs?”
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, a California Democratic congresswoman is celebrating a San Diego restaurant that was raided by ICE — and ignoring the fact that the restaurant is accused of exploiting those workers into twelve-hour-or-more shifts with no breaks and being verbally abusive to those workers.
Congresswoman Sara Jacobs, are we sure that the restaurant is the hero in this story?
Reprinted with permission from the National Review by Jim Geraghty.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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