AMAC Exclusive – By Aaron Flanigan
Over the course of 2023, the federal government has doled out more than $200 billion to America’s colleges and universities. But despite the fact that U.S. citizens are footing the bill for scholarships, research grants, federally subsidized student loans, and dozens of other taxpayer-funded programs, it is increasingly foreign-born students, not the children of U.S. taxpayers, who are reaping the benefits of the American higher education system.
Data shows that, during the 2022-2023 academic year, there were a whopping 1,057,188 international students studying at American universities—nearly double the number from just two decades ago. Approximately one out of every four students on an American university campus today is not a U.S. citizen.
25 percent of the Harvard student body (including graduate students) is designated as “international.” That figure closely mirrors the percentage of foreign students at other top schools like Yale (20 percent), Stanford (24 percent), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (29 percent), the University of California, Berkeley (15 percent) and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (23 percent).
Close to a third of these students hail from Communist China, and about 10 percent come to the U.S. from Middle Eastern countries such as Iran, Iraq, and Syria.
American families preparing to send their children to college today already face soaring tuition costs, daunting acceptance rates at elite schools, and a cutthroat application process that often drains students and their families of their energy, financial resources, and dignity. Now they face another challenge – competing with foreign-born students who often earn extra points on their application simply for not being from the United States.
Meanwhile, it should be noted, the American students who do manage to get into and attend our nation’s elite schools are faced with stupefyingly woke faculty who are bent on indoctrinating students with ahistorical and anti-American propaganda.
These alarming developments raise some crucial questions: why are our nation’s colleges and universities endorsing such blatant anti-Americanism? Perhaps more importantly, why are taxpayers expected to subsidize universities even as they actively work to exclude American students in the name of “diversity”?
Every year, U.S. high school students spend endless hours and resources studying for entrance exams, readying college applications, and completing their coursework only to face rejection from American colleges, many of which are subsidized by their families’ tax dollars. And more often than not, those who do manage to get accepted are inundated with course material that pressures them to question their heritage, disavow their culture, and hate their country.
The culture of anti-Americanism and moral depravity that now dominates college campuses has been on full display in recent weeks following Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel and massacre of Israeli civilians. American colleges and universities have shamefully become a cradle of anti-Semitic hate and even open sympathizing with Hamas and radical Islamic extremism. Along with outright celebrations of the deadly attacks, some tenured professors have delivered anti-Semitic lectures, while others have encouraged threats and even violence against Jews.
Even prior to the Hamas attacks, however, American colleges and universities had already cemented their reputations as hotbeds for Communism, Marxism, and other breeds of leftism—warping the minds of millions of young Americans and fraying the bonds of patriotism and civic unity.
There are also legitimate concerns that America’s adversaries, particularly China, are using the university system to steal military and trade secrets. The FBI has repeatedly warned American universities about intellectual property theft from Chinese spies posing as college students.
Although there is certainly a place for international students on America’s campuses, the idea that they should account for 25 percent of our nation’s college students is likely a difficult one for American families and students to swallow. After all, it is impossible to imagine China or other U.S. adversaries allowing westerners to take up a quarter of the slots at their most prestigious schools.
Fortunately, some conservative leaders have begun to devise solutions to the problems plaguing our campuses. President Donald Trump, for instance, has called to revamp the college accreditation system and institute what he calls the “American Academy,” a free and anti-woke online educational institution that will be funded by money taken from “excessively large private university endowments.”
Trump has also pledged to deport foreign students who support Hamas or express hatred for the United States despite enjoying the benefits of taxpayer-funded American education.
Even as academia’s woke turn and the skyrocketing costs of higher education erode the overall value of many college degrees, America’s universities remain one of the nation’s primary engines of economic empowerment and personal advancement. It’s long past time for a serious conversation about why admissions offices hand out one in every four of these significant, taxpayer-funded opportunities for success to foreign nationals.
Aaron Flanigan is the pen name of a writer in Washington, D.C.
