Are International Students Good for American Universities?

Opinion|Don’t Let Trump’s Brutality Fool You. The Internationalization of American Schools Is a Real Issue.

Several years ago, a colleague teaching at Miami University, a large state school in Ohio, kindly invited me to give a talk there. After picking me up at the airport, he suggested that we have lunch at a Sichuan restaurant near campus. I was skeptical. Sichuan, in small-town Ohio? “Trust me,” he said. “It’s fantastic.” And it was.

The reason a first-class Sichuan cook had set up shop in this unlikely location soon became clear. At the time, the university was enrolling large numbers of Chinese students — more than 1,400 in 2014, for example. In fact, my colleague went on to tell me, significant social tensions had arisen, since the Chinese students were much wealthier than the American ones, to say nothing of the townspeople. As he said this, he pointed to a Chinese student driving past in a Maserati.

The Trump administration’s attempt to keep Harvard from enrolling foreign students has drawn new attention to the remarkable internationalization of American higher education over the past two generations. In the 2023-24 school year, no fewer than 1.1 million international students were enrolled in colleges and universities in the United States, or almost four times the number in the 1979-80 school year. (Total enrollments at universities rose by a little more than 50 percent over the same period.)

Like many large social changes, this one happened without much conscious planning or debate. Foreign students kept applying in ever greater numbers, and universities happily admitted them, since non-Americans receive merit- and need-based financial assistance at much lower rates than Americans do. It has taken Donald Trump’s crude and vengeful swipe at Harvard to draw much attention to the subject.

Now, it seems that a serious debate may finally start. Has the internationalization of the American student body been a good development? Should it continue?

To be sure, no one should take the Trump administration’s position on the issue seriously. In announcing the suspension of Harvard’s participation in the Student Exchange and Visitor Program (which a judge quickly blocked with a temporary restraining order), Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said: “It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multi-billion-dollar endowments.”