And I don’t mean the good kind of “party school” either — i.e., placement on Playboy’s ultra-prestigious list of the Top 10 Party Schools in America. (Toga! Toga!) The “party” I’m talking about is the Chinese Communist Party.
The Wall Street Journal: Harvard Has Trained So Many Chinese Communist Officials, They Call It Their ‘Party School’
For decades, the [Chinese Communist] party has sent thousands of mid-career and senior bureaucrats to pursue executive training and postgraduate studies on U.S. campuses, with Harvard University a coveted destination described by some in China as the top “party school” outside the country.
Alumni of such programs include a former vice president and Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s top negotiator in trade talks with the first Trump administration.
Americans spend gargantuan amounts of money on education. Just K-12 costs $17,277 per student each year. For state and local governments, 8.5% of their entire budget is allocated to higher education, i.e., colleges and universities — more than what’s spent on highways, roads, police, courts, jails, and housing.
These colleges and universities also stuff their pockets with federal grants. In 2023, Americans spent nearly $60 billion on research and development grants alone.
Yet increasingly, the biggest beneficiaries of America’s colleges are international students. American citizens are getting frozen out.
There’s no reciprocity, either, notes Secretary of State Marco Rubio:
In the academic year 2024, there were 277,000 Chinese nationals who were studying here at academic institutions here in the United States. On the other hand, there were only 800 Americans who were studying at universities over in China.
My oldest son graduated from high school over the weekend. The valedictorian (er, not my kid) announced that he would be going to Carnegie Mellon, which is certainly an excellent school. Kudos to him.
I’m sure he worked super-hard.
But when he’s there, about half his classmates will be non-Americans. That’s because 44% of Carnegie Mellon’s student body is comprised of foreign students.
The same is true for many of America’s most admired colleges and universities. Among the top 15 U.S. colleges with the highest percentage of international students are such heavy-hitters as Columbia, Johns Hopkins (which receives more NIH grant money than any other college), New York University, Caltech, University of Chicago, M.I.T, and yes, Harvard.
Perhaps it’s time for the MAGA movement to go MEGA: Make Education Great Again.
None other than The New York Times(!) noted the inherent unfairness in an eye-opening article, “Don’t Let Trump’s Brutality Fool You. The Internationalization of American Schools Is a Real Issue.” Among the highlights:
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. [emphasis added]
The author is David Bell, a history professor at Princeton. In his assessment:
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. [emphasis added]
Their Poli-Sci departments might preach the virtues of socialism, but universities are black-hearted capitalists when it comes to admissions. American students usually need scholarship dollars and financial loans to attend four years of college; a Chinese kid zipping around town in a Maserati — with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party — will gladly pay the full admission price.
Thus, the college admission system prioritizes foreigners over Americans.
That’s not to say there shouldn’t be any foreign students. If Elon Musk hadn’t attended American colleges, there’s an excellent chance that Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, and numerous other innovations would’ve been launched elsewhere. There’s value in importing the best and brightest minds worldwide.
But there’s also a tipping point.
And it’s NOT xenophobic, bigoted, or racist to insist that the primary beneficiaries of American-funded colleges ought to be American citizens. We paid for it — and we did so with OUR children in mind.
Not the Chi-Com’s kids.
Even the “diversity” argument falls short because the sheer volume of foreign students is so top-heavy, it’s disadvantaging working-class Americans:
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? [emphasis added]
Exclusively for our VIPs: On High School Graduation and Destiny
Last week, President Trump floated the idea of redirecting $3 billion in Harvard grants to trade schools. Partly because of the large influx of foreign students, limited seats, and the sky-high cost of colleges and universities, trade schools have become America’s newest vehicle for upward mobility. From University Business:
Enrollment in trade school has grown 4.9% from fall 2020 to 2023, erasing pre-pandemic declines, according to a new report from Validated Insights, a market research company. Revenue has also expanded 11.1%.
Interest in attending trade school has nearly doubled among both teens and adults since 2017. In 2024 alone, search traffic is up 27%.
University enrollment, on the other hand, has declined by 0.6% since the pandemic, according to data compiled from the National Center for Education Statistics. Projected market growth through 2030 is looking more favorable for trades (5-7%) than broader higher ed (2-4%).
Imagine that: American schools focusing on helping Americans!
Sounds like another winning issue for Team Trump. From MAGA to MEGA — and to hell with Harvard and the Chi-Coms.
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