Education: America First vs. foreign students

Trump has created an opening for foreign universities to lure both international and U.S. talent

(Image credit: Reuters)

published 16 June 2025

Are international students still welcome in the U.S.? asked The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. It doesn't seem so, judging by the Trump administration's escalating "attack on foreign talent." President Trump signed an executive order last week barring foreigners from enrolling at Harvard University—where more than a quarter of students are from overseas—claiming they threaten national security. A federal judge quickly blocked the order, which was announced just days after Secretary of State Marco Rubio vowed to "aggressively" revoke visas issued to the roughly 277,000 Chinese students in the U.S. The administration justified that move by citing espionage concerns. But Vice President JD Vance gave the real game away when he declared that curbing visas for overseas students would help "American citizens to really flourish." This is "simply not true," said Sheldon H. Jacobson in The Hill. The 1.2 million foreign students in the U.S. haven't displaced our best and brightest—they pay full tuition, helping subsidize Americans who receive aid. And some 40% remain in the U.S. after graduation, "filling vital needs in health care, engineering, and science."

Trump's ongoing campaign against Harvard is "crude and vengeful," said David A. Bell in The New York Times. But the "internationalization of American schools is a real issue." While the number of foreign students in the U.S. is up 300% since 1980, many elite schools have not raised their enrollments significantly, despite the U.S. population growing by 50%. As a result, the admissions process has become more competitive "for homegrown applicants." Then there's the fact that the foreign students who attend our institutions "tend to come from considerable wealth and privilege; this is what allows them to pay the full U.S. tuitions." Those students make our universities "look even more elite and possibly out of touch"—providing fuel for Trump's populist assault on academia.

There is no upside to this "war on knowledge," said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. For decades, "the freedom and diversity of American higher education operated like a magnet," attracting the planet's most incredible minds and "spinning off trillions of dollars in wealth." But by ripping up the welcome mat and slashing tens of billions of dollars in funding for almost every area of science, Trump has created an opening for foreign universities to lure both international and U.S. talent. Drugs that would have saved American lives, and breakthrough technologies that would have created American jobs, will now be developed abroad. The destructive consequences of Trump's "Cultural Revolution" will haunt us "for a generation."