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.”
This is the Trumpian viewpoint in a nutshell: The enrollment of foreign students is basically an elite scam. And the Trumpian solution, at least in Harvard’s case, is to shut things down as brutally as possible, regardless of the consequences for the students who cannot complete their degrees, the labs that need these students to conduct research and the university that is losing the tuition income.
But the fact that the Trump administration is handling the issue crudely doesn’t mean it’s not a real issue. Strikingly, the progressive historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and the conservative law professor Adrian Vermeule both suggested on X after Mr. Trump’s move against Harvard that perhaps international enrollments should not continue at the same level.
By some measures, the opening of American higher education to international students is an obvious, unqualified good. By others, it is much more problematic.
If we think of universities principally as generators of knowledge, expanding international enrollments clearly makes sense. By increasing the pool of applicants, it raises the quality of student bodies, thereby improving the level of intellectual exchange and facilitating better research and more significant discoveries.
If we think of universities as engines of economic growth, taking as many foreign students as possible is again a good idea. These students bring billions of dollars a year to American shores. Since many foreign students end up immigrating to the United States after graduation and earn salaries much higher than the national average, they contribute to the economy for decades. In their high-level jobs, they also help boost American productivity.
And if we think of universities as instruments of American soft power and international understanding, the benefits are especially evident. By coming here, foreign students create ties between the United States and their home countries, develop friendships with Americans and gain an understanding of American culture and society.
But if we think of universities as engines of social mobility and promoters of national unity, the story looks different. 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, where 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 each other’s opinions about global trade?
Any debate about international enrollments might soon become, well, academic. If the Trump administration maintains its current border and visa policies and continues its attempts to detain and deport foreign students who express controversial opinions, foreign enrollments could shrink drastically of their own accord.
But as we look to the post-Trump future, it will be important for U.S. universities to recognize the genuine tensions and trade-offs of international enrollments, and to balance their increase with more outreach to a larger range of domestic applicants — even if it comes at the cost of culinary diversity in the heartland.
David A. Bell (@DavidAvromBell) is professor of history at Princeton. His latest book is “Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution.”
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