Reducing the Number of Foreign Students

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Jay Greene

Subject: Reducing the Number of Foreign Students
Bio: Senior Research Fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy and former Department Chair at the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education Reform

Larry Bernstein:

Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and education. 

The topic today is Reducing the Number of Foreign Students.

Our speaker is Jay Greene, a Senior Research Fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy and previously was the Department Chair at the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education Reform. Jay is probably best known as my debate partner at New Trier High School.

Foreign students can make important contributions to every college campus but there are downsides as well. My alma mater the University of Pennsylvania is now 25% international and over 35% if you include the optional practical training programs. Should we reserve more spots for American citizens for our best universities and our medical school residency programs. Does turning American universities into global educational centers undermine its critical function to inculcate American values in our future American elite. 

Buckle up.

Jay, please begin with your opening six minute remarks.

Jay Greene:

Let me start by stating some assumptions for the argument I'm making. 

First, nation states matter. There is no such thing as a citizen of the globe. Being a citizen of the United States offers different rights and imposes different obligations than a citizen of another country. 

Second, the United States has a distinctive set of values, traditions, and institutional norms, and upholding those is part of being a good citizen of the United States. 

Third, institutions, including universities, play a key role in transmitting these American values, traditions, and norms from one generation to the next. If those institutions fail to perform this function our values will fade and be displaced by others that are not American.

And fourth, despite its imperfections, America has and can continue to be a force for good in the world. This, however, depends on whether Americans continue to adhere to its values. If those are displaced, America may cease to be a force for good in the world. 

It's because I believe these four assumptions to be true that I'm concerned about excessive foreign enrollment in U.S. universities. 

The student visa program for foreign nationals was developed by policymakers who also believed these four assumptions to be true. They thought that enrolling a moderate number of foreign citizens in our universities would help those foreigners learn about our political system and the values, traditions and norms that help it succeed. They also thought that U.S. students would benefit from learning ideas from the foreign students so that they could understand the differences between their countries and their political systems and ours with an eye toward appreciating the advantages that the American approach had to offer.

Universities also like admitting foreign students for financial reasons since they tend to pay full tuition and were often the children of important or wealthy people who could contribute to the resources of the university. Between World War II and 1977, foreign enrollment nationwide never exceeded 2%, but after 1977, that percentage began to ramp up slowly and then dramatically in the last few decades, so that it has more than tripled at selective universities, the ones that are more likely to educate the future political, cultural, and business leaders of our country. The rate has increased to between a third and half of their total enrollments are from overseas. 

What is educationally beneficial in smaller doses has become potentially dangerous at much higher rates of foreign enrollment. The educational exchange has begun to reverse so that foreign students are increasingly teaching U.S. students about the superiority of their value systems, traditions, and norms at a certain level of foreign enrollment.

Our leading universities stop seeing themselves as the incubators of the American elite and start seeing themselves as incubators of a global elite, which sometimes involves teaching hatred of America and its values. We have American faculty who are also promoting hostility to American values, but their efforts are facilitated by a critical mass of students who are receptive to their message. 

It is also important to note that university faculty also increasingly come from abroad with more than a fifth having been born overseas. The high rate of foreign nationals who become faculty is partially the result of having such a large percentage of foreign students who after completing graduate school become professors. 

The vast majority of foreign students are uninterested in political issues and simply want to focus on their studies and get a good job. But when you have foreign students, even a small percentage who are determined to engage in political agitation can significantly alter these institutions.

There is a relationship between the high rate of foreign enrollment in the campus protests we have seen over the past year against Israel, America and its values. On campuses where foreign enrollment exceeds 13%, we see twice the number of campus protests that you see on campuses with lower rates of foreign enrollment. 

If U.S. universities wish to continue receiving large public subsidies, they will eventually be forced to ensure that they are serving American purposes by educating American students in American values and limiting foreign influence over the nature and content of the educations that are provided to foreign and native students alike. 

Larry Bernstein:

How do foreign students undermine American norms and values?

Jay Greene:

Part of it is that they haven't grown up imbibing them. Things that come without thought to American students don't feel very natural to students who come from very different value and political systems. The chief among these is free speech and political tolerance. We think of these as obviously good and attractive things, but they're remarkably unnatural. It requires incredible cultivation of an unnatural instinct for you to protect the speech of people who say things you hate. When people come to campus without having grown up upholding those values, they may be hostile and tilt the culture of those institutions away from those American values.

Larry Bernstein:

I think one of the reasons that you decided to focus on this relates to the pro-Hamas rallies at the select American universities.

Jay Greene:

Oh, there's no doubt. I was sitting around puzzling about how this happened? There are a lot of factors that have contributed to it, but part of it is how detached these universities have become from America’s values and interests, and we see that very clearly in the protests that receive significant support from other students and faculty on campus.

Larry Bernstein:

Tolerance is good. Openness to other people's ideas, demonstrations and free speech is encouraged, but there's a cost and consequence if the speech runs counter to American interests. What is the role of the foreign students in these actions? Why do you view it as problematic?

Jay Greene:

Part of what has happened on campus is that the boundaries have been removed so that people think free speech means shouting other people down or blocking their entrance to their classes, or they're simply expressing themselves. 

Larry Bernstein:

Jay, one of the professors that you had at Harvard was Samuel Huntington.

Jay Greene:

Yes, Samuel Huntington was my advisor for a while until I switched to Paul Peterson, but he remained on my dissertation committee.

Larry Bernstein:

Samuel Huntington wrote a famous book called Who Are We, the Challenges to America's National Identity. And in that book, he was greatly concerned about excessive waves of immigration for very similar reasons. He was concerned that if Mexicans concentrated speaking Spanish in urban areas, they would be reluctant to learn English and adopt American values and norms. 

Huntington thought that immigration should be limited to where it would be easy to co-opt immigrants into the American experiment. Samuel Huntington got a lot of pushback for this book.

Jay Greene:

I remember not liking it when I first read it.

Larry Bernstein:

Is your thesis the application of Samuel Huntington to universities?

Jay Greene:

It is. I'm always impressed at how much the stuff that I thought my teachers were wrong about was right as I get older. I think he's right that we need a digestible rate of immigration. We must recognize we are a country of immigrants. Immigrants built this country. I'm a descendant of immigrants as almost all of us are who are listening to this program. I'm not against immigration. What I'm for is America, and there has to be a process by which immigrants become Americans. It doesn't just occur automatically. The lure of Lady Liberty does not just turn us into Americans. Immigrants must learn about America and its political system and how it succeeds and what norms and values are required for that to succeed.

The only way for us to learn that is for the rate of immigration to be low enough so that people can be assimilated at a digestible rate. And also that we have effective institutions to perform that assimilation. And chief among them are our educational institutions, like our universities. I think Huntington was right about that. 

Where I think he was wrong is that the danger comes from our highly educated not our low education immigrants. The reason for that is that elite immigrants come in with higher status and wealth almost immediately, and they have sophistication and networking ability.

That unassimilated highly educated immigrants can be much more politically effective against American values and interests within this country than working class immigrants can. Working class immigrants, by the time they accumulate the wealth and social networks for becoming politically effective, they have been assimilated. The chicken plant workers in Springdale, Arkansas don't pose political risk. They're struggling to make it financially. By the time they have the political sophistication, wealth and networking to do something politically, their children or grandchildren are thoroughly assimilated, and they'll be Americans.

Larry Bernstein:

Let me take the other side of that. Paris was the center of artistic creation before World War 2, and then it switched to New York and the United States. And New York has been the center of creative capabilities, and we view that as an asset. Immigrants have undue representation among the creatives. We have CEOs who are foreign born that have gone on to do great things creating enormous wealth and power for the United States. Obviously it's a mixed bag. It goes back to the original point that most foreigners are uninterested in politics. They just want to get a job and work on their task at hand. Just a few bad apples caused trouble and there have been bad apples who've come over and caused trouble in the past. 

How do you think about most intellectuals and creative types benefit the United States and don't cause much harm?

Jay Greene:

We have a false obsession with averages. The average immigrant is great, which is why, let me be clear, I like immigrants. It's just we have to worry about not the average, but the tail. And when you have critical mass, even a small percentage of a group where the average is good could be very bad that they pose real dangers. You call it a few bad apples and make it sound trivial. But it's not trivial and manageable when you get a critical mass of bad actors because you have such a high and undigestible rate of immigration. And so yes, many of the great contributors to business and culture in the United States are immigrants, but so is Ilhan Omar. I think that she is advocating for foreign interests and she's been able to be elected to Congress and there's a network that she has with others who think like she does. And don't get me wrong, I don't want to disenfranchise her. She is an American citizen. She is free to speak and to be elected to office. I just don't want too many Ilhan Omars. The country would be in trouble if we did.

Larry Bernstein:

Let's pick a specific profession and dig deep into that. My grandfather was an immigrant. My Grandpa George arrived in January 1943 during the war, and he was trained as a doctor and psychotherapist at the University of Vienna where he'd been a tenured professor in the Freud Institute. He moved to Chicago and opened a shingle to be a doctor. How do you feel about bringing in foreign doctors to take care of health problems for Americans?

Jay Greene:

It's very nice of you, Larry, to ask about this because I did write another study on the immigration of foreign doctors as well. There are a lot of good things about foreign doctors who come from overseas who many studies demonstrate to be as effective in the care they provide. 

We have a shortage of people being trained in US medical schools to fill all the residencies, which are the clinical programs where people complete their medical training and receive board certification. By design, we produce fewer doctors each year than there are spots in residencies by a lot. And that this gap between how many residents we need and how many doctors we produce domestically has grown over time.

Larry Bernstein:

What numbers are we talking about?

Jay Greene:

There are currently about 38 thousand doctors being placed in residency programs each year of whom over a quarter come from medical schools overseas. So about 9,000 of our newly minted doctors each year are from overseas.

Larry Bernstein:

Now, why should we care?  

Jay Greene:

Doctors are on average, wealthy and powerful people. They have more influence than average people because they're sophisticated. They have high incomes, they're well networked, they're well respected in their communities. And so doctors have a role in society beyond simply tending to the sick. They also are political and social leaders in their communities. And so when you go from 9% of your doctors coming from overseas to over a quarter, you are altering who your local elites are. In addition, the practice of medicine itself is not a value-free exercise. It involves promoting particular values and ideas about socialized medicine or about ways medical practice might be changed.

There are a lot of very qualified Americans who are being turned away from medical school and unable to become doctors because they are being displaced by foreign trained medical students.

Why does the AMA like a system where there's a shortage of American produced doctors, but a high rate of import? They like it because they want a two-tier system. They want the American trained doctors who are really their constituents to have first dibs at the best residencies in the best location. So they want the surgery residency in New York City.  Someone must be the family practice resident in Jonesborough, Arkansas. And as it turns out, the guy trained in Pakistan is thrilled to get that. 

Objectively, the criteria of the people who are admitted to medical school has gone up, the acceptance rates have gone down, and the MCAT scores have increased over time, which means that on average, we're turning away more qualified Americans from U.S. medical schools. 

Larry Bernstein:

Just to repeat your argument, you want the US to have equal medical school classes with residency programs so that we do not have to import 9000 foreign medical school graduates to fill the open residency programs.

Changing topics now. Our most highly prized universities have not been increasing their class sizes with population growth. At the same time, the percentage of foreign students at these select institutions has exploded and that has displaced domestic students. Should we reserve these incredibly valuable spots at Ivy League and other prestigious universities for US citizens?

Jay Greene:

Universities are selling the scarcity of their degree as part of the allure, and they can make it up by increasing the rate at which they charge and the donations they receive both for access to it and in appreciation for it. To give you specific numbers, the University of Pennsylvania has 37% of its total enrollment from overseas if you count students in the optional practical training program. If you don't include those students, it is 25%. So that's typical of our selective universities where about a third of their total enrollment is coming from abroad, and they are not expanding the total number of seats they have.

We went from 2% to a third in foreign enrollment. We significantly displaced domestic born students for those imported from abroad. US institutions have an obligation to American citizens first. 

Larry Bernstein:

The former President of Penn, Amy Guttman wanted to make Penn an international university. So, this didn't happen by chance. 

Jay Greene:

Just like the foreign doctors didn't occur by chance.

Larry Bernstein:

It's by design. She wanted an international student body; she wanted international faculty. And lo and behold, a third of the students are international. This isn't a big surprise, but there are consequences to that. And Amy Guttman viewed this as good. We can exchange ideas with international people. They bring their experiences. It provides insight that would be otherwise missed by a domestic audience. How do we think about the pros and the cons of bringing in an international student body to the most select university classroom?

Jay Greene:

All the pros that you describe are true. Foreign students do bring different ideas. They can enrich the educational environment by sharing those different experiences and ideas. And they also bring enormous resources to Amy Guttman and her university. Foreign students pay full tuition. They’re very wealthy and powerful people. They're paid for by foreign governments. Those individuals make large donations. But education is not a neutral process. If the goal is to produce a global elite, then Amy Guttman is spot on. But if what you want to do is produce an American elite, then you must think about controlling the number of foreign students so that you have enough foreign students to provide these benefits of different experiences and ideas, but not so many as to reorient the institution towards other country’s values and their goals at the expense of American goals and objectives. And again, if you believe that America is good and that it requires a particular set of values, then our elites must be trained in those values. And American universities have a role to play in doing that. And as they become international institutions, they're abandoning that mission. They are failing to perform that essential function.

Larry Bernstein:

In the movie Oppenheimer, he goes to Europe to learn about physics, and he does so because the great research institutions in Europe were ahead of the Americans. Oppenheimer decides to come back to the US to build a fantastic physics department using the German process at Berkeley and Caltech. And he also brought with him his ideas and learning that allowed him to make the nuclear bomb. There's a tension between two different ideals. How should we s value maximizing worldwide understanding versus maximizing the national interest?

Jay Greene:

Oppenheimer his success required being carefully controlled by the American military. Leslie Groves had to be on top of him to make sure that it was serving American purposes and not foreign ones. And even with Leslie Groves sitting on top of it, there were still spies there. And the openness of the process may have leaked key information to the Soviets, and Oppenheimer himself had preferences that may have weakened his vigilance on that matter. There are trade-offs here, and sure there are benefits to getting the best people and ideas from all over the globe. I understand the economic thought of how Pareto-optimal to increase the total pool.

But we're not always optimizing an economic outcome. We are also trying to optimize a political outcome. America wants wealth generation, but it also wants to continue itself as a political entity with a distinct set of values. We spend a couple percentage of GDP every year on military purposes to defend that.

Larry Bernstein:

When you look at the graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, it's highly concentrated with Chinese. Many of the Chinese students stay in the US and work for US firms and make enormous contributions to our productivity. Many Chinese graduates from American universities become model US citizens.  That said, China is not an ally of the United States, and we've heard about espionage going on at universities. How should we think about the high number and concentration of Chinese citizens in graduate programs in our most select universities?

Jay Greene:

It's an enormous problem. And again, the average Chinese student is great. This is not a story of averages. This is a story of tails. And you can't just say a few bad apples. We don't know who they are, and it's not just a few, especially when you get to large enough numbers. We do have real problems with intellectual theft where technologies are being stolen and being used to enhance the power of both the Chinese government and economy at the expense of US companies and US military. 

You also have a lot of spying going on politically so that there are Chinese students who are serving as spies on fellow Chinese students to detect if any of them might be troublesome when they come back home or are agitating for anti-Chinese government things when they're here. And they're also recruiting their fellow students from the US to serve their interests. It matters just like you think about who your kids' friends are. You want a mix that is consistent with your priorities and values.

Larry Bernstein:

We hear that American colleges are dependent on these foreign students.

Jay Greene:

This is true. There are some lower tier non-selective universities that also have very high rates of foreign enrollment. And you should think of them as immigration scams. They're selling entry into the U.S. and the students who come aren't thinking they're going to get the greatest education. What they're getting is a shot at becoming an American citizen and finding a job in the United States. They're essentially in the student visa selling business.

Larry Bernstein:

Zvi Galil is the former Dean of Computing at Georgia Tech mentioned on the podcast that he has a master's degree in computing one year program and he offers it two ways. You could do it on campus for like $40,000 a year, or you can do it online for $8,000 a year for the same degree. The content is the same. 

There's 20 times more students who are online than on campus. But almost all the on-campus kids are foreigners and almost all the online kids are Americans. And to your point, the reason why the foreigners are coming on campus is they want to stay in the United States and get a job and get a path to citizenship.

Jay Greene:

I don't begrudge them. Being an American is great, and people around the world recognize that truth. And it's great not just because of the economic opportunity, but it's also great because of our political system and the freedoms that it offers. But we have to preserve those freedoms and we have to preserve that system. And that requires ensuring that each new generation appreciates the foundational values, traditions, and norms that allow our political system to succeed. 

There's a naive belief that our system is so wonderful that it sells itself. Freedom is so attractive that you don't have to do anything to teach people to want it, but you do. If it were true that our system was naturally so good, then the various countries around the world that adopted essentially our constitution crossing out where it said the United States and writing in Brazil and the Philippines, they'd be like us, but they're not. Becoming America isn't merely adopting our set of political institutions and rules. There is a set of values, traditions and norms that go with that that allow it to succeed. And anyone who's read Tocqueville understands how important that is in producing American successful political institutions. We need to teach those values to the next generation.

Larry Bernstein:

Jay, I end each podcast with a note of optimism. What are you optimistic about as it relates to foreign students and American universities?

Jay Greene:

I'm optimistic that foreign students can be a great contributor to American education and American universities and can become very productive and loyal American citizens. But this depends upon two things. It depends upon a digestible rate of immigration or inflow of foreigners into universities. And it requires that the institutions are effectively performing their assimilation function. And my concern is that the rate is currently higher than is digestible, and that our institutions are failing to perform their assimilation function. But we can easily correct both problems. We can reduce the rate to a digestible level, and we can redirect these institutions towards assimilation because they're large recipients of government subsidy. We have leverage over them to do so. 

We can continue to be a country of immigrants who become Americans when they adopt the values, traditions, and norms that help America be a force for good in the world. We want the immigration that strengthens America and deepen its commitment to its foundational values that allow it to succeed.

Larry Bernstein:

Thanks to Jay for joining us today.

If you missed our previous podcast, check it out. The topic was Whipping in the Public Square.

Our speaker was Peter Moskos who is the author of the books Cop in the Hood as well as In Defense of Flogging. Peter is a Professor in the Department of Law and Political Science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Peter asked us to reconsider physical punishment in lieu of incarceration to get deterrence without ruining the criminal’s life.   

You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, good-bye. 

Check out our previous episode, Whipping in the Public Square, here.