Educate Americans First – Tablet Magazine
Among Ivy League institutions, the foreign student population averages 27% or 39%, depending on whether students participating in Optional Practical Training (OPT) program are included. OPT allows foreigners on student visas to remain in the U.S. for as many as three years, if their university recommends that they receive additional applied training by working in their field of study, often as research assistants or instructors at the university. If OPT students are counted, Columbia University now has almost two-thirds of its total enrollment from abroad a remarkable figure that makes it hard to imagine why U.S. taxpayers are massively supporting the educations of students who aren t Americans. If OPT students are excluded, international students at Columbia still constitute 40% of its student body.
The University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and Cornell each number 25% of their enrollment from abroad, not counting OPT students, and between 33% and 37% if OPT students are included. Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Brown all have more than a fifth of their enrollment from abroad, excluding OPT, and between 23% and 31% if OPT is counted.
What was healthy at a low dose is turning poisonous at much higher levels. As foreign enrollments reach critical mass, the direction of the cultural exchanges taking place on campus has reversed. U.S. students are starting to take political opinions from countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Malaysia, and others whose governments and people are hardly known for their adherence to liberal values like democracy, free speech, legal equality of the sexes, opposition to racism and antisemitism, and other basic rules of the road in Western societies. 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.
Columbia has 2/3 of its students from abroad? That explains a lot.