The College Admissions Game and American Foreign Policy

It’s high school graduation season.  An exciting time. 

All over the United States, our best students and hardest workers are looking forward to the next step in their life journey:

Some are making the tough choice between a few good four-year colleges.  Some are going to save some money the first couple of years, by going to the local community college.  Some are entering the military. Some are going to vocational school.  Some are going straight into full time jobs and starting their careers.

This happens everywhere, at every income level.  Our FAFSA forms may look different, but for the most part, we all balance the same choices, from the lower middle class to the wealthy: what’s affordable, what’s close, what feels like the best fit for our son or daughter? 

And in a certain number of homes, this was preceded, a month or two earlier, by a moment of true sadness:  despite a perfect SAT score, a perfect GPA, several AP classes and a well-rounded set of extracurriculars – their top choice — Harvard University, perhaps? -– sent a rejection letter.

The student was confident, and the parents had let themselves be confident as well; with such an application packet, the odds were good that Harvard would say yes -– but you never know.  And sure enough, their dream school said ‘no.’

There are other good schools, we tell our kids; things will turn out O.K. 

The parents console their child:  “You did great; it’s just the breaks, that’s all.  You’ll be happy at your second choice school.”  Or “You did great; I guess they liked somebody else’s essay more, or they liked somebody else’s extracurriculars more, or something.”  Or “if you got in, then some other kid wouldn’t have, and maybe that kid couldn’t handle it as well as you could.”  Or “Maybe they had too many French horns and pianists already, maybe they needed more cello and sax players this year.  Who could’ve known?”

These conversations have taken place in America for generations. Not everybody gets into their top choice schools. It’s just the way it is.

But do you know where these conversations don’t take place?

In China.

All of a sudden, there are Chinese students who expected to go to Harvard – and to other good American research universities  – who are suddenly finding that their plans are falling through.  They thought the skids had been greased for them, and they are shocked.

The application process is different for a certain type of foreign student.  The sons of Arab emirs on the board of directors of an American college’s remote campus in Qatar or Saudi Arabia or the U.A.E.  The daughters of Chinese generals or Chinese Politburo members, the sons of the general managers of Chinese joint ventures, those infamous public-private partnerships that run the factories and design firms in China’s massive industrial parks.

Foreign students pay full freight, as the saying goes.  While you and I filled out the FAFSA every year to find out what the real price would be for our little darlings, these foreign students pay that entire, outrageous, massive tuition, room and board total – the number that caused us to faint when we first heard it.

This makes those foreign students more desirable to Harvard – and to so many other American universities, both public and private.  But the fact that they pay the full freight isn’t the only thing that makes them attractive.

The fact is, they are part of a deal — a very big, complex deal — that even most of the university personal don’t fully realize themselves -– or if they do, they try not to acknowledge to themselves.

The big research universities have a quid pro quo in place with these foreign countries.  We educate their children; they reciprocate, as they host that remote campus in their country, and they give great benefits to our students and teachers on their semesters abroad.  No matter how dangerous the country, they make our remote campus a little tax-free oasis, an exotic temporary destination that helps polish our reputation, making us that much more desirable ourselves.

We (our universities) tell ourselves that we can boast how we now offer a well-rounded, worldly education to our students. We can offer our faculties a chance to collaborate with the best thinkers and scientists abroad.  We can offer our students internships and co-ops with not only our own American corporate giants, but with the corporate giants of China and Europe and the Middle East and Latin America.

These exciting partnerships get us featured in scientific and business journals, and we develop patents and become famous abroad as a result. The money and accolades just flow right in.

There’s a problem, however.  People have begun to notice things. 

A lot of these foreign students – especially the ones from China – have been linked with illegal technology transfers, where college research projects resulted in information being sent back to China, even export-controlled technology. A lot of them lead Marxist community organizations, spreading anti-American propaganda and being politically active in ways that are illegal for noncitizens.

And a lot of these foreign students – especially the ones from the Middle East – have been found running radical Islamic centers, recruiting people into Jihadist cells, even running anti-Israeli protests, beating up rabbis, barring Jewish students from their classes, shutting down buildings, intersections, neighborhoods, with tent cities and demonstrations in support of Hamas and other such terrorists.

In fact, now that people are being to actually pay attention, it’s becoming more and more evident that there has been a crooked deal in place for years now, as our colleges stock up their research projects with foreign students and foreign professors, obtain huge federal grants from the US government to perform scientific experiments or develop technology, then turn over their findings to companies in their home countries, whether the results were ever authorized for such export or not.

Turns out, in fact, that of all the intellectual property theft we’ve been suffering in recent years, a surprising amount of it has been occurring in our own colleges, right under our noses, funded by our own tax dollars.

There’s a lot we can do to deal with these problems, now that they have been revealed. We can identify the criminals involved and sue, prosecute, convince, and imprison them.  We can stop the most obviously corrupt programs right away.  We can order corrupt foreign campuses shut down, or otherwise severed from their home colleges.

But these things take time, and the federal government doesn’t always have the power to do everything they want to.

But this much is certain:  our government can immediately terminate the government programs that have been so seriously abused. 

·         We can stop giving our colleges carte blanche to bypass the normal immigration process to grant student visas to the foreign sons of politically connected people they want.

·         We can stop issuing lucrative federal research grants to universities that have been caught carelessly allowing the results to be stolen by foreign countries.

·         We can stop giving federal student aid to colleges that allow student groups to assault and otherwise harass Jewish students or other innocent minorities.

·         We can return to the days of properly prosecuting people for treason, for sharing export-controlled defense technology to our enemies, and yes, include the professors and administrators who’ve turned a blind eye while it happened.

The best place to begin is at the beginning: start off with stopping the foreign students from coming in, in the first place.

Will we be turning away some innocent students in the process?  Probably.  But that’s not our fault; it’s the fault for the universities for running these corrupt bargains for so long.

There are a million foreign students in American colleges every year.  If we put an end to that, well, that just happens to be a million more slots available for all those brilliant, innocent American high school scholars who should have been admitted all along.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his most recent collection of public policy essays, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.

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