The real fraud in higher ed: Universities need that Chinese money

The universities preaching that America is structurally racist now say they need international students to survive. Sad but true.

President Trump on Monday floated a proposal that has conservatives buzzing. Just before meeting with the president of South Korea, while discussing trade negotiations with China, Trump suggested that the deal might include allowing 600,000 Chinese students to attend American universities.

Instead of winning hearts and minds, universities would be exporting American self-loathing. Why should taxpayers fund that?

I’ve learned not to sprint ahead of Trump’s negotiations. He often uses public remarks as part of the bargaining table — dangling outrageous possibilities to shove the other side into error. And inconveniently for his critics, it usually works. Still, this one deserves a closer look.

Universities built on sand

As a professor at Arizona State University, the nation’s largest state school, I see firsthand how fragile higher education has become. Universities increasingly depend on international students to prop up their budgets. They reorient themselves not around local students but around foreign ones, reshaping programs and communications to make sure outsiders feel at home.

ASU boasts 195,000 students. Yet when the semester began, the university’s homepage highlighted international arrivals, not Arizona students. The welcome-back email did the same. Arizona families — the taxpayers who actually fund the place — were treated as an afterthought.

Administrators justify this by pointing to economic contributions, diversity, and talent. But native students notice the slight. Parents notice it too. The message is clear: Tuition dollars matter more than the citizens who built these schools. ASU may call itself the “New American University,” but more often it presents itself as the “No Longer American University.”

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A house of cards

Here’s the truth: Many American universities cannot survive without international tuition checks.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted as much on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, saying the bottom 15% of U.S. colleges would simply shut down without that revenue. Universities have operated like Ponzi schemes, built on the illusion that enrollment growth never ends. But as American students tire of being hectored with radical political agendas, growth slows and the budgets collapse.

The U.S. already hosts about 270,000 Chinese students, not counting tens of thousands more from India, South Korea, and elsewhere. ASU alone has 16,000 international students, down from 18,000 last year. Trump’s proposed deal would more than double the number of Chinese students nationwide overnight.

What are they learning?

Even if you grant the economic benefits, the bigger question — maybe the biggest — is: What sort of education would these 600,000 students receive?

We could introduce them to the greatness of the American experiment, the sweep of Western civilization, and the biblical truths that shaped both. We could even present the gospel to hundreds of thousands of students who may never have heard it before. That would be a noble exchange.

But that isn’t what happens on most campuses.

Drop them into a humanities classroom and they’ll be steeped in anti-racism, DEI dogma, LGBTQ activism, “decolonizing the curriculum,” and the thesis that America and the West are irredeemably wicked. Instead of winning hearts and minds, universities would be exporting American self-loathing — either by turning foreign students into residents who despise their host country or sending them home as ambassadors of contempt.

Why should American taxpayers fund that?

A higher-ed reckoning

Universities like ASU showcase international students while sidelining their own. They rely on foreign tuition to mask fiscal rot. And in exchange, they sell a curriculum that treats America as racist, the West as evil, and Christianity as oppressive.

No “economic benefit” offsets that catastrophic formula.

If American universities want to survive, they must first clean their own house.

• Admit the harm caused by their reckless anti-America, anti-West, anti-Christian curriculum.
• Abandon DEI dogma, corrosive identity politics, and “decolonized” philosophy.
• Value American students — the citizens and taxpayers who fund these schools.
• Reorient higher education toward the people of the states and communities that built it.
• Teach again that we are created by God, equal in worth, and capable of knowing truth, goodness, and beauty.

Only then can we discuss whether more international students make sense. Until then, it is rich with irony: The same universities that teach contempt for America now admit they need foreign students to survive.