Higher Ed’s Crisis of Domestic Confidence

Buried in a recent report from the Economic Innovation Group is a statistic that should make every university administrator in America lose sleep: Foreign-born workers who arrived in the U.S. on student visas now out-earn their native-born peers with college degrees by nearly $30,000 annually. They’re also more than twice as likely to work in research and development—the engine room of national progress.

Let me be very clear: This isn’t about IQ. It’s about institutions. It’s about a cultural drift so deep, so corrosive, that a native-born population is slowly being nudged out of its own future—not by brute force or some grand conspiracy but by decades of educational decay, elite indifference, and intellectual cowardice. America didn’t run out of smart people. It ran out of the will to cultivate them.

A native-born population is being nudged out of its own future—not by brute force but by decades of educational decay. And nowhere is that more evident than in higher education. Once the incubator of American innovation, producing Nobel laureates, cutting-edge research, and the technological bedrock of the 20th century, the modern university system has devolved into self-parody. Bureaucratized beyond recognition, hijacked by ideological orthodoxy, and driven by administrative bloat, the university is no longer a model of excellence. It’s an HR department with a football team.

Today’s American student is increasingly guided into disciplines that produce little beyond debt and disillusionment. Today’s American student is increasingly guided into disciplines that produce little beyond debt and disillusionment. Fields once synonymous with discovery—engineering, chemistry, and applied physics—are under-enrolled, underfunded, and under-defended. Instead, we celebrate degrees in queerness or “Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.” We infantilize students, training them to feel rather than think, and then we wonder why employers look elsewhere.

Enter the international student.

Foreign students—especially those from Asia and Eastern Europe—arrive with none of the postmodern baggage. They aren’t here to dismantle the system; they’re here to master it. They don’t need healing circles. They need lab access. They pursue electrical engineering, computer science, and biotech. They dominate our classrooms not because they’re inherently superior but because they treat education as a vehicle for upward mobility, not a personal soapbox.

These students didn’t grow up in an ecosystem that told them the system was rigged or that objectivity was oppressive. They weren’t told that merit is a colonial construct. They studied, endured, and outcompeted. And that should be a wake-up call.

Because it’s not just that America imports talent. It’s that we now rely on it. We lean on the drive of students raised in far less wealthy, far more disciplined societies because we’ve abdicated the responsibility of developing our own. We send our kids into debt traps for gender-theory degrees while begging H-1B visa holders to keep the lights on at Google and the research running at Stanford.

In this academic vacuum, universities continue courting international students—not for the sake of diversity or global exchange but for the money. Foreign students usually pay full freight. They rarely need financial aid. They’re low-maintenance revenue streams. In many cases, they subsidize the cost of educating domestic students, and colleges are now addicted.

Take North Carolina. According to the latest Open Doors data, international-student enrollment is up across nearly every institution in the state, from UNC-Chapel Hill to Duke to NC State. Yet, despite this growth, North Carolina fell in the overall national rankings for international-student enrollment since the release of the previous year’s figures. Why? Because other states are racing even faster to secure foreign tuition dollars. It’s not education anymore. It’s bidding for export-grade customers. And what product is America selling? Its campuses.

Neetu Arnold noted this phenomenon last year in her breakdown of the state’s dependency on foreign students. That dependency has only grown, and it’s not without cost. As classrooms are restructured to accommodate the needs of transient international cohorts, long-term investment in native-born students—who are supposed to be tomorrow’s engineers, scientists, and innovators—diminishes. The short-term profit model erodes the long-term national project.

Dependency on foreign students has only grown, and it’s not without cost. And now, into this chaotic equation, walks President Trump.

Just weeks ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised to “aggressively revoke” student visas for Chinese nationals, a bold move echoing the Trump administration’s previous crackdown on Chinese espionage in academia. Yet, in a recent Truth Social post—all caps, of course—Trump appeared to backpedal, announcing that, in exchange for rare-earth shipments from China, the U.S. would “PROVIDE TO CHINA WHAT WAS AGREED TO, INCLUDING CHINESE STUDENTS USING OUR COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES (WHICH HAS ALWAYS BEEN GOOD WITH ME!).”

President Trump’s policy on international students shouldn’t fluctuate with each negotiation memo. In other words, America’s research infrastructure is now a bargaining chip in a mineral trade deal. The optics alone are stunning: foreign nationals filling domestic labs, bolstering foreign economies, and in some cases—particularly with China—returning home to replicate and surpass the very technology they were taught to build on American soil.

But the core issue isn’t the students. Again, it’s the vacuum they’re stepping into.

If 27 percent of foreign-born workers engage in R&D, compared to just 12 percent of native-born graduates, the solution is not to panic about losing international talent. The solution is to restore the domestic capacity that made American science great in the first place. That means re-engineering our universities, starting with a complete moral and curricular reset.

Here’s what needs to happen.

First, STEM must be prioritized over ideology. Public universities should be compelled, through funding incentives or performance-based accountability, to redirect resources back toward high-rigor, high-impact disciplines. Engineering departments should grow, while departments drowning in abstract theory and grievance rhetoric should be audited and, where necessary, defunded. Taxpayer dollars should serve the national interest, not subsidize intellectual dead ends.

Second, merit must be re-centered in funding decisions. Instead of offering the most generous grants to international students, elite institutions must be required to match foreign fellowships with domestic ones. You want to admit top-tier Iranian physicists and Indian coders? Fine. Now find an American-born farm kid who can build circuit boards or write software and invest in him, too. Excellence exists in Appalachia, on the South Side of Chicago, and in rural North Carolina. But it needs a system that believes in finding it.

Third, the wall between the academic and the practical must be torn down. Not every American student will go to a four-year college, nor should they. But every one of them should have access to the kind of high-level technical training that prepares them to build, operate, and lead in the age of robotics, biotech, and AI. That means fusing vocational and higher education—not in name, but in practice.

Finally, and perhaps most critically, the culture of education must be rehabilitated. American students have been raised in a soup of narcissism, cynicism, and ideological confusion. They are not stupid. They are not lazy. They are malnourished. Universities must stop selling therapy and start modeling truth, intellectual seriousness, and rigor. The pursuit of knowledge is something sacred, not performative.

Higher education won’t save the country by chasing foreign tuition. It will save the country by awakening the minds already here—bored, cynical, and starving for purpose.

President Trump’s policy on international students shouldn’t fluctuate with each negotiation memo. It should be part of a coherent plan to Make America Think Again. That means breaking the addiction to foreign enrollment, recalibrating the university’s mission, and investing in the long game of civilizational continuity.

The problem isn’t that foreigners are outperforming Americans. The problem is that too many Americans have stopped believing they can compete.

It’s time for them to remember they still can.

John Mac Ghlionn is a psychosocial researcher and essayist. His work has been published by the New York Post, Sydney Morning Herald, Newsweek, National Review, and the Spectator (U.S.). He covers psychology and social relations and has a keen interest in social dysfunction and media manipulation.