The Great Foreign Student Scam: How Universities Sold Out Domestic Students for Cash! By James Reed and Chris Knight (Florida)

Universities in America and Australia have developed a dangerous addiction to foreign student money, and domestic students are paying the price. What began as noble talk about "diversity" and "international perspectives" has devolved into a cynical cash grab that discriminates against local students, inflates costs, destroys academic standards, and turns higher education into an immigration racket.

The numbers tell the story of institutional betrayal. As John Grondelski reveals, some American universities now have foreign student enrolment exceeding 15%, with Illinois Tech reaching an astounding 51% international students. Meanwhile, Australia's addiction is even more severe, with foreign students comprising massive percentages of enrolment at major universities, generating billions in revenue while local students face restricted access to their own institutions.

This isn't diversity, it's displacement. And it's time to call this scam what it really is: the systematic prioritisation of foreign cash over domestic students' futures.

The economics driving this transformation are brutally simple. Foreign students pay full freight, no subsidies, no government support, just premium prices for education that domestic taxpayers help fund through public university support. As Grondelski notes from his diplomatic experience, there are Chinese parents sending their children to college with "suitcases of cash" to pay tuition.

University administrators discovered they could maintain smaller class sizes while maximising revenue by replacing domestic students with foreign cash cows. Every seat given to a foreign student is one denied to a local student, but the foreign student pays two to three times more for the privilege.

The New York Times tries to spin this as foreign students "subsidising" American students, but this is economic nonsense. If foreign students were truly subsidising domestic costs, tuition would be falling for local students. Instead, costs have skyrocketed as universities chase international revenue while domestic students face increasing debt burdens.

Australia's experience exposes the lie even more clearly. Sites like Macrobusiness have documented how the foreign student boom has coincided with exploding executive salaries, with university vice-chancellors now earning more than the Prime Minister. The "subsidy" isn't reaching students, it's padding administrative bank accounts and funding corporate-style compensation packages.

Universities justify this displacement with diversity rhetoric, but the reality is far more cynical. When administrators decided that students from Portland, Oregon were more "interesting" than students from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, or Perth Australia, they weren't pursuing educational excellence, they were chasing room and board revenue alongside tuition.

This "diversity" obsession has created a perverse system where being local becomes a disadvantage. Students who grew up in the communities surrounding universities find themselves competing against international applicants for admission to institutions their families' tax dollars help support.

The social justice implications are staggering. Working and middle-class students who can't afford to travel across countries for education are displaced by wealthy international students whose families can pay premium prices. This isn't progressive policy, it's regressive discrimination that privileges wealth over merit and foreign cash over local community.

The foreign student influx has created a culture of academic compromise that degrades educational quality for everyone. Australia's experience is particularly instructive here, with widespread reports of cheating, plagiarism, and grade inflation designed to keep international revenue flowing.

When universities become dependent on foreign student fees, they face enormous pressure to ensure those students succeed regardless of academic performance. Failing international students means losing revenue streams, so standards adjust downward to accommodate language barriers, cultural differences, and varying academic preparations.

The result is credential inflation without education inflation, degrees that cost more but mean less, issued by institutions more concerned with customer satisfaction than academic rigour. Domestic students pay higher prices for diluted education while competing against classmates who may not meet the same standards.

Foreign student programs have become a massive immigration pipeline that bypasses normal visa processes and public debate about immigration levels. Students arrive on education visas but many intend to stay permanently, using university enrolment as a pathway to residency and citizenship.

Australia has essentially created an immigration system disguised as education policy, with hundreds of thousands of "students" arriving annually with no intention of returning home. Universities profit from the front-end enrolment fees while taxpayers absorb the long-term costs of population growth, infrastructure strain, and social services. It is the scam of the century, and there has yet to be any significant political opposition to the crimes of the universities, with even the freedom movement quiet on this issue, both in Australia and America.

Indeed, American universities operate similar schemes, with graduate programs in particular functioning as immigration pipelines for skilled workers who bypass normal employment visa processes. This might serve corporate interests seeking cheaper labour, but it disadvantages domestic graduates competing for jobs in their own country.

Grondelski's account of the modern college application process reveals the human cost of this system. Where previous generations applied to three schools (dream, preferred, safety), today's students submit double-digit applications costing hundreds or thousands in fees, with no guarantee of admission to any institution.

American students now compete against international applicants for admission to universities in their own country, funded by their own tax dollars. The stress, expense, and uncertainty this creates for domestic families is enormous, while universities profit from both increased application fees and premium international tuition.

The psychological impact on young Americans shouldn't be underestimated. Growing up knowing that being American provides no advantage, and possibly a disadvantage, in accessing American higher education creates justified resentment and alienation from institutions that supposedly serve their communities.

The foreign student boom has enabled massive administrative bloat and executive compensation that would be impossible with domestic-only enrolment. Australian vice-chancellors earning more than the Prime Minister represent just the visible tip of administrative excess funded by international student fees.

These compensation packages create powerful institutional incentives to maintain foreign student flows regardless of educational impact. Administrators whose salaries depend on international revenue become advocates for continued displacement of domestic students, creating conflicts of interest that prioritise institutional wealth over educational mission.

The transformation of universities from educational institutions into immigration-processing businesses with luxury executive compensation reveals how far higher education has strayed from its original purpose of serving local communities and advancing knowledge.

The foreign student influx creates parallel educational systems within universities, with international students often clustering together rather than integrating with domestic student populations. This defeats the supposed diversity benefits while creating cultural tensions and reducing social cohesion.

Large international student populations can fundamentally alter campus culture, academic expectations, and social dynamics in ways that domestic students never consented to. Universities that once reflected local values and served community needs become international businesses with tenuous connections to their geographical locations.

The scale of this transformation in countries like Australia approaches cultural replacement in major cities, where international students comprise significant percentages of young adult populations. This represents demographic change through educational policy that bypasses democratic debate about immigration and cultural preservation. In short this is the Great White Replacement.

Fixing this system requires abandoning the diversity rhetoric and returning to first principles about higher education's purpose. Universities should primarily serve the communities that support them, not function as immigration businesses or international revenue generators.

This means implementing caps on foreign student enrolment, perhaps 5% maximum at public institutions, and requiring universities to demonstrate that international students genuinely add educational value rather than just revenue. Private institutions can make their own choices, but public universities funded by taxpayers should prioritise taxpayers' children.

Transparency requirements should force universities to disclose the true costs and benefits of foreign student programs, including long-term immigration impacts and opportunity costs for domestic students. Administrative compensation should be tied to domestic student outcomes rather than revenue generation.

Most importantly, the public needs to recognize that the current system represents institutional betrayal of the communities universities claim to serve. The foreign student fetish has created an educational apartheid where being local becomes a disadvantage in accessing local institutions.

The foreign student scam represents one of the most successful cons in modern institutional history. Universities convinced the public that discrimination against domestic students serves diversity goals while generating massive profits from international education customers.

The human costs are enormous: domestic students face restricted access, higher costs, and degraded educational quality while universities choose foreign revenue over local service. Communities lose institutions that once reflected their values and served their needs.

It's time to end this betrayal and return universities to their original mission: serving the communities that support them rather than functioning as international businesses that happen to be located in particular countries. Domestic students deserve priority access to domestic institutions. Anything less is institutional fraud disguised as diversity policy. If this cannot be done, then sack the academics, and shut the universities down! It will be time to rebuild higher education from the ground up.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/05/foreign_students_and_universities_scams.html

By John M. Grondelski

The New York Times carried an article on May 27 listing 50 American colleges and universities whose foreign student enrolment was 15% or higher. One — Illinois Tech — had the majority of its student body (51%) coming from abroad.

The Times doesn't ask, What's wrong with this picture? It ran the piece as part of its continuing attacks on the Trump administration for rescinding Harvard's eligibility to enrol international students. Schools can't take foreign students unless they are part of the federal registration network for international students — SEVIS — and Trump just kicked Harvard out. It justified its position on the grounds that Harvard discriminates (Harvard went all the way to the Supreme Court — and lost — in defense of its racially biased admissions policy) and fails to protect its Jewish students (the Ivies once even excluded them).

The liberal arguments for international students are that they "enrich" and "diversify" the student body and bring talent to America, elevating the status of our universities.

Let's ask about some of the downsides to the rosy picture the Times paints. I tap my experience as a retired Foreign Service officer, former faculty member and administrator in higher education, and father.

As a Foreign Service officer, I served abroad in consular (visa) roles. My last post abroad was Shanghai. I'd make two observations. First, as one of China's biggest cities and a key hub for expatriates, we received our fair share of U.S. college recruiters. That included the "prestige" schools, because many Chinese parents have a "label" fetish: I remember a counsellor at Shanghai American school once beginning an evening for parents of high school juniors getting ready to apply to college with "your life won't be over if you don't get into Stanford...or Harvard." A college recruiter once told me she could fill her freshman class right there in Shanghai but didn't because her school valued "diversity." Second, we had floods of Chinese students applying each year for visas. I was also struck that most of them were declaring they would study STEM or business (the latter certainly in graduate programs).

The college recruiter's remark got me thinking. If a school can get a foreign student who will pay full freight for tuition, room, and board, how does that disincentivize it from prioritizing Americans who can't or from controlling its sticker prices? There are Chinese parents who send their kids to college with a suitcase of cash to pay tuition.

The Times tries to spin that by claiming that foreign students are subsidizing American students: They pay more so Americans can pay less. Somehow, that strikes most Americans as convincing as Joe Biden claiming that "Bidenomics is working" or Janet Yellen yelling, "Inflation is transitory."

But there's one other aspect to the college recruiter's comment that deserves consideration: "I could fill my freshman class in one trip." It means that first year class sizes are fixed. There are only so many slots, and every seat taken by a foreign student is one unavailable to an American student. I am not hearing colleges say, "Hey, those foreign students pay so well that we'll grow the size of our freshman class!" Even if they did, where would the incentive then lie: using the money to "subsidize" U.S. students, or getting more lucrative international ones? Would an expanded class size prioritize U.S. students for the extra slots?

As a former university faculty member and dean, I also observed the "diversity" mania. When most people think of "diversity," they usually imagine racial discrimination — i.e., different cut-off thresholds for admissions eligibility according to race. But diversity assumes many more variants than that. There are all sorts of categories du jour of which we want more of or, in Ruth Bader Ginsburg's immortal words, "populations we don't want too many of." Sex. Sexual preferences. Abilities. Disabilities.

But let me offer an even more pedestrian example: the local folks.

Once upon a time, many schools understood their mission as serving the community where they were. My alma mater, Fordham, gladly served the New York metropolitan area and the Catholic Church in the tristate area. My first employer, St. John's, was so enmeshed in New York back then that it didn't even provide dormitories. Seton Hall had dorms but was both a commuter and a "suitcase" school — many on-campus kids went home on the weekend across New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut.

But in the 1980s and 1990s, administrators decided: Local school "bad." We need "diversity." Accreditors abetted it. Students from Portland, Oregon were more interesting than students from Perth Amboy, New Jersey. It was justified in the name of "diversity" and "raising educational standards." Truth is, importing Oregonians meant you were also getting room and board alongside tuition, so it paid better. And having a "national reputation" in U.S. News and World Report beat being the beloved source of teachers, nurses, businessmen, and other professionals in Staten Island and Brooklyn. And once a school shifts largely to residential students, overall costs tend to go up.

The question is, what metrics show that the quality and caliber of students have gone up proportionate to the costs? And for all the social justice warriors of the world, how have we shafted the working and middle classes by making the kid from Perth Amboy go to school in Oregon so the Oregonian can come to New York?

As a father, I have seen the consequences. The annual frenzy from September to May of high school senior year is caught up in applications, "perfect" essays, balanced portfolios, interviews, campus visits, exquisitely detailed financial aid forms, etc., etc. When I applied to college 48 years ago, most of my class made three applications: dream school, wanted school, safety school. Most kids' applications today are in the double-digits (adding up usually to triple-digits in fees). And it's not assured that the more competitive the application list is, the more successful the student will be in getting into a majority of schools. He might even get into none. Given that, I think it honest to ask: Why are we putting American kids through such competitive expense and stress to get into an American college when some of our top-rated schools are competing them against classes made up of one fifth or more foreigners?

Harvard claims that it is fighting the President to protect "academic freedom and institutional independence," a narrative the Times echoes. Maybe we should ask the counter-narrative: Are colleges fighting to protect their right to discriminate and to make oodles of money at the expense of American students?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/us/china-international-students-trump.html