Pausing foreign applications to US universities is a terrible idea

Mint

29-05-2025

The Trump administration's decision to pause all visa interviews for foreign students who want to study in America, pending a review of how applicants' social-media posts are vetted, is yet another escalation in the power struggle over who controls the world's best universities. The policy may be modified. It may prove less onerous than it looks at first glance. Even if that happens, though, this is another blow to a great American success story.
President Donald Trump cares about America's trade deficit. So it is perverse for him to make it harder for one of America's most prodigious exporters—the education industry—to sell its services to foreigners. Some of his supporters imagine that foreign students are taking places that could have gone to Americans. This could be called the lump-of-college fallacy. In fact, by paying higher fees, foreign students tend to subsidise locals. American universities attract a wider variety of the best minds from around the world than any of their global rivals. That makes them more dynamic and innovative. And by pulling foreign elites into America's cultural orbit, they magnify America's soft power abroad.
Unfortunately, that is not how Mr Trump and his cabinet see it. To them, elite universities, in particular, are hotbeds of antisemitism and wokery. They are factories for future Democratic Party leaders and donors. And they must be brought to heel. 'The universities are the enemy," as J.D. Vance (Ohio State and Yale Law) told a conference of national conservatives before he became the vice-president.
There is some truth to MAGA criticisms of elite universities. Some have indeed been too soft on antisemitism and too dismissive of conservative viewpoints. But that hardly justifies the cudgels the administration is wielding against the entire college system. So far they include: deporting foreign students for wrongthink, freezing applications from foreign students, suspending government research grants and promising to increase taxes on big college endowments.
Mr Vance has often complained, with some justification, about censorship on campus. So it is galling for him now to favour deporting foreign students for their views and making new student applications subject to social-media vetting. College is supposed to be a place where the young explore new ideas, not a place where they venture only with burner phones, terrified to reveal they once shared a meme sympathising with Palestinians or mocking Mr Trump. The only students likely to have clean social-media feeds will be those from police states like China, who have internalised the lesson that free expression attracts unwelcome attention.
In the global war for talent, America's universities have long been its most persuasive recruiters, with huge benefits for American science, business and arts. Mr Trump's policies will make them less attractive. Any foreigner with the brains and resources to study in America has other options. Why risk taking on a pile of debt to study in a country where the president doesn't want you, where your visa could be revoked before you graduate, where your chats will be snooped on and where you may not be allowed to work?
American universities are so good that large numbers of foreigners will still jostle to attend them. However, the early signs are that all this really is deterring applicants. Mr Trump and his supporters may think that, by cutting snooty lefty institutions down to size and shutting out foreigners with distasteful views, they are making higher education in America great again. They are on course to make it mediocre.