Future queen of Belgium caught up in Harvard foreign student ban
BRUSSELS, May 23 (Reuters) - Princess Elisabeth, the 23-year-old future queen of Belgium, has just completed her first year at Harvard University but the ban imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration on foreign students studying there could jeopardise her continued studies.
The Trump administration revoked Harvard University's ability to enroll international students on Thursday, and is forcing current foreign students to transfer to other schools or lose their legal status in the U.S., while also threatening to expand the crackdown to other colleges.
"Princess Elisabeth has just completed her first year. The impact of (the Trump administration's) decision will only become clearer in the coming days/weeks. We are currently investigating the situation," the Belgian Royal Palace's spokesperson Lore Vandoorne said.
"We are analyzing this at the moment and will let things settle. A lot can still happen in the coming days and weeks," the Palace's communication director, Xavier Baert, added.
Elisabeth is studying Public Policy at Harvard, a two-year master's degree program that according to the university's website broadens students' perspectives and sharpens their skills for "successful career in public service".
The princess is heir to the Belgian throne, as the eldest of four children born to King Philippe and Queen Mathilde. Before attending Harvard, she earned a degree in history and politics from the UK's Oxford University.
Harvard said on Thursday the move by the Trump administration - which affects thousands of students - was illegal and amounted to retaliation.
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The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Top US universities raced to become global campuses. Under Trump, it's becoming a liability
Three decades ago, foreign students at Harvard University accounted for just 11% of the total student body. Today, they account for 26%. Like other prestigious U.S. universities, Harvard for years has been cashing in on its global cache to recruit the world's best students. Now, the booming international enrollment has left colleges vulnerable to a new line of attack from President Donald Trump. The president has begun to use his control over the nation's borders as leverage in his fight to reshape American higher education. Trump's latest salvo against Harvard uses a broad federal law to bar foreign students from entering the country to attend the campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His order applies only to Harvard, but it poses a threat to other universities his administration has targeted as hotbeds of liberalism in need of reform. It's rattling campuses under federal scrutiny, including Columbia University, where foreign students make up 40% of the campus. As the Trump administration stepped up reviews of new student visas last week, a group of Columbia faculty and alumni raised concerns over Trump's gatekeeping powers. 'Columbia's exposure to this 'stroke of pen' risk is uniquely high,' the Stand Columbia Society wrote in a newsletter. Ivy League schools draw heavily on international students People from other countries made up about 6% of all college students in the U.S. in 2023, but they accounted for 27% of the eight schools in the Ivy League, according to an Associated Press analysis of Education Department data. Columbia's 40% was the largest concentration, followed by Harvard and Cornell at about 25%. Brown University had the smallest share at 20%. Other highly selective private universities have seen similar trends, including at Northeastern University and New York University, which each saw foreign enrollment double between 2013 and 2023. Growth at public universities has been more muted. Even at the 50 most selective public schools, foreign students account for about 11% of the student body. America's universities have been widening their doors to foreign students for decades, but the numbers shot upward starting around 2008, as Chinese students came to U.S. universities in rising numbers. It was part of a 'gold rush' in higher education, said William Brustein, who orchestrated the international expansion of several universities. 'Whether you were private or you were public, you had to be out in front in terms of being able to claim you were the most global university," said Brustein, who led efforts at Ohio State University and West Virginia University. The race was driven in part by economics, he said. Foreign students typically aren't eligible for financial aid, and at some schools they pay two or three times the tuition rate charged to U.S. students. Colleges also were eyeing global rankings that gave schools a boost if they recruited larger numbers of foreign students and scholars, he said. But the expansion wasn't equal across all types of colleges — public universities often face pressure from state lawmakers to limit foreign enrollment and keep more seats open for state residents. Private universities don't face that pressure, and many aggressively recruited foreign students as their numbers of U.S. students stayed flat. The college-going rate among American students has changed little for decades, and some have been turned off on college by the rising costs and student debt loads. Supporters say foreign students benefit colleges — and the wider US economy Proponents of international exchange say foreign students pour billions of dollars into the U.S. economy, and many go on to support the nation's tech industry and other fields in need of skilled workers. Most international students study the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math. In the Ivy League, most international growth has been at the graduate level, while undergraduate numbers have seen more modest increases. Foreign graduate students make up more than half the students at Harvard's government and design schools, along with five of Columbia's schools. The Ivy League has been able to outpace other schools in large part because of its reputation, Brustein said. He recalls trips to China and India, where he spoke with families that could recite where each Ivy League school sat in world rankings. 'That was the golden calf for these families. They really thought, 'If we could just get into these schools, the rest of our lives would be on easy street,'' he said. Last week, Trump said he thought Harvard should cap its foreign students to about 15%. 'We have people who want to go to Harvard and other schools, they can't get in because we have foreign students there,' Trump said at a news conference. The university called Trump's latest action banning entry into the country to attend Harvard 'yet another illegal retaliatory step taken by the Administration in violation of Harvard's First Amendment rights.' In a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's previous attempt to block international students at Harvard, the university said its foreign student population was the result of 'a painstaking, decades-long project' to attract the most qualified international students. Losing access to student visas would immediately harm the school's mission and reputation, it said. 'In our interconnected global economy," the school said, 'a university that cannot welcome students from all corners of the world is at a competitive disadvantage.' ___ The Associated Press' education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
I run a French university course on why Britain is such a mess – I won't run out of material
Your 60-minute exam on 'Public Policy Failure and the British State: A History in Twelve Case Studies' starts…. now. Turn the page and read Clarissa Eden's diary entry for November 4 1956, in the midst of the Suez Crisis, and answer the question: 'Do the personalities involved in a given policy failure matter as much, if not more than, the ideas themselves?' Bon courage! For the past three years, 38-year-old Oxford academic Oliver Lewis has been teaching an oversubscribed course at Sciences Po – the Paris university that produced six of France's last eight presidents – while researching a DPhil (equivalent to a PhD) on UK rail privatisation as a 'case study in British public policy failure, 1985-1997'. The source of Lewis's inspiration, he believes, was his father's scientific expertise in materials failure. After earning degrees in History and Politics at the London School of Economics and King's College London – and a short stint in financial services – Lewis was unable to shake off his interest in a different sort of failure, dating back to his study of the privatisation of British Rail for A-level Economics. Having enrolled at Oxford for his DPhil, he won a year's fellowship to Sciences Po in 2021 as part of an exchange programme. The following year, he was asked to develop a 12-week course. It has now been taken by over 200 French, British and other international students at the university dubbed ' la fabrique des élites ' (the elite factory). 'Regardless of citizenship, there is a universal curiosity in a country that has gone from one of the richest in the world to a mediocre one,' says Lewis. 'There is definitely a general feeling that something has gone deeply wrong for Britain. When I tell people that my DPhil is on railways and public policy failure, they say, 'Well, you won't run out of material'.' There has certainly been no shortage of recent stories highlighting problems with Britain's rail infrastructure. In December, The Telegraph reported on an 18-mile line in Northumberland – a victim of the Beeching cuts in the 1960s – which took three decades to be rebuilt after plans for its reopening were first mooted in the 1990s. When work finally began in 2019, the £160 million project was due to be completed by spring 2023. It eventually opened in December 2024, by which time the estimated cost had nearly doubled to £298 million – and only two of its six stations were ready. Nevertheless, the curiosity displayed by Lewis's enthusiastic students appears untainted by any contempt for the country they have been studying. 'I have always been a fan of the UK,' says Milan Wojcieszek, a 23-year-old Polish student at the University of Amsterdam, currently on a year-long exchange at Sciences Po. 'I admire your newspaper culture and the civilised way in which you debate in Parliament. But for me, Brexit appeared an irrational decision in a country where everything seemed to be going right, and I wanted to understand the motivations behind it better. 'I still like the British attitude, but the course put an end to the picture in my head that people from western Europe have a superior intellect when it comes to statecraft. It raised my national self-esteem: if these guys can f--- up, maybe we're not so stupid.' But what about his French classmates, the Pompidous, Mitterands and Chiracs of the future? Did they enjoy a good laugh about l es Rosbifs while quietly taking notes on mistakes to avoid? 'I did not see a visible enthusiasm for smirking about their arch-rivals shooting themselves in the foot,' says Wojcieszek, who hopes to become an entrepreneur when he graduates. 'I guess what I saw was more sympathy and curiosity.' Wojcieszek's classmate Amélie Destombes, a second-year student at King's College London currently on secondment to Sciences Po, confirms the impression that Britain is a fascinating country to study – if not for the most reassuring reasons. 'I've had conversations with many French students who have brought up Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss or Boris Johnson – so there's a pretty bad reputation,' she says. Brexit is often the hook that attracts European students to Lewis's course – although many might be unaware that he stood for Reform, originally founded as the Brexit Party, in last year's general election for the Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr seat, where he came second to Labour. Now no longer active in the party, Lewis adopts a rigorously apolitical stance in his seminars. 'Our duty is to truth, not to subjectivity or opinion,' he explains. In any case, he argues, 'it's too early to tell' with Brexit. Instead, he roots his teaching in historical method, blending aspects of anthropology and law, as befits Sciences Po's interdisciplinary approach. This results in a 12-part lecture series on the 'long 20th century' that seeks to understand 'how we got to this malaise,' what lessons can be learnt for other countries, and whether British decline is reversible. The course begins with the First World War, a well-documented event, before exploring three further foreign policy failures: appeasement in the 1930s, the Partition of India in 1947, and the Suez Crisis of 1956. It then shifts focus to domestic issues, covering Northern Ireland, comprehensive education, the 'financialisation' of the economy, the poll tax, rail privatisation – which Lewis estimates has cost taxpayers over £120 billion – and Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs). This shift in focus reflects the changing role of a state that, over the past 100 years, has been asked to do more with less. 'For most of its history, the British state dealt only with defence and with imperial concerns,' explains Lewis. 'Its culture and institutions were designed to serve a different purpose. They are, therefore, not terribly efficacious when it comes to solving domestic problems. Britain is in a uniquely unfortunate position because its global role coincided with a domestic economy that could not shoulder its defence burden.' This, Lewis says, did deep, long-term damage, meaning the country 'could not adjust to its drastically reduced role post 1970, with the result that domestic public policy has been poorly planned, poorly executed – and at times poorly financed too.' Prof Sir Ivor Crewe, a distinguished political scientist, is the author of The Blunders of Our Governments, which features on the reading list for Lewis's course – alongside films such as Rogue Trader (the Nick Leeson biopic), and The Navigators, Ken Loach's story of Sheffield rail workers affected by privatisation. 'It's hard to say if Britain is appreciably worse than other countries such as Italy, France or Germany,' he says. 'But it's difficult to imagine students in Britain being very interested in the mistakes of those countries.' The Blunders of Our Governments, co-authored with the late Prof Anthony King and published in 2013, includes well-known British disasters such as the Millennium Dome and membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, as well as more niche blunders like New Labour's individual learning accounts and the Child Support Agency spending two years chasing a childless gay man over a daughter who didn't exist. The book argues that the British political system suffers from a dwindling talent pool, limited understanding of project management, ineffective checks and balances and inconsequential penalties for failure. Although decisive governments can make effective policy, it is just as easy for incompetent ministers to make bad decisions – a problem that has worsened since the Thatcher and Blair governments. 'With the best will in the world, I have found it difficult to identify successes since 2010,' says Crewe, who is currently working on a new edition of the book covering fresh blunders such as austerity, High Speed 2 and Covid. 'Even when I ask Conservative commentators, it's pretty thin gruel.' Lewis's course at Sciences Po concludes with the Iraq War, before devoting the final lecture to a handful of public policy successes, including PAYE and Bank of England inflation targeting, followed by a plenary discussion on the past and the future. 'My main takeaway is that, when we make policy, it impacts real people,' says Destombes, who hopes to work in British public policy after graduating. 'There needs to be better research on the communities that are affected.' Gabriel Ward, a third-year student at the LSE who took the course at the same time, cites Nicholas Ridley – the Cabinet minister responsible for introducing Thatcher's poll tax (and the son of a viscount) – dismissing people's financial worries by saying, 'Well, they could always sell a picture.' 'There's a disconnect between policy makers and those who would feel it most,' says Ward. 'I was constantly struck by the gap between ideology and practicality.' Wojcieszek's conclusion is that even a strong political system can lead to bad decision making. 'It reinforced my belief that what really matters is visionary leaders who can propose something unpopular,' he says. Lewis wants his students to 'leave with a knowledge that ideas can be as dangerous as they can be powerful.' But inevitably, he has some interesting ideas himself on how Britain might extricate itself from problems that began last century and have worsened since the millennium. 'I used to think that dealing with Britain's 'issues' would be a 30-year project,' he says. 'I now think it's a 50-year one. In the short run, the solution is attracting the best human capital into politics. In the long run, it's education. The education of our future political elite is a massive burning platform.' Lewis is an admirer of the French lycée system, as well as the strong sense of national pride at Sciences Po, where 'virtually every corridor has a tricolour and its primary duty is to the people of France.' Dismissing claims in a recent book that Sciences Po is a hotbed of woke radicalism – 'This obviously afflicts all institutions' – Lewis applauds 'the genius of de Gaulle and the reset of the 1950s,' which Britain has never had, with the possible limited exception of the Northcote-Trevelyan Civil Service reforms of the 19th century, aimed at moving away from patronage and towards a meritocratic system. 'Our electoral system creates a duopoly in which there's no market for ideas,' he says. 'We've never really had a proper conversation about the role of the state in our lives. 'An absence of vision and standards seems to affect every branch of the British state. It's now at emergency levels. Britain's standard of living is on course to be overtaken by Poland's by 2030. The electorate is not going to accept that decline. Something will have to give.'
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Wise goes to the US. Will its founder's supercharged voting rights follow?
Back in 2021, the arrival on the London stock market of Wise, a rapidly expanding money transfer company, generated a feelgood factor at a useful moment. It came a month after overhyped Deliveroo flopped on debut. And, since Wise was a pure fintech business, as opposed to a pizza delivery outfit with an app, there was reason to think the UK might be getting its act together in the sector that politicians swoon over. Shoreditch's finest, and its Estonian founders, would show the way in UK fintech. Wise sported a £9bn valuation. Now the company wants to switch its primary listing to New York in search of a wider pool of investors, more active trading in its shares and 'a potential pathway to inclusion in major US [stock market] indices'. A secondary listing will be retained in London, but we know what usually happens. Nine-tenths of the share trading gravitates to the primary location. The obligatory description on these occasions – 'a fresh blow for London' – applies. Wise, with revenues of £1.2bn and underlying pre-tax profits of £282m, is a bad one to see succumb to the temptations of New York. Rachel Reeves may take note. The chancellor is cajoling UK pension funds to shove cash into private markets (at a moment when even private equity insiders worry that the golden years for returns could be over) but it is the public markets that are more in need of love and affection from No 11. She won't do it (almost certainly), but the first step would be to cut the UK's uncompetitive 0.5% rate of stamp duty on share purchases. There is plenty of evidence that a reduction would pay for itself in increased trading. Yet let's not overlook a weirdness about Wise's move – and an unanswered question. The oddness is that the company, now so keen on getting into a US index, never tried to enter a UK one. At flotation, its dual-class share structure meant it could not be included in FTSE indices. Why not now join the grown-ups? With a £12bn valuation these days, Wise would rank halfway up the Footsie. It would be a big fish. The danger in having the main listing in New York is that the firm will be a relative minnow in a tech pond populated by the trillion-dollar likes of Nvidia. But that's a risk its founder, Kristo Käärmann, is clearly prepared to take in pursuit of greater US visibility for 'major US growth opportunities'. Or perhaps the dual voting structure is a bigger part of the story. Wise's statement described the US listing as having 'a structure that aligns with US market practices including those of our US-listed tech peers, which we believe allows us to remain laser-focused on delivering our mission'. That sounds suspiciously like a reference to the enhanced voting rights that now allow Käärmann to own 18% of the shares but have 50% of the votes. Such unequal arrangements cause little fuss in the US, but they remain controversial in the UK, even if they are now allowed for index-inclusion purposes after a change in the rules a couple of years ago. A key point about Käärmann's supercharged rights, however, is that they are due to expire next summer under a 'sunset clause' agreed at listing. Wise could, if it wished, ask its UK shareholders for an extension but that may cause a row in itself – a sunset is meant to mean what it says. Perhaps the company thinks it is easier to wrap continued enhanced rights into a package where the main element is the change of main listing. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion Käärmann offered zero clarity on whether he wants to keep his supercharged rights. 'It depends on the structure we are going to land on,' he said, adding that all would be clear in the formal circular later this month. Curious. London's acceptance of dual rights – but, critically, only with a five-year sunset clause – was meant to be a way to entice UK tech founders to list in London. It was a pointless change if it just encourages them to leave when the sun is about to set.
