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And I don’t mean the good kind of “party school” either — i.e., placement on Playboy’s ultra-prestigious list of the Top 10 Party Schools in America. (Toga! Toga!) The “party” I’m talking about is the Chinese Communist Party.
The Wall Street Journal: Harvard Has Trained So Many Chinese Communist Officials, They Call It Their ‘Party School’
For decades, the [Chinese Communist] party has sent thousands of mid-career and senior bureaucrats to pursue executive training and postgraduate studies on U.S. campuses, with Harvard University a coveted destination described by some in China as the top “party school” outside the country.
Alumni of such programs include a former vice president and Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s top negotiator in trade talks with the first Trump administration.
Americans spend gargantuan amounts of money on education. Just K-12 costs $17,277 per student each year. For state and local governments, 8.5% of their entire budget is allocated to higher education, i.e., colleges and universities — more than what’s spent on highways, roads, police, courts, jails, and housing.
These colleges and universities also stuff their pockets with federal grants. In 2023, Americans spent nearly $60 billion on research and development grants alone.
Yet increasingly, the biggest beneficiaries of America’s colleges are international students. American citizens are getting frozen out.
There’s no reciprocity, either, notes Secretary of State Marco Rubio:
In the academic year 2024, there were 277,000 Chinese nationals who were studying here at academic institutions here in the United States. On the other hand, there were only 800 Americans who were studying at universities over in China.
My oldest son graduated from high school over the weekend. The valedictorian (er, not my kid) announced that he would be going to Carnegie Mellon, which is certainly an excellent school. Kudos to him.
I’m sure he worked super-hard.
But when he’s there, about half his classmates will be non-Americans. That’s because 44% of Carnegie Mellon’s student body is comprised of foreign students.
The same is true for many of America’s most admired colleges and universities. Among the top 15 U.S. colleges with the highest percentage of international students are such heavy-hitters as Columbia, Johns Hopkins (which receives more NIH grant money than any other college), New York University, Caltech, University of Chicago, M.I.T, and yes, Harvard.
Perhaps it’s time for the MAGA movement to go MEGA: Make Education Great Again.
None other than The New York Times(!) noted the inherent unfairness in an eye-opening article, “Don’t Let Trump’s Brutality Fool You.
