The Takeover

To shed light on the flood of foreign tuition money into U.S. universities, I obtained data on international student tuition payments at several state universities through public records requests. Texas A&M University was of particular interest—it is one of the top recipients of foreign funds nationwide and a major public research university. Pre-pandemic, international students comprised 8% to 9% of Texas A&M’s student body. It dropped slightly to 7% of students post-pandemic.

The top countries of origin for foreign students are typically China and India, and Texas A&M is no exception. These countries are therefore the top sources of international student revenue to American universities. But Texas A&M’s data allows for an investigation of international students who are sponsored by foreign governments and organizations, rather than simply paying their own way. And the top countries of origin for sponsored students tell a more troublesome story.

From 2010 to 2022, Saudi Arabia was the top country of origin for sponsored international students at Texas A&M. The university received a whopping $293 million in tuition revenue from Saudi Arabian organizations during this period. Second to Saudi Arabia was Turkey, from which the university received $108 million in tuition revenue. Rounding out the top five were Mexico at $56 million, Kuwait at $43 million, and Thailand at $36 million.

In other words, three out of the top five countries that sponsor foreign students at Texas A&M were Middle Eastern states. And Texas A&M is no outlier—data at the University of Maryland, Louisiana State University, the University of Northern Iowa, and the University of South Carolina show a similar pattern of overrepresentation of Middle Eastern countries (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and the UAE). While China also appears as a top sponsor for some schools, India is notably absent, indicating that most international students from India must pay their own way.

These Middle Eastern international student sponsorships do not consist of decentralized, private scholarships; rather, they are massive funding operations that come straight from the government. Out of the $293 million in Saudi Arabian sponsored tuition revenue at Texas A&M, half came directly from the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission (SACM), the government agency in charge of administering funding to Saudi students abroad. The vast majority of the remainder came from Aramco, the Saudi state-owned oil company. Kuwait, Oman, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates are no different—government agencies provide the vast majority of funds.

Middle Eastern states have also provided funding to American universities to establish Middle East and Islamic studies centers, which are in turn tools for attracting more foreign tuition money. They are also hotbeds of left-wing and anti-Israel activism. Both Harvard and Yale received funds from Saudi Arabian donors to establish Islamic studies centers, totaling $30 million. Brown and Columbia boast Palestinian studies centers. Between 2020 and 2022, Brown reported receiving almost $2 million from entities in the United Arab Emirates, Panama, and England to “provide support for a professorship in Palestinian Studies within Middle East Studies.” Furthermore, two separate donations from the United Arab Emirates, which totaled $400,000 in 2022, specified that the funds should support students from Middle Eastern territories such as Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem. The dean of the University of Arkansas’ King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies largely attributed its own success in recruiting Middle Eastern students to the presence of the center.

The funding comes with strings attached. The Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission, which sponsors some two-thirds of the Saudi international student population in the U.S., has actively spied on its sponsored students. In 2017, the SACM published a list of rules for Saudi students in the United States, which stated that students could not engage in political and religious discussion. They also could not have contact with the media. The Saudi Embassy in Washington has even warned students via text messages to avoid participating in “anti-Saudi” events.

A different form of spying has occurred with Chinese students who study in the United States. For instance, a Chinese student at the Illinois Institute of Technology recruited spies to steal top information from American companies focused on building aerospace and satellite technology. The censorship, however, is similar. Chinese students are frequently bullied into silence, both by the Chinese government and even their own parents, if they criticize governmental policies such as China’s authoritarian lockdowns during the COVID pandemic.

So even in the vanishingly rare event that universities attempt to cultivate an environment of academic freedom and free speech on campus, it will never fully apply to sponsored international students from countries with authoritarian governments. In many ways, this defeats the main purpose of having international students on American campuses in the first place: the free and open cultural exchange that occurs between them and American students. What kind of skewed cultural education will American students receive about Saudi Arabia and China if their friends from those countries aren’t even allowed to criticize their own governments, and if the main source of teaching and scholarship on such countries comes out of “centers” funded by those governments?

American universities also compromise on their academic standards to keep the international tuition money flowing. In order to maintain relationships with massive foreign student sponsors, universities will often accept students with weak English-speaking skills who can’t perform adequately in classes. While this can also happen with self-paying students, it’s a much larger problem with sponsored students because the sponsors exercise real financial leverage against the universities. Because universities engage in strategic collaborations with foreign sponsors to increase research and grow student exchange programs, administrators tend to overlook poor academic preparation—even as poorly prepared foreign students engage in academic dishonesty.

Idaho State University professors saw these problems firsthand in the mid-2010s when the school increased its number of sponsored Saudi and Kuwaiti students to almost 10% of total enrollment. Classes that enrolled more than 20 Middle Eastern students saw extreme failure rates: 90% in physics, 75% in introductory English, and more than 60% in math. Professors said the international students were not prepared to handle these classes. One administrator noted that 80%-90% of cheating cases concerned Middle Eastern students. The university bought anti-plagiarism software, installed security cameras, and tracked internet usage to confront academic dishonesty. But it wasn’t enough. As a former physics professor at the university, Martin Hackworth, told The New York Times in 2016, “They [Idaho State] viewed these students as A.T.M. machines,” to the tune of “$20,000 per student in annual out-of-state tuition, nearly three times what state residents pay,” the NYT reported at the time.