Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from an article originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on July 14, 2025. It is crossposted here with permission.
Buried in a recent report from the Economic Innovation Group is a statistic that should make every university administrator in America lose sleep: Foreign-born workers who arrived in the U.S. on student visas now out-earn their native-born peers with college degrees by nearly $30,000 annually. They’re also more than twice as likely to work in research and development—the engine room of national progress.
Let me be very clear: This isn’t about IQ. It’s about institutions. It’s about a cultural drift so deep, so corrosive, that a native-born population is slowly being nudged out of its own future—not by brute force or some grand conspiracy but by decades of educational decay, elite indifference, and intellectual cowardice. America didn’t run out of smart people. It ran out of the will to cultivate them.
And nowhere is that more evident than in higher education. Once the incubator of American innovation, producing Nobel laureates, cutting-edge research, and the technological bedrock of the 20th century, the modern university system has devolved into self-parody. Bureaucratized beyond recognition, hijacked by ideological orthodoxy, and driven by administrative bloat, the university is no longer a model of excellence. It’s an HR department with a football team.
[RELATED: H-1B Visa Undermines American Students and Workers]
Today’s American student is increasingly guided into disciplines that produce little beyond debt and disillusionment. Fields once synonymous with discovery—engineering, chemistry, and applied physics—are under-enrolled, underfunded, and under-defended. Instead, we celebrate degrees in queerness or “Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.” We infantilize students, training them to feel rather than think, and then we wonder why employers look elsewhere.
Enter the international student.
Foreign students—especially those from Asia and Eastern Europe—arrive with none of the postmodern baggage. They aren’t here to dismantle the system; they’re here to master it. They don’t need healing circles. They need lab access. They pursue electrical engineering, computer science, and biotech. They dominate our classrooms not because they’re inherently superior but because they treat education as a vehicle for upward mobility, not a personal soapbox.
These students didn’t grow up in an ecosystem that told them the system was rigged or that objectivity was oppressive. They weren’t told that merit is a colonial construct. They studied, endured, and outcompeted. And that should be a wake-up call…
Read the remainder of the article here.
Image: “What have I done!?” by Miguel Angelon Flickr
