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Commentators have been arguing that Donald Trump’s attacks on higher education—slashing funding, threatening endowments, and recently trying to block Harvard from admitting foreign students—are less about reforming academia than they are about advancing ulterior motives. And Trump may have proven them right.

On June 11, he took to Truth Social to announce what he framed as a masterstroke: a trade deal with China. In exchange for access to rare earth minerals, Trump promised to throw open the gates of American universities to Chinese students. This move is not putting America first. Apart from the fact that the United States already sits on 2.34 billion metric tons of rare earth minerals and that we don’t need China’s dirt, we also don’t need the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) spies waltzing into our research labs.

The CCP has a well-documented habit of sending students abroad not just to study thermodynamics—but to steal it.

For years, U.S. intelligence agencies have practically begged research universities to keep an eye on students linked to Chinese state institutions. In 2019, NPR—not exactly a hotbed of China alarmism—reported that the FBI was urging universities to scrutinize Chinese nationals in STEM fields. That warning now reads less like paranoia and more like prophecy.

[RELATED: Eisenhower Warned Us]

Case in point: On May 7, 2025, the Stanford Review exposed a CCP agent, Charles Chen, masquerading as a Stanford student. Chen was inviting classmates, especially women, on Beijing-funded junkets while communicating through CCP-monitored WeChat. Authorities believe Chen was working for China’s Ministry of State Security, “tasked with identifying sympathetic Stanford students and gathering intelligence.”

But Stanford hasn’t been the only target. 

Tsinghua University, a linchpin of China’s military-industrial complex, has infiltrated many of California’s academic institutions to advance Beijing’s agenda. In 2019, Tsinghua partnered with the University of California, Berkeley, to form the California-China Climate Institute, facilitating a notable state-level agreement with China’s Ministry of Ecology. This partnership, backed by California’s Assembly Bill 39, promotes “zero emission” policies shaped by Tsinghua’s research, which bolsters China’s dominance in green energy markets.

Tsinghua University also maintains partnerships with Yale, Columbia, and several other elite American institutions, as reported by Ian Oxnevad, the National Association of Scholars’s senior fellow for foreign affairs and security studies. And it’s not just elite schools. Add to the list the University of Maryland, which is now “a soft-power satellite for the CCP.” These academic ties often serve as conduits for technology transfers that have enabled China to advance its military technology, even creating hypersonic missiles that have “successfully shot down U.S. B-21 stealth bombers” during wargames. And China’s so-called climate collaboration in California has worked to siphon U.S. resources, weaken America’s energy independence, and bolster China’s military and economic strength.

Not everyone is clutching their pearls, however. Matthew Andersson, a former business executive and Minding the Campus contributor thinks America can spy just as easily on China as China spies on America, and he sees this move as creating “cooperation.” “[I]f we’re going to move further into a cooperative trade posture, certain bilateral science and technology sharing is inevitable,” he said.

A former Hill staffer I spoke with was even more relaxed about the arrangement, saying, “I think the China problem [in universities] is overblown … they don’t need to send spies to the universities because they already have them in Congress … and it’s not like the ones they send over here are the students doing the rioting,” he added, referencing the recent mostly peaceful protests lighting up Waymo cars in Los Angeles.

Most of those I interviewed, however, view Trump’s deal as a reckless misstep.

Teresa Manning, policy director at the National Association of Scholars, calls it “incomprehensible,” arguing it betrays America First principles. “Putting the country at serious risk of technology theft, security breaches, and espionage” is bad enough, she notes, but foreign students also “take a seat from American students” in our classrooms.

The issue of foreign students flooding U.S. universities at the expense of American students has long troubled me.

Today, over 1.1 million international students study in the U.S., including more than 500,000 in STEM graduate programs. Their presence carries steep costs that extend well beyond national security concerns.

Many of these students—particularly from India—pursue U.S. degrees as a stepping stone to H-1B visas. Corporations, in turn, exploit the program to hire cheaper labor, undercutting American workers and sidelining domestic talent in our most vital industries. (Read “H-1B Visa Undermines American Students and Workers.”)

[RELATED: Foreign Students Price Americans Out of Their Own Workforce]

American corporations, with the help of our policy makers, already hollowed out the heartland by offshoring manufacturing to make obscene profits. Must we now watch our tax-funded universities pave the way for foreign nationals to claim classroom seats, job offers—and, in some cases, sensitive research to be used against us at some point in the future—on our own soil? I don’t think so. Institutions funded by American tax dollars should serve American citizens first.

A real solution requires rebuilding our education system from the ground up. That means revitalizing K–12 education so 18-year-olds are genuinely prepared for college-level rigor—especially in STEM—eliminating any excuse that universities can’t find qualified American students. A real solution also means dramatically restricting access to our institutions for foreign nationals: barring students who hail from adversarial nations like China entirely, and limiting college enrollment from even allied countries to a small number, subject to strict security vetting. 

Let’s not dig our universities deeper into an already gaping hole by using them as bargaining chips to gain access to foreign land minerals—minerals we can readily extract from our own backyard.

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Cover by Jared Gould using an asset by Iurii Gagarin on Adobe Stock; Asset ID#: 328134219 & Screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social post