The role of universities is conspicuously absent from debate over the H-1B program
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CounterCurrent:
America’s Education and the Uncomfortable H-1B Visa Debate of 2025
The role of universities is conspicuously absent from debate over the H-1B program
CounterCurrent is the National Association of Scholars’ weekly newsletter, bringing you the most significant issues in academia and our responses to them.
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Category: Future of Higher Ed, Foreign Influence, Higher Education;
Reading Time: ~4 minutes
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** America’s Education and the Uncomfortable H-1B Visa Debate of 2025 ([link removed])
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Sovereignty emerged as a key theme of the 2024 election cycle. Our national borders and failed immigration policies took center stage as Americans recounted and discovered the changes brought by a record-breaking wave ([link removed]) of 10 million illegal aliens who entered America in less than four years. Democratic legislators, mayors, and governors will now face off against Donald Trump’s “MAGA” coalition promising deportations and stronger border protections. Definitions of sovereignty and immigration appear starkly partisan. Battle lines on immigration shifted again last week when Trump backers Elon Musk ([link removed]) and Vivek Ramaswamy ([link removed]) came out in support of increased legal
immigration and the country’s H-1B visa program, pitting the GOP’s new and young business elite against populist conservatives like Steve Bannon ([link removed]) and Charlie Kirk ([link removed]) who want job security for American workers. The politics has proven mercurial, as far-left senator Bernie Sanders recently joined ([link removed]) his ideological foes in stating his opposition to the H-1B program. Despite the changing political bedfellows and media ruckus, the role of universities is conspicuously absent from a debate that is as complex for policy as it is uncomfortable for
dinner-table politics. Finding any compromise means fixing academia.
The H-1B visa program, in which American companies can hire workers from abroad for U.S.-based jobs, was catapulted out of a broader debate on immigration when Vivek Ramaswamy set off a firestorm when he declared ([link removed]) on X that a “culture” that places the “jock over the valedictorian will not produce the best engineers.” Ramaswamy’s diatribe against American culture is striking, as it not only neglected to note how American “jock” culture stormed Omaha Beach, hunted down Osama bin Laden, and ran into burning buildings in firefighter uniforms but also how it assumes the best about American education. In his post ([link removed]) , Ramaswamy upheld the “math Olympiad champ” and the “valedictorian”; unfortunately, U.S. education is no longer designed to produce America’s best.
A cursory look at U.S. education and America’s universities reveals nothing short of a dumpster fire of the country’s own making. The United States is outstandingly average in the STEM fields ([link removed]) , ranking 28 out of 37 among developed nations in math and 12 out of 37 in science. Because of school lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, test scores among American students dropped ([link removed]) in both reading and math. According to the National Literacy Institute, roughly 130 million Americans cannot read ([link removed]) a story to their children, and 54 percent of Americans are functionally illiterate, reading below the fifth-grade level.
Scandals and culture war battles about gender ideology and racialized teaching hide a systemic rot that takes place in day-to-day K-12 classrooms. America is becoming a desert of academic excellence as the concept is increasingly devalued or dropped altogether. School districts in Colorado ([link removed]) , Ohio ([link removed]) , Tennessee ([link removed]) , California ([link removed]) , and elsewhere no longer produce any valedictorians at all. The numbers show the atrocious state of America’s primary education system. Higher education is even worse.
American colleges and universities are excellent at producing anti-Semitic hate mobs and generational student debt ([link removed]) . Often, college majors do not lead to good pay, and where it does, the data on college majors is telling. Among college majors, American STEM graduates fare the best in terms of income. Computer and chemical engineering sit at the top ([link removed]) of the list for early-career earnings by major. Unfortunately, the “American” STEM graduates of U.S. universities are often not American at all but foreign students from China and India. In 2019 and ([link removed].) 2020, 49 percent of all STEM master’s graduates
and 57 percent of STEM doctoral graduates in American universities were foreign students. In 2018 and 2019, 18 percent of U.S. STEM students were from China alone ([link removed]) . In higher education, America is training the science professionals of a neutral partner and its top geopolitical rival.
Ramaswamy’s attack on American culture is not without some basis. Countries like Russia ([link removed]) and India ([link removed]) do, in fact, math differently than in the United States. Israel teaches ([link removed]) cybersecurity in high school. When living in Turkey, I saw high school students learning to sketch engine components, calculate fluid dynamics, and use geometry to understand the dimensions of their study subject. Turkish students were visibly miles ahead of their average American counterparts. Clearly, there is something missing from American education.
The economic divide splitting the GOP’s new coalition concerns policy loyalty to American citizens against neoliberal profitability. Indeed, companies hiring H-1B workers from abroad are underpaid ([link removed]) compared to their American counterparts, and some Americans have been forced ([link removed]) to train foreign replacements who are cheaper to hire. That profit incentive is a demand-side problem but remains a separate problem from America’s education system. American workers deserve protection from H-1B visa abuse. They also need protection from failing schools and predatory universities that seek foreign tuition dollars over striving and ambitious American citizens. If the incoming conservative coalition brought to power by Donald Trump is serious, two conversations need to happen at once. Education reform is just as
necessary, if not more, than immigration reform.
Until next week.
Ian Oxnevad
Senior Fellow for Foreign Affairs and Security Studies
National Association of Scholars
Read the Article ([link removed])
For more on future of higher ed, foreign influence, and higher ed:
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January 06, 2025
** Sedition U: Marxist Ideology Threatens American Democracy from Campus to Culture ([link removed])
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John A. Gentry
The First Amendment’s free speech protections and “academic freedom” at colleges and universities are pillars of American democracy.
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January 03, 2025
** Ivies in Crisis ([link removed])
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Liza Libes
Ivy League applications are down, and Ivy League schools have begun to panic. Over the past few weeks, America’s most coveted schools welcomed the early decision cohort of the class of 2029.
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November 15, 2020
** Report: Disfigured History ([link removed])
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David Randall
Disfigured History: How the College Board Demolishes the Past details the careless, politicized history in the College Board's revisions of the Advanced Placement (AP) European, United States, and World History course and exam descriptions.
** About the NAS
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