Extreme HYPS syndrome NYT edition

David Bell, a history professor at Princeton, has just written another of these yes the Trump administration of fascist morons but on this one issue they sort of have a point pieces, which have flourished like kudzu in the first months of our current national insanity.

The this one issue in this case is foreign student enrollment in America’s colleges and universities.

Bell lays out very convincingly why there are all sorts of reasons to consider foreign student enrollment in American higher ed to be a hugely positive sum transaction for everyone affected by it, both directly and indirectly. But then:

If we think of universities as engines of social mobility and promoters of national unity, the story looks different. Many of the most elite American universities have not raised their overall enrollments significantly since the 1970s, even as the U.S. population has risen by 50 percent, making admissions far more competitive. The more slots that go to foreigners, the more challenging the process for homegrown applicants.

As in the case of the Chinese students in Ohio, foreign students tend to come from considerable wealth and privilege — this is what allows them to pay the full U.S. tuitions. They have often graduated from elite schools that prepare them for the grueling American application process — and, where necessary, teach them fluent English. So these students make U.S. universities look even more elite and possibly out of touch, at a moment when populist resentment of these institutions has facilitated the Trump administration’s destructive assault on the scientific research they conduct.

Furthermore, while foreign students bring one sort of diversity to U.S. universities, it may not be as great as the diversity provided by Americans of different social backgrounds. A graduate of an elite private school in Greece or India may well have more in common with a graduate of Exeter or Horace Mann than with a working-class American from rural Alabama. Do we need to turn university economics departments into mini-Davoses in which future officials of the International Monetary Fund from different countries reinforce one another’s opinions about global trade?

There are currently about 1.1 million foreign students enrolled in American higher ed, out of around 19 million total students. I’m sure that on some level Prof. Bell is well aware that the modal foreign student is not some kid with billionaire Chinese parents who just funded a new wing at Princeton’s Institute For the Study and Replication of the Power Elite — it’s just that people like him tend to forget this whenever they’re writing for the Times’s op-ed page.

The overwhelming majority of foreign students in the US don’t go to elite universities, even broadly defined, for the same reason that the vast majority of American college students don’t go to those places. The funny/not funny thing is that Bell starts his piece with an anecdote that should drive this precise point home:

Several years ago, a colleague teaching at Miami University, a large state school in Ohio, kindly invited me to give a talk there. After picking me up at the airport, he suggested that we have lunch at a Sichuan restaurant near campus. I was skeptical. Sichuan, in small-town Ohio? “Trust me,” he said. “It’s fantastic.” And it was.

The reason a first-class Sichuan cook had set up shop in this unlikely location soon became clear. At the time, the university was enrolling large numbers of Chinese students — more than 1,400 in 2014, for example. In fact, my colleague went on to tell me, significant social tensions had arisen, since the Chinese students were much wealthier than the American ones, to say nothing of the townspeople. As he said this, he pointed to a Chinese student driving past in a Maserati.

Do I have to point out that the overwhelming majority of foreign students in this country don’t drive Maseratis, or anything even slightly similar, and that indulging in these sorts of stereotypes under present political conditions is inadvertently giving aid and comfort to the Trump administration’s nativist racism and general xenophobic hysteria?

Also too, the Google informs me that the percentage of applicants admitted to Miami-Ohio last fall was 82%, which might be somewhat dissimilar to Princeton’s parallel statistic, though I haven’t checked. Miami is just one of many schools across the country, and in Hillbilly Elegy country in particular, that is basically being kept afloat by foreign students. For example, Western Michigan University, in my semi-hometown of Kalamazoo, had seen its enrollment go from a high 29,000 25 years ago to 17,000 a year or two ago. This overall situation is only going to get worse with post-Great Recession baby bust about to move through the enrollment pipeline.

Conflating American higher ed with the Sorrows of HYPS is normally just really annoying, but under current circumstances it’s a lot worse than that. And thinking that America’s hyper-elite universities have ANYTHING to contribute to ameliorating the structural problems of social mobility and radical economic and social inequality in 21st century America is almost as absurd as thinking that major league baseball and the NBA could contribute to that same project if they just didn’t have quite so many foreign players these days.

To paraphrase some French statesman or the other, when Princeton gets a cold Miami of Ohio gets virulent pneumonia, and faces a genuinely existential crisis as a result that the Princetons of the world simply do not, even if they are the most visible and prominent targets of the Trump administration’s assault on higher education in this country in general.

Pro Tip: You do not under any circumstances have to hand it to the Trump administration, ever. This is the Autobahn Doesn’t Count principle. It’s real easy to remember and it is never wrong.