A Rare Moment for International Education in Foreign Policy

Introduction

After four years of America First, hawks and doves alike are eager for a return to a foreign policy that prioritizes relationship building over swagger. Proponents of public diplomacy in particular are positively giddy. The notion that the United States “will lead not merely by the example of our power but by the power of our example,” as the president suggested in his inaugural address, is a promising sign of national re-commitment to soft power (Biden, 2021).

That the president has also surrounded himself with cabinet officials who value educational and cultural diplomacy only heightens expectations. Vice President Kamala Harris’s parents met as international students in the United States. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken himself was an international student for many years. He is married to Evan Ryan, a former Assistant Secretary of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), who was responsible for government-sponsored exchanges like the Fulbright program. Samantha Power, President Biden’s nominee to run the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), has explicitly called for substantial re-investment in international education and suggested the president deliver a major speech announcing that American universities welcome international students. This is a message they are ready to hear. Two-thirds of recently surveyed foreign students stated that they are more likely to study in the United States following the results of the 2020 election.

The Biden administration appears to have both the opportunity and the disposition to make international education a core tenet of its foreign policy. In order to do so effectively, however, it will need to navigate deep-seated institutional biases in the State Department’s public diplomacy apparatus, avoid distractions that have waylaid past administrations, and think more boldly than adversaries who have proven adept at operationalizing international education for geopolitical gain.

The Significance of International Education

International education affords the United States considerable economic, political, and national security advantages.

America is the world’s largest educational hub. For each of the five years preceding the pandemic, there were more than a million international students in the United States. In 2019, a fifth of all international students worldwide were studying stateside, more than double the number in the United Kingdom, the second most popular destination. The flow of students across American borders has made international education a $40 billion industry supporting more than 400,000 jobs.

What compels such a large number of people to study in the United States? In a word, quality. Former American University of Beirut president John Waterbury once suggested that “the word ‘American’ is to education, what ‘Swiss’ is to watches” (Waterbury, 2003). The advent of global rankings of universities in the early 2000s helped America to burnish that brand. While other countries’ institutions have strengthened their positions in recent years, U.S. universities still dominate. In the QS 2021 rankings, America held 5 of the top 10, 10 of the top 20, and 27 of the top 100 positions. Educational excellence facilitates geopolitical influence. The top universities get the top students, many of whom later assume key roles in business, academia, and government in their home countries. This was a lesson learned during the Cold War when the U.S. specifically sought out foreign students with leadership potential. It is no accident that 39 Fulbright alumni have gone on to become heads of state.

These international networks keep us safe, too. They create new markets for shared business interests and political values, reducing the likelihood of armed encounters. Furthermore, study of foreign cultures allows individuals of different backgrounds to develop mutual understanding. A cultural orientation to internationalism emerged in the wake of World War I and was later expressed in the UNESCO constitution: “That since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed” (UNESCO, 1946). To wit, Cold War scholars like Yale Richmond cite long-standing educational and cultural exchanges with the United States as a contributing factor to the collapse of the Soviet Union—a surprisingly peaceful end to a conflict that had pushed the world to the brink of destruction. Today, as then, international education helps to ensure that our national defense personnel have the language skills and intercultural competencies to navigate complex security environments.

It is clear both that international education has important benefits for global affairs, and that the United States maintains the pole position. It is less clear that the United States can maximize its strategic advantage to advance its geopolitical interests, especially after the last four years. But such is the task of public diplomacy.

Public Diplomacy Priorities

The fundamental premise of public diplomacy is that nations are often more successful in advancing their interests when engaging directly with the public rather than in closed-door meetings with officials. That is what distinguishes public diplomacy from traditional diplomacy. The idea is that a sympathetic foreign public would then pressure their leaders to adopt preferred policies or stances. Notwithstanding its merits, public diplomacy is the runt of the international affairs budget, accounting for less than four percent of expenditures in 2019.

A long-standing debate in public diplomacy concerns which of two approaches is the best way to engage foreign publics. Historian Richard Arndt refers to the two sides as informationists and culturalists. Informationists prioritize messaging, while culturalists prioritize mutual understanding. Informationists use one-way communications like broadcasting. Culturalists use two-way communications like person-to-person exchanges. The work of informationists can be measured quickly through public opinion polling. The work of culturalists is harder to measure and might take years or decades to pay off. Good public diplomacy leverages both of these approaches. But America has long tilted the scales toward the informationists. In 2019, the State Department spent $100 million more on global media than educational and cultural exchange. Can education, the provenance of culturalists, restore balance? Lessons from history suggest otherwise.

A Brief History of International Education in Foreign Policy

Education has been a component of official U.S. foreign policy since World War II, albeit often unsung. Even after legislative successes like Fulbright (1946), Smith-Mundt (1948), the National Defense Education Act (1958), the Foreign Assistance Act (1961), and Fulbright-Hays (1961), all of which provided key resources for international education efforts, Assistant Secretaries of State still referred to education as the “underdeveloped area” (Coombs, 1964) or “the neglected aspect” (Frankel, 1966) of foreign policy. Indeed, any postwar momentum toward centralizing education in foreign policy was squandered by the late 1960s. In 1966, Congress passed a wide-ranging International Education Act with bi-partisan support, but never funded it. American public tolerance for internationalism waned as the Vietnam War escalated. Domestic political crises like Watergate also turned the American gaze inward. The moment had passed.

Another moment accompanied the end of the Cold War. Anticipating greater need for expertise in languages besides Russian, Congress established the National Security Education Program in 1991 to support the study of languages critical to national security. Policymakers could have doubled down by utilizing bi-national exchanges to reinforce its hegemonic position and create unopposed networks for geopolitical influence. Yet, the prevailing idea was that the Cold War was a 20th century problem, and that the nation needed to direct its resources to the opportunities of the 21st century. So, with hearts and minds ostensibly won, the value of public diplomacy diminished among key decision-makers. In 1996, not even a fifth of the public diplomacy budget was allocated for academic and cultural exchanges. Between 1995 and 1998, Congress cut the Fulbright budget by 25 percent. Exchanges were well and good, the thinking went, but they need not be the government’s concern. The moment had passed.

For a brief period after 9/11, international education seemed critically important once again. The United States rejoined UNESCO after a two-decade absence and there was suddenly a great need to engage the Arab world on a human level. Hard power expended in Iraq and Afghanistan was to be accompanied by a resurgence of soft power to fight the global war on terror. Yet conflicts such as these tarnished America’s global reputation and escalated the militarization of foreign policy. The Department of Defense’s new “strategic communications” efforts took priority over the kind of public diplomacy that had been practiced during the Cold War. When it was learned that one of the hijackers entered the United States on a student visa, it restricted entry requirements and international enrollments fell. The moment had passed.

A Recent History of International Education in Foreign Policy

It is hard to overstate the damage the Trump presidency did to America’s global reputation. His open disdain for multilateralism and democratic allies exacerbated his consistent portrayal of victimhood and fawning over strongmen. The world laughed at him and now lectures us. It should come as no surprise that America’s overall attractiveness has declined since Trump took office. The United States dropped a spot each year of his presidency in the global soft power rankings.

Still, there is good reason to expect a bounce back. Along with technological prowess and trend-setting popular culture, America’s education remains an asset. But even that is under threat. An expert on higher education finance estimates that the pandemic will cost America’s colleges and universities $183 billion in lost revenues, Covid-related expenses, and anticipated decreases in state appropriations. While domestic enrollment declines accounted for some of the lost revenue, a fall 2020 survey suggests that international enrollment may have dropped by 43 percent. The full extent of the damage remains to be seen. What we do know is that international education challenges under Trump pre-date the pandemic. After peaking at 300,000 in 2016, the number of new international students has fallen every year thereafter. A 2019 analysis found that this trend translated to losses of $11.8 billion and more than 65,000 jobs.

But the picture could have been even bleaker. The Trump administration proposed cutting the ECA budget by more than fifty percent for the 2021 fiscal year budget. While the scale of the proposed cuts was shocking, they also represented a dramatic shift in domestic politics. Generally, Fulbright budgets have been slightly higher during Republican presidencies than in Democratic ones. But the America First movement represents a strain of isolationism not seen in this country since the 1930s, as well as an antipathy to higher education, which is increasingly viewed as a partisan institution. Fortunately, legislators tend not to share these views in aggregate. And even after Trump’s first budget proposal in 2017, a Republican-led Congress enacted budgets for exchange programs at levels even higher than those under his predecessor. But these modest improvements are insufficient compensation for the harm caused.

What this all amounts to is a devastating loss of economic impact and geopolitical influence, not to mention a legitimate threat to national security. The moment is upon us.

How to Strengthen International Education in Foreign Policy

If ever there were a time to make education a centerpiece of America’s relationship with the rest of the world, this would be it. The time for quick fixes is over. Our adversaries are stronger, and our allies have lost trust in us. This is the time for long-term relationship building. At the same time, as the above examples show, past opportunities to embed international education more deeply into foreign policy failed because they were incongruous with domestic priorities. As National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan put it, “foreign policy is domestic policy and domestic policy is foreign policy” (Seldin, 2021). To seize the moment, the Biden administration should use international education to link domestic and foreign policy.

Here are five ways the Biden administration could strengthen international education’s role in foreign policy.

1. Re-invest in educational exchange. The foundation of American educational diplomacy is exchange. Every year 55,000 people from around the world participate in an exchange program funded by the State Department. The Biden administration should make exchange a hallmark of its global re-engagement strategy by substantially increasing the number of participants in government-funded educational exchange. To do so it should request that Congress significantly increase its allocations to existing exchange programs, especially its flagship Fulbright program. Last year, Congress allocated $730 million on educational and cultural exchange programs. While this figure represents a high-water mark, the administration should not get complacent. Instead, it should pursue a two-pronged strategy advocating for a robust budget increase as well as private sector cost-sharing.

The budget increase would support greater representation of historically black and minority serving institutions and community colleges in Fulbright programming, both as senders and receivers of students and scholars. Meanwhile, the administration can expand the range of partners it works with to subsidize costs. Every year about a third of total Fulbright funding comes from foreign governments and their private sectors as well as the U.S. private sector. The goal should be to increase the overall volume of support, while reducing the percentage of the overall exchange budget funded by the taxpayer. Meanwhile, Biden’s team should call on corporations and philanthropies to increase their support of international exchanges more broadly. It could create an incentive-laden compact to usher in an entirely new era of person-to-person exchange that is more diverse and inclusive. Corporations who hire international students should receive tax breaks and philanthropies that issue scholarships should earn priority access to policy discussions.

America is unique among advanced nations in that it does not have a national strategy for international student recruitment. Institutions develop their own strategies. Modest government funding for international students is scattered across different federal agencies that do not coordinate well. A new multi-sector compact could improve efficiency in distribution of resources and ensure more equitable access to them. Further, the compact could build capacity for virtual exchange. Prior to the pandemic, this was a niche field, but nation-wide transition to online learning has demonstrated the potential for virtual exchange to supplement and facilitate traditional exchanges. The federally funded Stevens Initiative has aided virtual exchanges between classrooms in 46 states and 16 countries across the Middle East and North Africa. The compact would ensure that the United States has the infrastructure in place to expand to other world regions so that it can rely more heavily on this option during the next pandemic.

Over 90 percent of exchange funding is spent in the United States. But for re-engagement to be effective, more Americans need to go abroad. Only two percent of American undergraduates studied abroad in the 2018-19 academic year. The few students who do go abroad are disproportionately white. Research shows that study abroad significantly improves graduation rates for students of color and effectively eliminates gaps in graduation rates between black and white students. Fortunately, we already have programs in place that could rectify disparities in access to study abroad by race and class. The Benjamin A. Gilman program supports economically disadvantaged American undergraduates for study abroad. Unfortunately, this program is chronically underfunded. In 2018, the nearly $13 million Congress allocated for it afforded opportunities for 3,000 participants, approximately one percent of all Americans who studied abroad. Greater investment in Gilman and programs like it would promote economic and racial justice at home and public diplomacy abroad.

2. Support American universities abroad. When you’ve got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But international education can be more than exchange. Overseas campuses extend the reach of American higher education into environments where it can be more difficult to recruit students for foreign study. The United States “exports” the most international campuses. The 86 foreign branches of American universities are twice as many as universities from the United Kingdom have set up abroad. There are also more than 80 independent American-modeled universities in more than 55 countries. The best known are the American universities in Beirut, Cairo, and Paris. These outposts are critical venues for advancing American ideas about education and learning about other cultures. They provide an unparalleled comparative advantage among allies and adversaries. President Johnson rightly understood that American schools and colleges abroad “should be showcases for excellence in education” (Johnson, 1966).

Other countries understand the soft power possibilities of foreign campuses. Russia has made strategic placement of international branch campuses an important component of its relations with former Soviet countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Yet branch campuses and independent institutions have figured only peripherally into American educational and cultural diplomacy. In locations where they have been particularly successful, diplomats have even perceived them as impediments to promoting study in the United States or, more grotesquely, to placating strongmen.

Instead of viewing overseas campuses as competition, the administration should see them as permanent, supplemental quasi-embassies. When the United States and Egypt broke off diplomatic relations in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the American University in Cairo was practically the only American presence in the country. Indeed, America’s best exports have long made contributions to progress and prosperity in regions where the U.S. government cannot so easily. The Biden administration should therefore encourage embassy personnel to seek out opportunities to support extant institutions and establish new ones. Branch campuses are often subsidized by host countries, but independent ones rely much more heavily on tuition and donations. Unlike branch campuses, which tend to grow in stable countries, their independent counterparts often take root in more fragile environments like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Nigeria. As such, they are often financially distressed. USAID’s American Schools and Hospitals Abroad unit provides small grants toward facilities improvements and equipment purchases. The administration should seek to expand its paltry $30 million budget and alter its mandate so that it can also support operational costs.

Establishing new American campuses overseas can provide an opportunity to expand the range of American institutions represented abroad. A plurality of international branches of U.S. universities come from research institutions. While this sector is understandably the envy of the world, American higher education’s true strength is its institutional diversity. Yet the global prestige, transnational networks, and financial capital that follow from international branches typically only flow to a certain type of institution. This pattern does a disservice both to Americans and foreign audiences. The administration should set targets for institutional participation in international higher education activities by sector to ensure that American higher education abroad is more reflective of American higher education at home. Until then the current arrangement that disproportionately advantages already well-resourced institutions will only reinforce inequality within the system at home. Meanwhile, it will deprive populations abroad of the opportunity to engage with an American institution whose mission and expertise may be better aligned with their national priorities. A community college or minority serving institution might be a better partner than a research university in many contexts.

Because establishing a branch campus is a complex and costly undertaking, the administration should lead efforts to identify potential partners among host governments and the private sector. While the concentration of willing capital in the Gulf has made it a likely candidate for yet further growth, it would be prudent for the administration to look elsewhere for new opportunities. India, which has recently revised its higher education law to allow for foreign campuses, would be a good place to start.

3. Rein in for-profits. The mechanisms in place to support the mobility of people and educational providers were developed for the challenges of other eras. Modern educational diplomacy must supplement them with ways to engage foreign audiences that respond to contemporary challenges. To that end, international education should be an integral component in a comprehensive global strategy for countering disinformation and corruption. Traditional public diplomacy tools like the Voice of America and other broadcasting resources are critical for communicating objective facts and correcting manipulated media. Yet, Trump’s politicization of the U.S. Agency for Global Media has shown how these tools can be warped for partisan and non-democratic purposes. That is why the fast approaches of informationists should be accompanied by slow approaches of culturalists, viz. to promote critical thinking, media literacy, and appreciation for diversity. These civic outcomes, however, are generally incompatible with the proprietary model of higher education that has proliferated across the globe.

In most countries, a private university is by definition also a for-profit university. Around the world, the rapid rise of private higher education has outpaced the ability of regulators to assure quality and prevent fraud. The failure of private higher education in many countries weakens public trust in higher education more broadly and threatens stability. Furthermore, the increasing association of the untrademarked “American” label with for-profit colleges of dubious merit sows confusion and dilutes the brand that America’s public diplomats need to promote now more than ever. The two most recently announced independent American universities abroad—in Ukraine and Cyprus—are both for-profit undertakings. The Biden administration should encourage American-modeled education abroad and ensure that the model of choice is not-for-profit. It can incentivize the development of not-for-profit institutions abroad by offering lucrative grants to U.S.-based institutions to provide curriculum, training, and other services to independent campuses overseas so long as they operate as not-for-profits, a governance model that U.S. institutions can help to implement and sustain.

The Biden administration is expected to curtail the for-profit sector in the United States, which flourished the past four years, even during the pandemic. With few exceptions, for-profit institutions use predatory recruitment strategies to enroll underprepared students, charge them high tuitions, provide them with poor-quality educational experiences, award them credentials of limited value on the labor market, and leave them with debts they cannot pay. The Biden administration should take appropriate measures to limit the damage of this sector in the United States and should also ensure that these efforts do not unwittingly prop it up abroad. Policies that shrink the for-profit market in the United States could force the companies to expand overseas operations. The Biden team can take advantage of foreign interest in American accreditation to align domestic and foreign policies on for-profit education. America’s regional and programmatic accreditors have begun certifying foreign institutions and programs, and the agency that coordinates accreditors has established an international unit to share best practices across countries. The administration should provide grants to accreditors, universities, and non-profit higher education associations to help foreign governments to set standards and assure quality. This approach would also be consistent with the president’s expected anti-corruption agenda more broadly.

4. Rejoin UNESCO. The United States withdrew from the intergovernmental organization in 2019 but had stopped paying its dues in 2011 when UNESCO admitted Palestine. The suspension of payments—more than a fifth of the organization’s revenues—was a serious blow. By the time the United States officially left, the country was nearly $600 million in arrears. This funding dearth impeded UNESCO’s effectiveness, contributing to hiring freezes and program cuts. American proponents of UNESCO are eager to see the country return to the organization it helped to establish in 1945. But such optimism belies significant hurdles. Beyond the Palestinian issue, American officials have alleged corruption and mismanagement in the past. Meanwhile, UNESCO members may not be immediately eager to re-welcome a country member that has twice withdrawn. The U.S. left for the first time in 1984 and only rejoined in 2002 when the Bush administration needed to establish multi-lateral bona fides for its war on terror.

The benefits of rejoining ought to outweigh these concerns. First and foremost, renewed membership would mitigate the organization’s financial distress, for which the U.S. is largely responsible. The recovered funds would greatly enhance UNESCO’s leadership of the multi-lateral effort to achieve the fourth Sustainable Development Goal to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” (UNESCO, n.d.). This goal aligns with the president’s campaign pledge to “Ensure that no child’s future is determined by their zip code, parents’ income, race or disability” (Biden, 2020). UNESCO also provides a platform to reinforce other shared priorities such as combating authoritarianism and corruption.

In the meantime, without a seat at the table, Americans wield little influence for setting global education policies and directing resources to achieve SDG 4. In their absence, China has assumed a greater role in policy discussions. Rejoining would counter Chinese influence by creating paths for Americans to steer its course, which likely appeals more to the president’s instincts than quitting over policy disagreements. Simply put, rejoining UNESCO would restore American credibility abroad in ways that are consistent with related re-entries into multilateral efforts such as the Paris climate accord, the World Health Organization, and the Iran nuclear deal.

5. Embrace competition with China. Cold War competition with the Soviet Union motivated most of the international education policies that we still have in place today. Rather than dis-engage when tensions were building, the United States and Russia began bi-national exchanges. Once they were established in 1958, they remained in place. A Fulbright Commission was even established in 1973. This approach contrasts with the Trump administration’s abrupt cessation of the China and Hong Kong Fulbright programs last summer and repressive legislative proposals for the higher education sector coming from the Senate, House, and Florida. The Biden administration should restore the Fulbright programs immediately and unconditionally as part of a more comprehensive plan to compete with China. The Cold War provides a playbook.

Our legitimate disagreements with China—on human rights, the economy, national security, etc.—are not grounds for depriving our citizens the opportunity to learn from each other. Punitive measures may be necessary, but we have other diplomatic tools at our disposal. Rendering educational exchange as collateral damage is counterproductive, especially considering China is the largest sender of foreign students to the United States by a wide margin. Further provocation could have a catastrophic effect on American colleges and universities, which are already shouldering a considerable burden in suppressing anti-Chinese bias in the country. Despite the Trump administration’s wide-ranging China Initiative heightening fears of espionage on college campuses, university-based scientific collaboration between the two countries actually increased significantly during the first few months of the pandemic. This display of science diplomacy could have been a model for future Sino-American relations. Yet, upon taking office, President Biden needed to issue an executive order to combat a pandemic-inspired resurgence of xenophobia against Asians. A UN report from last summer observed that hate crimes against Asians had reached an “alarming level” in the United States. Americans’ favorable opinions of China are the lowest they have been in four decades, and more than half of Americans support imposing limits on the number of Chinese students who can study in the United States. Restoring government-sponsored exchanges with China and Hong Kong is a modest response, but important signal of goodwill amid mounting geopolitical tensions.

The U.S. must also counter Chinese influence in other nations, especially in youth-booming Africa where a quarter of the world’s children live. Analysts project that in 10 years, Africa’s under-18 population will increase by 170 million. The educational preferences that African children and their families develop now and in the coming years will structure global power networks and geopolitical dynamics. Especially with Chinese universities climbing the global rankings, we can no longer take for granted America’s position as the higher education model of choice. Developing educational and cultural ties with African nations ought to be a long-term foreign policy imperative for any nation with aspirations for global influence.

That is why China has embarked on an ambitious soft power campaign on the continent, becoming Africa’s largest creditor along the way. Debt-trap diplomacy or not, “One Belt, One Road” is creating networks and generating influence. Its more than 60 Confucius Institutes on university campuses throughout Africa spread Chinese language, culture, and propaganda. Chinese aid has funded new campuses and scholarships. International students from Africa increasingly choose China over the United States. Between 2003-18, the number of African students in China rose from under 2,000 to more than 81,000. During the same period, the number of African students in the United States hovered around 35,000. After France, China has become the most popular destination for African students. This outcome is a successful return on a strategic investment. China now provides more scholarships for African students than all other Western nations combined.

The Biden administration should regard mounting Chinese influence on African higher education as unacceptable. It must multiply the number of scholarships, advising resources, and development aid to build higher education infrastructure. Further, it should ensure that higher education is integral to an inter-agency Africa strategy. The Trump administration’s Prosper Africa Initiative was a recognition of China’s comparative advantage there but falls short of the task at hand. The private sector should indeed be a key partner, but the challenge in front of us requires sustained governmental commitment.

Conclusion

We Americans now find ourselves at a critical juncture: we can embrace internationalism by embedding education into our foreign policy or we can continue to pay lip service to internationalism by returning to the status quo. A mere restoration of pre-Trump policies is insufficient. After all, the Obama administration in which President Biden served at one time proposed a 13 percent cut to the Fulbright budget. The moment at hand calls for a fundamental restructuring of the position of education in foreign policy from the periphery to the center. We must institutionalize its value. We must not let this moment pass.

Biden has shown a willingness to take bold action for reform in the early part of his presidency. But many executive actions are reversals of Trump policies. It remains to be seen how far he is willing to reform entrenched structures that minimize public diplomacy in general, and within that framework prioritize information over culture. A first indication will be the budget he proposes for educational and cultural affairs. A second will be his choice for Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, a position that has been vacant for three years. The U.S. Advisory Commission for Public Diplomacy has called on the president to nominate a career Foreign Service Officer, not a political appointee. Regardless, the president would do well to nominate a culturalist, not an informationist.

When proposing the International Education Act to Congress 55 years ago, President Johnson observed that because “Education lies at the heart of every nation’s hopes and purposes. It must be at the heart of our international relations” (Johnson, 1966). Since then, every president has failed to meet that standard. On his quest to restore the soul of America, President Biden should use education to link his domestic priorities with his foreign policies.

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