CounterCurrent: Week of 01/06/2025
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 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 and Vivek Ramaswamy 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 and Charlie Kirk who want job security for American workers. The politics has proven mercurial, as far-left senator Bernie Sanders recently joined 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 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, 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, 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 in both reading and math. According to the National Literacy Institute, roughly 130 million Americans cannot read 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, Ohio, Tennessee, California, 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. 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 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 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. 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 and India do, in fact, math differently than in the United States. Israel teaches 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 compared to their American counterparts, and some Americans have been forced 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 reforms is just as important, if not more, than immigration reform.
Until next week.
CounterCurrent is the National Association of Scholars’ weekly newsletter, written by the NAS Staff. To subscribe, update your email preferences here.
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