A friend of mine told me that her daughter, who attends UCLA, will be living at home and taking only online classes in the fall.  While the family will be spared the cost of on-campus housing, there is no tuition deduction.  On Monday, Harvard announced the same policy.  Also on Monday, the Trump administration used the new academic reality as a way to eject Chinese nationals from America.

For several decades now, America's colleges and universities have been making bank by holding spaces open for foreign nationals, especially Chinese students who are the scions of powerful people in the Communist Party.  The beauty of these students is that they pay full fare.  With them, there are no grants, no in-state discounts, no pesky and inconvenient loans.  Instead, it's cash all the way.

A year and a half ago, the New York Times wrote about academia's reliance on foreign students, especially Chinese ones:

It's no mere coincidence that Jeffrey R. Brown, the dean of the Gies College of Business, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is also a scholar of risk management. At his first faculty meeting four years ago, Brown fretted that his school had become, like many American universities, overly dependent on a single source of money — roughly a fifth of tuition revenue came from Chinese students.

[snip]

Over the past decade, the explosion in the number of international students has turned education, almost by stealth, into one of the most vital American exports.

[snip]

Nearly 1.1 million international students attended American colleges and universities in 2017. They generated $42.4 billion in export revenue. ...

This chart from a 2018 report on foreign students in America gives some idea of how beholden to the Chinese academia is:

Because foreign students, especially the Chinese, are an important funding source for academia, the Trump administration's announcement on Monday that, if classes go online, foreign students will be denied visas comes as a devastating blow:

Nonimmigrant F-1 and M-1 students attending schools operating entirely online may not take a full online course load and remain in the United States. The U.S. Department of State will not issue visas to students enrolled in schools and/or programs that are fully online for the fall semester nor will U.S. Customs and Border Protection permit these students to enter the United States. Active students currently in the United States enrolled in such programs must depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction to remain in lawful status. If not, they may face immigration consequences including, but not limited to, the initiation of removal proceedings.

There are some exceptions for schools with hybrid models (partially online and partially in-person classes) but the above paragraph is the meat of the new policy.

In theory, foreign students should be in the same situation academically as my friend's child: they'll live in their home country and take the same classes they would have anyway.  They'll lose the opportunity to perfect their English and mingle with (or spy on) Americans, but they'll still get the degree.

China's internet censorship, however, means that Chinese students probably won't be able to take those online classes.  And without those classes, Chinese students will walk away and take their money with them.

A reader at Instapundit understands what Trump just did:

Trump has just kicked out all Chinese University students by hiding it in a sea of ejected international students. ... Universities can either help Trump get re-elected by returning to in-person classes or going bankrupt and cutting off money from the Democratic Party.

Put another way, if colleges and universities return to normal, that will be part of a general opening up of America, which is good for the economy.  On the other hand, if the colleges and universities stick to their guns about online classes (and professors seem resistant to the idea of returning to crowded lecture halls), many struggling colleges will go broke.

Academia's indoctrination provides the foot soldiers for leftism, both on the street and in the boardroom, and because their faculty and staff are huge Democrat party funder, academia also helps fund the party.  If these institutions of higher leftism go under, their demise can only help preserve an America dedicated to the traditional principles of individual liberty and the free market.

Image: Wikimedia.