MIT is a land grant college. Over its almost 150 year history it has supported the US in various ways such as the Rad Lab, Lincoln Lab, the Instrumentation Lab, and recently such efforts as Koch Lab, Whitehead, and others. Much of the success in technology has come from these efforts. MIT's Government funding is now close to $2.4 billion annually. However it has some 30% of its almost 12,000 students are foreign.
Now I have been a member of the above mentioned Labs over the years. I have also been in the EECS Department as student and faculty as recently as 2012. However I noticed that by 2012 none of my doctoral students were US citizens, many from the PRC. But worse was the fact that these students were funded from US Government contracts many even from DoD related contracts! One fears that in a remake of the film Tora Tora Tora we see an Admiral Yamamoto saying not that he went to Harvard but to MIT and learned all he could under a DoD sponsored contract while earning a doctorate. While one suspects the American student, say a Feynman double, was not admitted since he did not make the DEI match and was from New York City!
In my opinion the current Administration may have a point but the point is mired in details which seem to be a blind spot. In the 60s it would have been unheard of to have a large cadre of Soviet grad students funded by DoD! But the parallel today is not only thought of but implemented. Details do count. Perhaps that is a step to understanding what these students are doing and from whence they came.
More critically is why we do not have more American students. Are these 30%, or 3600 foreign students that much better than American students? Could I no longer qualify, even after life's accomplishments to gain admission.
There is clearly a critical national problem here. Are we educating possible national adversaries at the costs of the taxpayer. Are these putatively a threat of our own making? How does this compare to other countries? Does the PRC admits 30% of their students from the West? Hardly. I have argued this for decades just to see it compounded by the putative adversarial mix of students.
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