OPINION: Should the Trump Administration be Gatekeeping College Admissions?

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

Xi Mingze is the 32-year-old daughter of Chairman Xi Jinping, the dictator of China.

She attended Harvard University from 2010 to 2014 under a pseudonym, and has never sought the spotlight, but her name is in the news these days, as people ponder the various what-if questions related to the Trump administration’s current crackdown on higher education improprieties.

Pundits and writers who don’t understand or care about the issues at hand are using this theoretical case to pose the question, Should the government have allowed Harvard to admit her?

And if such a child of such a foreign dictator were to be accepted today, should the government allow them to accept her, or should the government deport the student?

The interesting thing about this is that the very question shows a fatal misunderstanding of the American system.

This really isn’t an admissions issue. With only two exceptions (and one of those is only partial), the US government doesn’t have the power to tell a college who it can or can’t accept. This is a free country, and our colleges and universities have their own admissions policies, all of which differ considerably from state to state, from public to private, from nonprofit to for-profit.

The federal government really only controls the admissions of the colleges that the federal government itself operates, such as the service academies at West Point, Annapolis, and so forth. The ROTC program gives the armed forces a partial say in their partnerships with other colleges, but even that is limited. Both the college and the military have to agree on an ROTC student’s admission; the army and navy don’t have the power that a football or basketball coach has to force an undesirable student through the admissions gate.

So the entire subject is framed dishonestly – but that’s the whole point, of course: to showcase the pretty and unassuming daughter of China’s head of state, pursuing a relatively harmless psychology major, all to give the impression that the Trump administration claims that such people are all spies.

But in reality, the administration isn’t going after specific individuals, specific ethnicities, or specific majors – though it’s demonstrably clear that some of these do indeed pose huge risks.

The administration is just recognizing a severe and widespread problem, not just at Harvard but across the country, and it’s time to crack down. Our colleges and universities have lined up at the trough for generations, guzzling down billions of dollars in taxpayer funds, while promulgating enemy philosophies, facilitating societally destructive political activism, disrupting and endangering communities, and even managing the illegal exportation of export-controlled technologies and the patented intellectual property of American companies.

Our government cannot set itself up as a gatekeeper for the universities – the way that the governments of socialist nations usually do, in fact. But our government can – and should – withhold the almost inestimable federal funding, federal research partnering, and delegation of federal authority that so many of these colleges have been abusing for decades.

For example:

Students

The hottest ticket on earth is an American green card. Almost eight billion people on this planet would love to move to the United States, but we simply can’t allow them all in, so millions are on practically permanent waitlists.

But we have long allowed most of our colleges the ability to self-police our student visa program. If the college wants to accept a foreign student, whether from a friendly nation or an unfriendly nation, the State Department generally rubberstamps their choices, figuring that these must be the best and brightest of their faraway lands. But what have we learned? That in reality, these are too often the corrupt future industrial spies of China, the corrupt future terrorists of the middle east, or a criminal element that comes here specifically to infiltrate our businesses, our politics, our government, our NGOs, even our military. Not always. But all too often.

There are over a million foreign students in the United States. Thousands of criminal cases in recent years, from specific anti-Jewish assaults to disruptive and illegal political demonstrations, to the collaboration with crooked professors and T.A.s to secretly transfer brand new American technology abroad.

It just makes sense to pause this program until it can be reformed.

Research

Outside of academia, we may commonly lump them all together as “colleges” – but that’s not what these schools want to be called. The most pompous professors and administrators in the world of higher education aspire to being “research universities” – that’s where the real money, fame, and travel budgets come from. But research is expensive, so “grant-writer” has become a booming career choice.

There is a symbiotic relationship between the research universities and the apparatchik class, both here and abroad. A federal agency hopes for some discovery – from the science lab to the production floor, from the public surveyor to the computer room – and writes a massive check, drawn on federal tax dollars, to fund the work at the winning university.

How many buildings have been built, how many department chairs funded, how many college students roped into doing the actual work, on projects for Energy or Education, Health and Human Services or Defense. Some are comical wastes of money; some are all too serious transfers of corporate or defense secrets to the military of enemy nations.

We now know not only that these programs are in the tens of billions of dollars per year, but in addition, we now know that much of the work is really for other countries, not for our own.

We can cut off this gravy train in an instant, at least until the federal government can put rational constraints upon it. And so we shall.

Crime

America is suffering from a massive crime wave. This isn’t new, though politicians and reporters play with the definition and either deny it or assign misplaced blame as election results alter the playing field.

But there is no question that there are tens of millions of illegal aliens here, many of whom are people who overstayed their student visas.

There’s no question that there is a great deal of crime on and near campus, from the micro (such as sex and drug crime) to the macro (such as the aforementioned theft of national defense secrets or industrial espionage).

There are universities that partner with rogue nations to populate both their domestic and remote campuses, literally inviting criminals – especially jihadists – into their midst.

And there is the massive anti-semitic activity of so many colleges in the wake of the October 7, 2023 attacks, where universities have taken the side of the rioters, assaulters and vandals, rather than taking the side of their innocent students, their endangered communities, and the sanctity of private property.

The federal government can crack down on these areas as well, withdrawing the longstanding sweetheart deal in which our government trusted our colleges to police themselves. Cancelling research grants is one thing; prosecuting crimes is yet another. And yes, the list of generally unprosecuted real crimes, from violations of anti-boycott law to statutory rape rings, from tax fraud to hate crimes, is a tantalizingly tempting weapon to wield.

It’s long past time for the federal government to crack down. There is no need to write new laws or to engage in a vendetta, as the accusation has been made.

The federal government can and should withhold the massive funding that has been so irresponsibly squandered.

The federal government can and should stop turning a blind eye all the time, and start prosecuting every corrupt professor, student, administrator, scientist and drug dealer, on and off campus alike.

And yes, the federal government should greatly curtail – or outright eliminate – the longstanding wink-wink agreement whereby our colleges could grease the skids for hundreds of thousands of foreign students per year to fill the admissions rosters so that America’s best students can’t find a spot in America’s best colleges.

There’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s on the side of the American people – not the jet sets, politburos and madrassahs of foreign shores.

Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo