**Don’t Limit Foreign-Student Enrollment**
*James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal*
*November 7, 2025*
*By Ed Gehringer*
For too long, merit has taken a back seat in American higher education. Under the banner of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), admissions policies at many institutions have prioritized demographic balancing over academic excellence. But the pendulum is swinging back.
A growing number of selective universities—including Princeton, Dartmouth, and Yale—have recently announced they will once again require standardized test scores for admission. These decisions reflect a broader reappraisal of merit-based criteria, driven not just by partisan pressure but by internal reviews of academic outcomes and fairness.
The message is clear: excellence matters, and the most promising students deserve a fair shot.
Increasingly, qualified students from around the world are seeking an American education. In my department at NC State, 86 percent of Ph.D. applicants in computer science for 2025 came from outside of the United States. That figure alone speaks volumes. These were not casual submissions—they were competitive applications to a selective program. The sheer volume of international interest reflects a global recognition of American graduate education as a proving ground for serious talent.
When so many of the strongest candidates are arriving from abroad, it becomes increasingly fraught to impose arbitrary limits on how many can be admitted, as a recent Martin Center article recommends.
Our department is not unusual. Across the country, graduate programs in technical fields show similar patterns.
According to the National Foundation for American Policy, international students make up the majority of full-time graduate enrollment in:
– Petroleum engineering (82 percent)
– Electrical engineering (74 percent)
– Computer and information sciences (72 percent)
– Industrial engineering (71 percent)
– Statistics (70 percent)
And those figures have been rising. Between 2017 and 2022, international graduate enrollment in science and engineering grew by 49.3 percent, while domestic enrollment grew by just 21.7 percent.
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*Excerpt*
Read more at [jamesgmartin.center](https://jamesgmartin.center)
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**Topics:** Education; Science
**Keywords:** graduate school; STEM
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