by Jonah Shepp
To support democracy abroad, Charles Kenny advocates inviting more foreign students to study at American universities:
Student experiences can have a huge impact on attitudes toward democracy and governance, and those with foreign education are an incredibly influential group in their home countries regardless of where they live. In national security terms, that points to a high return on efforts to increase the number of foreign students studying in U.S. universities—and suggests that recent policy has been going in completely the wrong direction. The share of foreign students studying in the U.S. dropped from 23 percent to 18 percent between 2000 and 2009, a decrease attributed not least to toughened immigration procedures.
We want those future leaders coming to the U.S. Along with easing the burden of visa application, the U.S. should offer more financial support for scholarship programs and consider it a highly effective form of foreign aid. The Fulbright program alone has supported the education of 29 heads of state or government. For U.S. government funding of $243 million, supplemented by $80 million in overseas and private contributions, there are around 3,000 students in the U.S. as well as over 4,000 U.S. citizens abroad. That makes the program considerably cheaper than other U.S. efforts to make friends overseas—it’s about $20,000 less per enrollee than the Peace Corps, for example. On an annual basis, the price tag is about 0.2 percent of the annual cost of the military effort to promote security and democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2011.
The preponderance of autocrats and apparatchiks in developing countries with American or European diplomas might dampen enthusiasm for this idea, but only by a bit. Kenny focuses on how an American education can produce more democrats, but there’s another side to the coin: it stands to reason that many of those who seek an American education do so because they are already attracted to liberal ideas, but can’t engage those ideas freely in their own societies. Reaching out to these people is of a piece with the notion, advanced by Masha Gessen among others, that sometimes the best (or only) thing we can do for oppressed people in illiberal societies is to get them the hell out of Dodge. That includes those who would like a Western education but can’t get one.
Perhaps there’s a way to target Kenny’s proposal toward those proto-democrats rather than the children of privileged classes seeking only to purchase prestige diplomas.
The Dish 