A Diminishing Competitive Edge

By Doug Lederman of Inside Higher Ed
Many a Congressional hearing is nominally about one thing but actually about another. Thursday's session on the U.S. government's tracking of foreign students for national security purposes did explore that topic, as advertised, but it became first and foremost a venue for bemoaning the United States's diminishing competitive edge in international higher education. At the sparsely attended hearing ... three federal officials painted a mostly positive picture of the government's efforts to monitor the presence of foreign students in the U.S. since the September 11 attacks.