In case this was off your radar I thought I would share the following report “Institutional Compliance with Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965”  by the U.S. Department of Education Office of the General Counsel that was published this month. The full 36 page PDF of the publication is available at https://www2.ed.gov/policy/highered/leg/institutional-compliance-section-117.pdf.

The brief introduction before the Executive Summary of this report states: “The question of foreign influence on and foreign funding of domestic activities has long been a matter of concern for the United States government and the American people. Congress did not task the Department of Education with assessing the positive, negative, or neutral impact of foreign money and foreign influence in American higher education. Rather, Congress asked us to ensure the public had transparency from colleges and universities so that you could make such an assessment yourself and hold those institutions accountable. This report is designed to empower you to make decisions, as an informed citizen, consumer, and taxpayer, about what is or is not appropriate behavior regarding financial interactions between institutions of higher education and foreign sources. We hope you will find it useful”

Additionally, the U.S. Department of Education issued the following press release on October 20, 2020:  “U.S. Department of Education Uncovers Vast Underreporting of Foreign Gifts and Contracts by Higher Education Institutions” at https://bit.ly/3dRgiac This DoE press release includes a link to "China's Impact on the U.S. Education System" Staff Report of the Permanent Committee on Investigations of the United States Senate (ca. 2019) at https://bit.ly/2TfSZwX.

This is nothing new but these national security concerns of international students and in particular Chinese students have been growing over the past several years. For example, during an open hearing of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on worldwide threats on February 13, 2018, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio [R-FL] asked FBI Director Christopher Wray about the counterintelligence risk posed to U.S. national security from Chinese students, particularly those in advanced programs in science and mathematics. You can watch their exchange via this past IHEC Blog post.

Given that the DoE press release was from two days ago and the “Institutional Compliance with Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965” report was very recently published these may have been off your radar given our focus on the DHS proposed rule change on D/S and perhaps DHS Operation OPTical Illusion! If you haven’t seen and are interested you can watch a video snippet (5:18) of DHS Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli speaking about DHS Operation OPTical Illusion targeting OPT violations at https://twitter.com/SpoxDHS/status/1318965538186579970?s=20.

Never a dull moment…onward and upward!