Earlier this year, Zhongyuan “Kelvin” Wang, a sophomore at Brigham Young University in Utah, discovered a new family of origami patterns called bloom patterns. It sounds inconsequential until you understand what it enables: the ability to fold incredibly complex structures into compact forms and then deploy them into outer space with precision. NASA has been chasing similar designs for years to make solar arrays, telescopes, and antennae small enough to launch but large enough to operate once in orbit. Wang’s breakthrough, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A and also picked up by the NY Times, offers a new way to solve one of aerospace’s toughest engineering problems.

This wasn’t the product of a government lab or a defense contractor. It was a 19-year-old foreign student in Utah, rethinking geometry at his desk and landing on something with clear applications for robotics, medical devices, and space exploration.

Could an American student have come up with this instead? Perhaps. But it’s important to this story that Wang started folding origami as an 8-year-old growing up in Beijing. And he never stopped. Would he have continued with his origami obsession were he growing up in the U.S., attending a U.S. middle school and high school? It’s hard to say.

America’s advantage doesn’t come only from its own native talent pool. It comes from being the place where ambitious outsiders—who bring their own strengths and rich cultural heritage—want to study, work, and create.

Dear Readers: Higher Education Leadership Intelligence is a reader-supported publication. We deliver periodic essays like this one, deep-dives, sentiment trackers, and our weekly digest, The Quad.

We had to build this, because much of mainstream higher education media is compromised by vendor-sponsored content dressed up as editorial. Between the vendor fluff and the human-interest filler content, it’s hard to focus on what really matters.

Even those smart-but-safe outlets that deliver "what happened," fail to tell you "why it matters" and "what you should do about it." Our readers rely on us for that kind of plain language and analysis—more necessary today than ever before.

Individual subscriptions and smaller groups can be purchased online. For larger group subscriptions we can work with your purchasing office. Just ping us at [email protected] and we’ll take care of you.

Kelvin Wang’s story should be a victory lap for U.S. higher education. Instead, it’s playing out against a backdrop of suspicion and political noise that treats foreign students as threats rather than assets.

It comes as the administration floats proposals to cut back visas for international STEM students, especially from countries like China. The argument is simple and seductive: why should America “train the workforce” of its rivals? But this collapses under actual data.

The reality is that the brightest minds overwhelmingly stay. Roughly 77% of international STEM PhD graduates remain in the U.S. long-term. For Chinese and Indian graduates, the numbers are even higher—around 90% and 87% respectively. That’s not a pipeline feeding competitors abroad. Foreign students in the U.S. are a talent engine building the U.S. economy, lab by lab, company by company.

The effect compounds in ways policymakers rarely acknowledge. In AI, for example, retention is even stronger: roughly 91% of Chinese AI PhDs were still in the U.S. five years after graduation. And when those PhDs stay, they don’t just publish nerdy papers and plod around in socks and Birkenstocks—they launch companies, staff startups, and anchor research labs that draw in American colleagues and capital. This is why the National Science Foundation and the National Academies have both pointed out that America’s research capacity is inseparable from the presence of foreign students.

When we treat every STEM-tracked sophomore from China as a potential spy, we don’t just insult them—we undercut ourselves. The next origami breakthrough, or the next AI algorithm, won’t wait for permission to emerge once the nativist and xenophobic fever has lifted. It will find a home instead where curiosity is rewarded and opportunity is (more) open. Right now, America risks telling the world’s best minds to take their ideas elsewhere.

Zoom out and the pattern becomes obvious. International students don’t just pad enrollment numbers and tuition dollars—though that is also critical to the survival of many U.S. universities. More strategically, they drive the labs and startups that define America’s economic edge.

Let’s look at the data. In advanced research, foreign students disproportionately populate STEM programs and publish at higher rates. They’re in the clean rooms, the biotech labs, the computer science departments where the next wave of discovery happens.

Then comes the founder pipeline. More than half of U.S. unicorns—companies valued over a billion dollars—have an immigrant founder. Roughly a quarter were founded by someone who first entered the U.S. on a student visa. Each of those companies creates, on average, 860 jobs here.

This isn’t about the cliché of “the next app.” Think Moderna, whose mRNA platform redefined vaccines. Think Tesla and SpaceX, which changed the trajectory of EVs and commercial space. Think Stripe, which rewired global payments, or Zoom, which turned real-time business video communication into a verb. Duolingo, which put scaled language learning in people’s pockets. Category-defining companies, all rooted in talent that first came to America as students.

Wait—it gets even more interesting: the effect doesn’t stop with the foreign-student-turned-immigrant. The Intel Science Talent Search—a bellwether for the next generation—showed in a 2017 analysis that 83% of finalists were children of immigrants, and 68% of finalists had a parent who had been a student visa holder. To put that in perspective, only a tiny fraction of American-born children have a parent who first came here on a student visa. This is the very definition of compounding returns: today’s foreign students become tomorrow’s researchers, entrepreneurs, and parents of America’s talent pipeline.

That pipeline is under real strain right now. In 2025, international students are navigating tighter scrutiny, unpredictable visa processing delays, a political environment that paints them with suspicion, and arbitrary policies that detain and deport students already here with frightening efficiency and barely due process.

Optional Practical Training (OPT) and STEM-OPT—the bridge between study and work—face constant uncertainty. The result is hesitation: China and India, the two largest STEM talent pools, are already showing plateaus or declines in student interest. Meanwhile, Canada, the U.K., Australia, and Singapore are offering something simple the U.S. isn’t: clarity. Clear post-study work pathways, predictable adjudication, and a more welcoming stance. Even China—typically an exporter of talent—has joined the competition. My contacts in Shanghai tell me there are more foreign students arriving there than ever before.

This isn’t just about missing out on tuition checks or marginally fewer postdocs in a lab. It’s about the next wave of U.S. breakthroughs never starting here. Artificial intelligence, clean energy, aerospace, biomedicine—the fields that will drive the next 20 years of growth and national advantage—are talent constrained. If the best and brightest from around the world don’t choose the U.S. between 2025-2028, the patents, labs, and companies they would have founded will surface somewhere else between 2030-2040. Or, in a loss not only for the U.S. but for humanity overall, some of those discoveries, inventions and businesses will never happen.

The cost of current policies and the unwritten but real climate of fear doesn’t appear on this year’s balance sheets alone. It will show up when another country commercializes the discoveries that could have been American. The world’s brightest minds are not waiting around. They’re going, or staying, where they can work, invent, and build without friction. Right now, the U.S. is making that choice harder than it should be.

Higher-ed leaders, business leaders, and policymakers need to see this for what it is: not just an enrollment story, not merely a tuition-gap story, but an American innovation and competitiveness story. International students are the top of the funnel for patents, labs, spin-outs, and industry partnerships. They are also the seed corn of America’s future competitiveness.

For higher education: the job isn’t just to admit them, it’s to keep the pipeline frictionless from classroom to lab to company. That means active support for research access at both undergrad and grad levels, stronger bridges from discovery to commercialization, and constant advocacy for programs like OPT and STEM-OPT that make staying viable.

For business: you already know the difference a single technical hire makes in AI, biotech, or aerospace. The same holds true in aggregate. Support predictable, fast visa adjudication. Put weight behind continuing STEM-OPT and a STEM green card at graduation for accredited programs.

For policymakers: immigration isn’t one blunt category. You can argue for tougher enforcement at the border and still back a wide-open, merit-based door for the world’s best legal entrants. That’s not contradiction. It’s smart strategy. Even targeted, reasonable, national-security screens are compatible with keeping the door wide open for talent. A closed system or one that broadcasts disdain sacrifices America’s edge. A smart system absorbs the best people on earth and keeps them here.

The stakes are not abstract. When a sophomore in Utah cracks a new class of deployable structures with aerospace implications, it’s a real signal. America’s edge is and always has been a people strategy. Cut the pipeline, and you cut into the next two decades of breakthroughs. Keep it open, and you continue to own the future.

Disclosure: I came to the U.S. as an international student nearly 30 years ago. I’ll be tracking this issue and writing about it, not only because of my own background, but because I strongly believe it’s what’s best for the U.S.

This weekly intelligence brief for higher education leaders, delivers high-impact developments shaping U.S. colleges and universities: what happened, why it matters, and implications for you. It is designed for presidents, provosts, deans, CIOs, and strategy teams. Each issue distills complex shifts into decision-grade insight.

The Quad is weekly, other Paid subscriber benefits include monthly deep-dives, quarterly sentiment trackers, and The Chancellor Plan subscribers have Analyst Access.

Higher Education Leadership Intelligence is for presidents, provosts, CIOs, and institutional decision-makers leading through enrollment, funding, and tech disruption.

This is one of our six education and learning-related publications spanning K-12, Higher Education, and Workforce. Our education newsletters reach tens of thousands of senior decision-makers across the U.S. and key international markets.

Ping us if you’d like to learn more, explore Enterprise Subscriptions, or would like to partner in other ways.

The Intelligence Council is a next-gen B2B media and business intelligence platform built for people who make strategy, allocate capital, and carry operating risk.