For decades, international students have made the US a top destination. Observers who track their reasons point to academic rigor, prestige, and innovation, along with campus diversity and potential work opportunities, as leading motivators. Their increasing numbers have posed a conundrum for US-based critics who have long decried the decline of American higher education. If US colleges and universities are and have been facing a quality crisis, why do so many students around the world want to enroll?Footnote 1
In the early 1950s, approximately thirty thousand international students were enrolled in the US. That number grew six-fold by 1975. With few exceptions, foreign enrollments have steadily increased year over year to more than one million students in 2025. Rising tuition rates, unpopular US military interventions, global economic crises, and expanding student visa bureaucracies—all of these have had no appreciable impact on the overall trendline. It took a worldwide pandemic that claimed millions of lives to put a dent in the numbers. But foreign student enrollments quickly bounced back and the US continues to benefit.Footnote 2
In the most direct terms, international students represent a significant influx of revenue to the institutions and states that receive them. Without them, approximately $44 billion would disappear from the US economy.Footnote 3 They also contribute to the American workforce by filling hundreds of thousands of jobs each year. International students who stay in the US after graduating become part of America’s highly skilled workforce in critical-needs sectors like science and technology. Some who start with student visas and become permanent residents—Elon Musk being a notable example—create multibillion-dollar juggernauts.
Indirectly, the US benefits from cultural and educational exchanges with international students. The numbers are a bit fuzzier in this accounting, but researchers who collect data on these intangibles consistently point to important benefits like expanded worldviews, improved critical thinking skills, and enlarged capacity for empathy. Many international students who return to their countries as cultural, economic, and political leaders also indirectly benefit the US as ready-made allies and collaborators.
This year, the US government has imperiled these long-standing direct and indirect benefits by issuing travel bans and revoking student visas. At the time of this writing, students from a growing list of countries face full suspension of entry, including Afghanistan, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.Footnote 4 Those from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela face partial restrictions and limited entry. Another three dozen countries are being considered for full or partial travel bans. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has specifically targeted Harvard with plans to block and remove all foreign students from its campus. Other US institutions could face the same treatment.Footnote 5
As the US takes a hard turn away from international engagement, HEQ has continued to make international perspectives a centerpiece of the journal’s mission. In this issue, high-quality submissions from around the world remind us of histories forgotten or never learned, and they inspire us to deepen engagement with our colleagues abroad.
This issue of History of Education Quarterly features four articles that illuminate the diverse roles education has played across time and geography—from colonial resistance in East Africa to expert policymaking in the Communist bloc, and from early modern Spain to late medieval England.
In “Rebellious Schooling in a Violent (Post)colony: Expanding the Field of Education History in South Sudan, c. 1905–1972,” Nicki Kindersley and Yosa Wawa trace a century of educational evolution in South Sudan. Moving beyond institutional narratives centered on missionary-founded schools, the authors call for greater engagement with Africa’s educational history as it unfolded in everyday life—often in ways that resisted colonial authority and reimagined the purpose of schooling.
Natalia Jarska and Theofil Finterschott take us to Cold War Eastern Europe in “Educational Expertise, Networks, and Policy-Making under State Socialism: School Maturity in Czechoslovakia and Poland (1950s-1970s).” Focusing on the expert networks that shaped educational policy, they explore how the concept of “school maturity” was defined, debated, and operationalized within socialist regimes—revealing the technocratic ambitions that underpinned state-led visions of childhood and schooling.
Reaching further back, Carlos Diego Arenas Pacheco examines a formative moment in early modern educational history in “A Humanist Reconquista: Hernando de Talavera’s Pedagogy of Good Manners and His Residential School for Morisco Boys.” Set in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Spain, the article explores how schooling was used to assimilate Morisco children into Christian society. Pacheco claims that Talavera’s totalizing institution is one of the earliest examples of the use of residential schooling to erase minority cultural identity in children.
Finally, Ben Parsons offers a vivid and unsettling portrait of educators in “Bad Grammar: Teachers, Crime, and the Law in Late Medieval and Early Modern England.” Drawing on legal records from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Parsons uncovers the surprising range of crimes for which teachers were charged—shedding light on both the social status and economic precarity of the profession in this era.
Together, these articles expand the field of education history by drawing attention to power, resistance, expertise, and labor—reminding us that the meaning and function of schooling have always been contested.
This issue concludes with a forum on the potential demise of the US Department of Education. Since its establishment as a cabinet-level agency in 1979, the Department has served as the central federal authority on education, consolidating functions previously housed in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, as well as programs drawn from the Departments of Defense, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, and Labor. The legislation creating the Department of Education had broad bipartisan support—fifty-seven co-sponsors in the Senate (including fourteen Republicans) and eighty-four in the House (including twelve Republicans). Its first stated purpose was “to strengthen the Federal commitment to ensuring access to equal educational opportunity for every individual.” At the time, it was difficult to imagine serious opposition.
Yet resistance came swiftly. Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign included a pledge to abolish the Department of Education, and while subsequent efforts to do so largely stalled, the idea never fully disappeared. When Donald Trump revived the promise during his presidential run, few expected meaningful follow-through. Nevertheless, from the moment he took office, his administration began working to dismantle the Department’s infrastructure. In light of these developments, HEQ invited nine leading historians of education to reflect on the implications—for students, for K-12 schools, for higher education, for educational research, and for the broader aims that the Department was created to serve. We are pleased to present contributions from Camille Walsh, Michelle Purdy, Mahasan Chaney, Laura Muñoz, Roger Geiger, Linda Eisenmann, Marybeth Gasman, John Thelin, and Chris Loss.
