The United States is a great place to be talented, but a poor place to develop your talents. The combination of tax and regulatory policies, access to capital, freedom of movement and expression, and concentration of other exceptional people allows the best and brightest to thrive economically and culturally. But for most American students, getting there is tricky, due to the bias against advanced education in our K-12 schools and teacher prep programs.
This dichotomy is what makes recent visa debates so vexing: For every H-1B visa holder who thrives in and contributes to our country’s economy and culture, we can point to many more students already in the U.S. who have few opportunities to develop their strengths into true excellence. We need both highly skilled immigrants and highly talented Americans, because the American economy has an almost infinite need for exceptional workers to compete in the global marketplace.
We have decades of research showing that students thrive when they have access to advanced education, be it in the form of accelerated coursework, AP courses, specialized math-science high schools, or other rigorous, high-quality interventions. However, the trend over the past decade in public schools has been to reduce advanced services, usually due to the mistaken belief that providing those services is “inequitable.”
But by increasing H-1B visa fees, we can leverage the immigration system to create more opportunities for American students to perform at advanced levels. The new revenue could support an initiative to promote American educational excellence, the first since the National Defense Education Act was passed in reaction to Sputnik. Raising the current fees by $2,000 at current visa numbers would produce over $160 million annually to promote academic excellence, or roughly $30 per K-12 student – a very small investment in American excellence but an exponential increase from the current 30 cents per student.
Leading policymakers, including Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), supported this idea during previous attempts to overhaul the immigration system. But using an increase in H-1B visa fees to develop homegrown talent is again timely due to the recent explosion in research and policy development on advanced education. We have learned a great deal about developing students’ exceptional talents both effectively and efficiently, yet this knowledge is not being used in most schools and classrooms due to a widespread bias against gifted and advanced education. Federal leadership is needed to push through this misguided resistance.
This additional revenue could be used to encourage academic excellence in many ways: expanding the existing Javits Program, which funds advanced learning pilot projects; offering demonstration grants for districts to implement research-based strategies; encouraging federally-funded labs to offer or expand internships for promising high school and college students; funding summer and weekend STEM programs; creating planning grants to help states create residential STEM academies; establishing public-private partnerships for teachers to help them understand what future workplaces will expect from their students; designing opportunities for private sector STEM experts to teach and mentor K-12 students; even offering NDEA-style graduate fellowships in key fields to get our brightest students the education they need to excel at world-class levels.
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These and many other ideas have been proposed, but a lack of urgency and funding at the federal level has prevented wide-scale adoption. The sense of urgency is increasing due to economic and security concerns, and an H-1B fee increase could help address the funding concerns.
So give out the golden visa tickets, but do so with the knowledge that industry’s and immigrants’ short-term gains will also directly benefit American students. The private sector and universities get their highly talented workers at a reasonable visa cost, the country gets its first serious, national attempt at advanced education in nearly 70 years, and America’s most promising students get more opportunities to shine. Our country attracts the highly talented like a magnet. Why not leverage that reality to help more American students develop their exceptional talents?
Jonathan Plucker is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, where he directs the master’s program in education policy.