Headline Roundup • February 12th, 2026
US Colleges Received Over $5.2B in Foreign Funding in 2025
Summary from the AllSides News Team
US colleges and universities received over $5.2 billion in foreign funding in 2025, according to newly released data from the Department of Education.
The Details: Over the past four decades, the international contracts and gifts, which partly went to research, came mostly from Qatar ($7.7 billion), China ($6.4 billion), Germany ($4.7 billion), Saudi Arabia ($4.2 billion), and England ($4.2 billion). Recipients included Harvard University ($4.2 billion), Carnegie Mellon University ($3.9 billion), Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($3.5 billion), Cornell University ($3.1 billion), and the University of Pennsylvania ($2.8 billion).
Key Quote: "Thanks to the Trump administration's new accountability portal, the American people have unprecedented visibility into the foreign dollars flowing into our colleges and universities — including funding from countries and entities that are involved in activities that threaten America's national security," said Education Secretary Linda McMahon in a statement.
For Context: In 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order enforcing Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires colleges and universities receiving federal funding to report foreign contracts and gifts. Section 117 was lightly enforced before 2019 when the first Trump administration began cracking down.
How The Media Covered It: There was a stark difference in coverage by media outlets. Axios (Lean Left bias) only mentioned last year's funding and described it as an "elite college crackdown." The Washington Times (Lean Right) noted that the figure is $70 billion from the last four decades and dug into who received it all. It also described universities as "awash" with funding from China, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.
Written by the AllSides staff (of humans). Learn more. Suggest an improvement to this summary.
Featured Coverage of this Story
AP Photo/Charles Krupa
U.S. universities have received tens of billions of dollars in the past four decades from foreign governments and entities, not all of them friendly.
Newly released data from the Education Department found that colleges accepted more than $5.2 billion in international gifts and contracts — partly for research — last year, part of the nearly $70 billion received since the federal government began requiring higher-education institutions to report their foreign funding.
The biggest overseas funder: Qatar, which has given $7.7 billion to U.S. universities over the past four decades, followed...
The Trump administration is casting new scrutiny on foreign funding at U.S. colleges and universities — a push critics say is part of a broader effort to assert control over higher education under the guise of national security.
The big picture: The Department of Education is pointing to newly-revealed data on foreign gifts and contracts to schools as a national security issue, which is misleading, Alexander Cooley, a political scientist researching foreign authoritarian influence, tells Axios.
Driving the news: The Education Department on Wednesday released foreign funding disclosure data submitted...
