Qatar and China Are Pouring Billions Into Elite American Universities By Frannie Block and Maya Sulkin
Foreign countries such as China and Qatar have poured $29 billion into campuses over the past few years. ‘Hostile powers are buying influence on American campuses at an industrial scale.’
Foreign donors have given as much to U.S. universities in the last four years as they did in the previous 40, according to a new report by the Network Contagion Research Institute shared exclusively with The Free Press. The study shows an explosion in overseas funding for American schools between 2021 and 2024, with nearly $29 billion in foreign money donated during that period.
Qatar and China are among the largest sources of funding.
That $29 billion figure is more than double the total for the preceding four years, and accounts for half of the estimated $57.97 billion in foreign funding since 1986, when the federal government began tracking the data.
“The floodgates opened during the Biden era,” said NCRI’s co-founder Joel Finkelstein. ”This isn’t just a financial issue—it’s a national security crisis. Hostile powers are buying influence on American campuses at an industrial scale.”
Here’s what the NCRI study found:
- Qatar is the largest source of foreign donations to U.S. universities since reporting began in 1986, with $6.3 billion coming from the gas-rich Gulf state.
- Germany ($3.3 billion) was the largest source of foreign funding over the last four years, followed by China ($2.3 billion), Qatar ($2 billion), and Saudi Arabia ($1.9 billion). Almost two-thirds of the money from Germany ($1.9 billion) went to the University of Pennsylvania, including $467 million in a settlement last fall after the university accused a German pharmaceutical firm of improperly licensing their vaccine technology.
- Qatari donations have ramped up significantly over the last four years. Nearly a third of donations from Qatar—over $2 billion—were given between 2021 and 2024.
- The second-largest source of foreign funding is China. Chinese funding accounts for $5.6 billion and, as with Qatar, Chinese donations have increased sharply in the past four years, with $2.3 billion in donations from 2021 to 2024. China is the single largest source of overseas donations to some of America’s most prestigious universities, including Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford.
- Harvard has historically received the most funding from foreign donors ($3.2 billion), followed by Cornell and Carnegie Mellon (which have each received $2.8 billion).
The findings come amid increased political scrutiny of foreign donations to American universities. Just last week, Donald Trump signed an executive order cracking down on universities who don’t properly disclose how much money they’re receiving from foreign sources. Trump’s order threatened to scrap federal grants to universities if schools failed to accurately disclose overseas sources of funding. A 2024 study published by the National Association of Scholars found that universities failed to disclose at least $1 billion in foreign funding since Biden took office, the majority of which came from authoritarian countries such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
This latest move is not Trump’s first attempt to scrutinize foreign funding in higher education. In 2019, during his first term, the Department of Education investigated a dozen elite universities and uncovered $6.5 billion in previously unreported foreign funds to U.S. colleges and universities from authoritarian countries such as China and Saudi Arabia.
While Qatar holds the designation of a major non-NATO ally of the United States, the country is also known for harboring the leaders of Hamas and exporting political Islamism, including by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, across the Middle East.
In some cases, Qatari donations to U.S. schools have been used to build campuses in Doha. The Qatari capital is home to “Education City,” which hosts an outpost of Northwestern’s journalism school and Georgetown’s foreign policy school, each of which has received hundreds of millions from the wealthy Gulf state. Cornell, which built a medical school campus in Doha, has received $2.1 billion from Qatar.
The true amount of foreign donations could be even bigger than the reported figures. The NCRI analysis includes only donations disclosed to the federal government, as required by law for donations over $250,000. As The Free Press has previously reported, at least 200 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on billions in undisclosed contributions from foreign regimes.
Trump’s latest executive order will require universities to report both the source and purpose of foreign donations. The executive order also warned that, “when appropriate,” the Attorney General and Secretary of Education will “conduct audits and investigations as appropriate and where necessary to ensure compliance with the law concerning disclosure of foreign funding and shall seek enforcement through appropriate action by the Attorney General.”
The executive order is not the only tool the administration is using. Earlier this month, the Department of Education initiated a records request from Harvard for failure to comply with Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires financial disclosures on foreign funding. The university has 30 days to prove that their previous financial reporting was truthful (which the Trump administration claims it was not) and provide the government, among other documents, “a list of all foreign gifts, grants, and contracts from or with foreign sources and Harvard.”
Forcing disclosures is one piece only of the administration’s strategy. An official on Trump’s antisemitism task force told The Free Press that they are actively investigating “alleged connections between foreign malign actors and student groups on campus.” According to the official, representatives from the offices of civil rights at the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services are interviewing professors and students at universities about groups involved in campus protests and allegations of foreign ties. The official said the task force was scrutinizing connections between both student groups and faculty who have ties to universities such as Birzeit in the West Bank, which Israeli officials have previously accused of having ties to Hamas. Just last month, Harvard ended its partnership with Birzeit over mounting pressure from the public and the Trump administration.
On Friday, the administration launched an investigation into UC Berkeley, alleging the university failed “to fully and accurately disclose significant funding received from foreign sources.” Berkeley reportedly failed to properly disclose a $220 million partnership with the Chinese government and Tsinghua University.
Why does all this matter? Part of the answer lies in an NCRI study published last year in Frontiers of Social Psychology that found a strong correlation between universities that receive foreign funding from authoritarian countries and a rise in antisemitic incidents. The study concludes “that providing massive financial support to campuses with ascendant illiberalism serves the interests of foreign actors hostile to the U.S. in particular or liberal democracy in general.”
While tracing the exact programs, initiatives, and departments these governments are funding is nearly impossible, it is notable that the universities exploding with anti-Israel protests have the strongest relationships with governments whose national interests are at direct odds with the United States.
Prasiddha Sudhakar, a senior researcher at NCRI, says that while the Trump administration’s new reporting requirements are “a step in the right direction,” they will inevitably “create more demand for black market donations,” including through “education institutions here in the United States, 501(c)(3)s, and think tanks.”
“There’s all kinds of ways you can get that money here without any university technically taking a dime from Qatar or any other foreign government,” Sudhakar said.
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