Since 1981, American universities have told the federal government about $62.4 billion in gifts from and contracts with foreign sources — 117,152 disclosures from 528 institutions, filed under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act. Almost nobody reads the file. We aggregated all of it into an open ledger, and the record is more interesting than the talking points.
It concentrates — hard
The top five recipients — Harvard, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology — account for roughly 24 percent of every disclosed dollar. Harvard alone reports $4.01B across 5,885 transactions from 93 countries. Carnegie Mellon's $2.91B is dominated by a single relationship: its Qatar campus. The long tail matters too — 528 institutions filed at least once — but foreign money in American higher education is, on the record, an elite-university phenomenon.
Qatar by dollars, Britain by volume
Qatar is the largest disclosed source: $6.57B, of which 11.7 percent is flagged as coming from the government itself — mostly the branch-campus economy of Education City. But Qatar appears in only 1,223 transactions. The United Kingdom, by contrast, appears in 14,617 — the most of any country — for $5.84B: the ordinary commerce of research contracts and collaborations. China sits between the two patterns: $4.06B across 6,818 transactions, with 8.2 percent flagged as government-sourced. The shape of the money differs by country, and the ledger makes the shapes visible.
The names the law does record
For most disclosures the statute requires no donor name — only a country. The exception is restricted gifts and contracts from foreign governments, and there the ledger reads like a diplomatic directory: the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission alone appears 373 times for $258.6M, alongside embassies, cultural missions, and state foundations. These are government entities by definition — which is why they are the only names our aggregate republishes. Everything else in the file resolves to “a foreign source in…” — a designed opacity the classification questions only compound.
Read it as a disclosure record, not a wire transfer log
The honest caveats, stated in the dataset itself: the file is self-reported and unverified; reporting thresholds and enforcement pushes changed over the decades, so the trend measures disclosure behavior as much as money; and the Department refreshes the public file on an occasional cadence — ours is aggregated from the cumulative snapshot as of 2025-02-28. What the record supports is exactly what it shows: which institutions told the government about how much foreign money, from where. That is already far more than the debate usually works with — and it is now one keyless JSON file away for anyone who wants to check.
Method
All figures are computed live from the Section 117 Ledger, aggregated from the Department of Education cumulative public file (public domain). Aggregate-only: no transaction-level records are republished, and the only named sources are institutions and foreign government entities. No personal data.
The data: Section 117 Ledger — 528 institutions, 188 source countries, keyless JSON, CC0.
Related writing: The Disclosure Law That Hides the Donor — why 97 percent of these dollars carry no name, by design.
Related writing: The Hong Kong Question — the classification gap this ledger inherits too.
Related writing: Who Owns American Farmland — the sibling record: foreign capital holding US land, from the register the country legislates by.