Foreign funding to United States colleges crossed the $5.2 billion mark in 2025, according to data released by the US Department of Education. More than half of this amount went to a small group of elite institutions, with Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the top of the list.The department also launched a new public portal to track these inflows, describing it in a press release as an effort to increase transparency and simplify institutional compliance with federal disclosure rules. The numbers are large.A new federal lens on foreign moneyUnder Section 117 of the Higher Education…