
Universities forced to face addiction to foreign students’ money - hhs
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-06/universities-forced-to-face-addiction-to-foreign-students-money
======
neumann
I work at a University in Australia and have been on both sides of academic
and professional. This unravelling was on the horizon for everybody, maybe not
so soon, but definitely in the viewport. In an effort to drive up income
streams there has been a slow erosion of Australian education (more at some
universities than others) to cater for the international (Chinese and Indian
predominantly) market. There are all sort of perverse incentives built in to
erode educational benefits, hand hold students, make university 'fun',
something that used to be part of the student body's remit, but having crushed
that movement it is now where a lot of money is being spent at many
universities. Not on academics, not on labs, but on comfort, edtech, busy work
and asinine initiatives underpinned by endless erroneous reporting by
consultants to make execs feel like they are 'doing good'. I know - it is hard
not to sound bitter, but it is a tragedy of short sightedness. The recruitment
of students is predatory and eventually the saturation of subpar graduates
from these university degrees would have eventually resulted in the fading of
both cultural and brand name prestige of sending your kids to Australia for
study. This is also tied to cheap international student labour, housing that
pockets the inner cities that nobody who isn't a trapped rich international
would live in and a segregation of the university student community that is
unhelpful.

~~~
washadjeffmad
Something I've noticed is that universities in the US no longer seem to
advertise their primary mission as education, but as providing the "college
experience".

Brochures are rife with amenities and activities like you're picking out a
resort or extended summer camp where you can safely figure out who you are,
make friends, and be protected until you're set free, job-pass in hand.

These advertisements are also primarily aimed at the parents.

My SO got a second degree several years ago, and all of her official and
financial paperwork was addressed to "the parents of $SO". It was a bit
shocking that there's so little expectation by universities for a legal adult
to take agency in the process.

I only wonder how much of this process was a result of student demands for
more parental oversight and involvement, and if the end result is better
outcomes or merely justification of more money spent.

~~~
save_ferris
> no longer seem to advertise their primary mission as education, but as
> providing the “college experience.”

This was already really noticeable when I enrolled in undergrad 12 years ago
at a large public university.

I think part of it has been driven by student demand for more parental
oversight, but I also think the marketing is what got so many students to take
out debt in the first place. So many of my undergrad classmates (perhaps even
a slim majority) believed that undergrad was going to be the best 4 years of
their lives and they had to make the most of them, which I personally found
completely insane.

I also think that the financial system around universities warped in such a
way that it became easier to establish direct relationships with parents as
university became less affordable to those trying to work while studying. Not
to mention the absurd amount of money and effort that universities put into
alumni communications to drive giving back to the school.

~~~
burntoutfire
> So many of my undergrad classmates (perhaps even a slim majority) believed
> that undergrad was going to be the best 4 years of their lives and they had
> to make the most of them, which I personally found completely insane.

For people who don't neccessarily like working (i.e. for most people), school
and college are usually the best times of lifes. It's just that it's hard to
appreciate that when you have no point of reference. My parents and aunt had
this wisdom and, while I was a child, told me "enjoy yourself now, because it
will be all downhill from here".

~~~
EngCanMan
Unfortunately, or maybe even fortunately for the rest of us, this 'wisdom'
isn't necessarily true unless you believe it to be. I worked extremely hard
during university both in my school work and at multiple jobs, it was far from
'the best years'. Now, most of the people who had all the fun in university
agree with you. For me, it just keeps getting better. "The harder you work,
the luckier you get" might have been better advice.

~~~
burntoutfire
You just may be in the group of people who enjoy working!

~~~
TremendousJudge
Or, maybe he actually did a lot of work during college instead of "enjoying
the college experience". Compared to that, "real life work" is usually nicer

~~~
emmanuel_1234
Yeah.

Or doing a PhD.

After that, any non-academic job is super easy.

------
8f2ab37a-ed6c
At least in the US, rich foreign students shelling out big sums for US
universities is one of the few legitimate paths towards immigration. You're
paying 150-250k worth of access to an F1, CPT, OPT, a more streamlined path
into the H-1B world, followed by permanent residency. You get to work for a US
employer for a few years without having to bother with the lottery, while also
applying to an H-1B at the same time. I believe this is most viable in the
STEM degrees. My hunch is that getting hired into the US as an H-1B from
abroad is more difficult since you don't know how interviewing in the US
works, you can't easily fly out to dozens of interviews to set up a
competitive bidding process, etc.

For others it's a way to build status back in the home country by having
attended a US university, and then go back.

For others it's just a way to hang out in the country, while paying someone
else to do all of the exam-taking for them. The wealthy Chinese-dense "626
area" in SoCal comes to mind as one of the big offenders in this underworld.
They don't even show up to class, someone else does. There's no incentive for
universities to police this, why bite the hand that feeds? The school gets a
few hundred k in revenue, the wealthy student gets to live in the US for a few
years, have fun. It's a win win, even though it corrupts the point of an F1
visa. Unlike H-1Bs, I don't think they're limited, so at least it's not a
zero-sum game where some other "more deserving" students are screwed out of a
place.

Just like decoupling health care from employment is a good idea, decoupling
for-profit education from immigration seems like a good call as well. Unless
we're on board with immigration being pay-to-play, vs using other markers
besides family net worth in order to gate keep.

~~~
thawaway1837
Rights so the Chinese pay hundreds of thousands of do,Lara so they can get F1
jobs (restricted largely to on campus or has to be study related, so it
doesn’t pay), OPT jobs (capped at 1 year) or H1B jobs (needs to be renewed
every year, at least by the Chinese who rarely get more than a 1 year
extension), so they can get permanent residency after 10-15 years of being on
an H1 based on current figures.

Right, that makes complete sense.

~~~
yardie
I see a large population of SE Asian students at a university nearby. I
honestly have no idea why they are here. The university is an expensive,
private school. The campus isn’t particularly beautiful. Just an office park.
And it’s not even ranked that high. I’m befuddled why anyone would choose to
go to a low tier university in an expensive city. The only thing that comes to
mind is getting an American visa. Because simply having a prestigious degree
from a no name uni does not make sense.

Many years ago a friend’s family offered me $30k to marry her so she could get
her green card. If students are spending upwards of $200k for a shot at a H1b
than that marriage would have been a bargain in comparison. She’s happily
married now with kids. And her spouse did not magically become $30k richer for
it.

~~~
thawaway1837
Marketing. And the fact that they are likely better than the universities most
people would be exposed to in their home countries anyways, where the
competition to get into the few decent schools is far more fierce.

The not so good universities spend a ton of money on marketing.

And some very good universities do too.

The American education brand was strong a decade ago, so any American
university would be considered good. Further, people outside the US are often
surprised by how many scams are prevalent in the US. The general belief used
to be that the US was a largely sensible country where people did things the
right way.

------
red_admiral
Good article, but I want to clarify a point since it could leave the
impression that it's universities themselves driving this growth race.

In the UK at least, we used to have a model where universities were funded by
the government (through tax, of course) but the government also set hard
limits on how many students you could enrol, with penalties for going over.
The current model which Tony Blair in effect started and David Cameron
completed removed this cap, and so opened the way for the current growth race.

Whether a university can survive under the new model, or even be better off
than before without increasing student numbers depends on many things
including the amount and kind of reasearch income, the proportion of
international students they have and whether they're city-centre or campus-
based. I would say most UK universities were faced with a choice between
masively increasing student numbers or massively cutting expenditure to
survive - lots of them seem to be doing a combination of both, which is one
reason we've seen so many staff strikes this year. At least in several decent
(Russell Group) universities that I know a bit about personally, it was very
much a case of we have to grow by x% a year just to carry on paying our staff
and bills. At least in the UK, I make a case that it's not just greedy unis
and fat cat vice-chancellors driving this problem.

To give some numbers - the fees for home undergraduates are capped at £9250 a
year and in a science or engineering degree with high equipment costs, it's
hard to break even on these fees. International students are where the money
really comes from, a one-year MSc degree can set you back £25k-£30k in fees
alone although that usually includes doing a supervised project over the
summer as well as attending an academic year's worth of teaching. Or at least,
it'll include whatever supervision you can get this summer.

~~~
amiga_500
How did we used to do this in the 1970s where the state paid for it all?

We now live in a world where you don't need a secretary, because you can type
up documents yourself, you can instantly send written communication via email.
You can publish agendas, and other campus wide information instantly on a
website. You can automate. You can distribute notes to your students for free
instead of endless photocopies.

Why given these gifts bestowed upon us by the tech gods, are we so hopelessly
inefficient in the West?

What is the actual point in doing more research, when we have all this step
jump in technology, and we can't seem to do _anything_ any more?

~~~
killjoywashere
> we can't seem to do anything any more?

I disagree. We do some amazing shit. Elon Musk runs circles around ULA. My own
research, as a far smaller example, has scaled up nicely despite the fact that
in the old model it should be virtually impossible to do any research in the
career track I'm in.

Tech doesn't help people who are bored (boring?). But it is like hydrazine for
people who need to get serious shit done on the fringes of society.

~~~
mschuster91
> Elon Musk runs circles around ULA.

That is because there has been a severe lack of competition until SpaceX
arrived. Let's be honest there is no real alternative to Airbus and Boeing for
airplanes, and it has been the same situation for space before SpaceX.

Or, to express it better: Why should ULA have tried to divert to agile
processes or try out new ways of doing things when the status quo reliably
keeps jobs in congressional districts and money in supplier companies?

The goal of these semi-governmental mega companies is _not_ to efficiently
produce goods/services, the goal is to ensure distribution of public taxpayer
money to jobs, no matter how wasteful they are, in order to essentially bribe
voters. Airbus, for example, could drastically cut costs and time in airplane
production if they would not have to send airframes and parts sometimes three
times across Europe, but that would not fly well with politicians as voters
would ask "we pay r&d money to Airbus but why aren't we getting anything
back?"...

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Sounds cynical. But I assure everyone its not. Government contracts are a
gravy train. I mentioned to my high school friend that my contracting overhead
in the Midwest was about 25%. He said "In Washington contractor overhead is
200%" Why? To make the owners of the contracting companies rich, of course.

------
nvarsj
This is a problem in the UK too.

The independent school (aka private school) sector has seen fees double or
triple over the last 10-20 years. This is largely driven by rich foreign
students, primarily Chinese, sending their kids to these schools.

I don't particularly regret these bastions of class division destroying their
reputation for money, but there are a lot of knock on effects. Independent
schools used to be one of the few paths for middle class mobility - scrounge
enough to send your kids there, and they are basically guaranteed entry into
the elite of British society. But these days the tuition is prohibitively
expensive and prices out almost everyone. This just exacerbates the class
divide even more in the UK.

The main issue though is that independent schools in the UK have non-profit
status - so pay NO tax on the fees they charge. With the rising fees locking
out most people from access to them, there is very little societal benefit to
these schools. But as a taxpayer, I have to subsidize education for the very
rich or rich foreign nationals. It's ridiculous.

~~~
HPsquared
Given enough time it could go the other way - the schools' increased income
from foreign students would subsidise more scholarships for local students.
I'm under the impression they are nonprofit, so the money has to go somewhere?

~~~
fastball
It doesn't require any more time, it's happening already. UK universities
charge non-Europeans more than double the tuition they charge Europeans. The
foreign nationals are subsidizing the education of Brits, not the other way
around.

~~~
foldr
OP is talking about schools, not universities.

~~~
red_admiral
Where independent schools are leading the way, universities are following.

There was an ongoing political debate on some of the news sites before
everything got taken over by coronavirus: independent schools have charity
status (which includes exemption from business rates tax that goes back to the
local area) because historically they were indeed typical examples of
charities. For example:

> "Eton College was founded by King Henry VI as a charity school to provide
> free education to 70 poor boys who would then go on to King's College,
> Cambridge, founded by the same King in 1441." (Wikipedia)

The debate was whether a school that mainly serves and lives off rich
foreigners should still enjoy the benefits of charity status - public opinion
seemed to be moving in the direction of "tax it like any other business".

And people were, very cautiously, starting to ask the same of universities.
Meanwhile in faculty meetings, I've heard this from many different places,
it's an unspoken rule that you don't refer to home students as "second class
students" or anything like that but management is finding increasingly
creative ways to paraphrase that. Things like "pivot to high-margin students".

~~~
foldr
HPSquared was talking about international students (effectively) subsidising
scholarships for UK students in private schools. As far as I know, there is
little evidence of any such "trickle down" effect at present, or reason to
think that there will be one in the future. That is, it is unlikely that a
typical British student at a private school will be paying lower fees owing to
the contributions of their international classmates. I think you are going off
on a tangent.

~~~
red_admiral
It's a tangent, yes. My point here (which I didn't articulate earlier) is that
one of the arguments against independent schools having to pay business rates
is they're indirectly helping the local community through this trickle down
effect - sure they're taking in huge sums from overseas students, the argument
goes, but that means home students get cheaper education than otherwise. As
you say, there's very little evidence for this in practice.

------
alexpotato
Something similar happened back in the late 1960's.

Eisenhower had pumped tons of funding into universities to help us catch up to
the Soviets after Sputnik. This was primarily for what is now called STEM but
benefited each university as whole.

Fast forward to the late-1960's and the costs of the Vietnam War plus social
programs under Johnson led to huge cuts in funding to universities.

To make up the shortfall, admissions rates at many schools, including the Ivy
League, went north of 50%. Coupled with the fact that being in college was an
exemption from the draft meant that total enrollment skyrocketed.

This whole situation was made to clear to me when I was in high school and
attended a UPenn information session. The rep from UPenn asked "are there any
UPenn alumni in the room?" and numerous parents who graduated from the late
1960s to the early 1970s stood up. I remember thinking "Wow! Admissions rates
at UPenn now are below 10% so these parents must have really been sharp!".

Finding out about the funding cuts and admissions rates changing drove home
that an institution's reputation can change dramatically over the years;
sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worst. It also highlighted how
outside incentives can dramatically change the internal processes of a large
school/company etc.

~~~
Loughla
State and federal funding can be tied to increases in enrollment, 100%.

My current institution was founded on the principal that 33% of funding came
from the feds, the state, and tuition. Now, it is 5% federal (excluding PELL
grants), 11% state, and the remaining amount is tuition and PELL grants. Our
incentive is to get as many students as we can, otherwise we close the doors.

If you want higher education to stop its sleazy processes, we need to fund it
appropriately via tax dollars. It's a lot like people who want abstinence
education, in my opinion. You can want people to do the right thing all you
want, but at the end of the day, people are going to bang, so you need to set
them up with the birth control they need. You can want institutions of higher
education to act altruistically all you want, while cutting funding, but at
the end of the day, they're going to do what they have to in order to keep the
doors open.

------
pjc50
Alternatively, "global shutdown destroys export industry".

There is a debate as to whether education should be for profit at all versus
purely state funded, but if it is private then normally an industry bringing
in overseas money and customers would be celebrated.

~~~
nitrogen
You really have to consider follow-on effects. It's like outsourcing all your
manufacturing -- eventually you'll need something local and won't be able to
get it, and everyone local who could otherwise have helped will resent you for
selling out your industry.

~~~
pjc50
Isn't this the reverse? China has outsourced higher education to the West.
What follow on effects are you referring to?

Besides, students are typically non-local in any university town.

~~~
nraynaud
they are a 1B people country, from their point of view, foreign education is a
fringe anecdote, no country in the world would even be able to house a
significant share of their students.

~~~
HPsquared
The elites are a far smaller cohort.

~~~
nraynaud
there is also the fact that as seen from a lot of people in China, American
universities are a way for bad students with money to get a degree they
wouldn't get at Chinese universities.

------
ggm
$AU 18b of revenue. The goal was significantly smaller when things started.
What this has done to tertiary education in Australia is a very mixed bag. I
love that we teach people. I hate what it has done to the system overall.
Also, NZ and other regional players are exasperated with how Australia
marketed. We didn't make things easy for any other players and now its all
crashing down, there are mutters of "good"

~~~
vinay427
I know the two countries are relatively closely related (with something
approaching freedom of movement, etc.), but why is the Australian tertiary
education marketing specifically a concern or source of exasperation for NZ?

~~~
2019-nCoV
Because they're substitute goods.

------
xiaolingxiao
Yup. While in college, a friend of mine who worked in one of the departments
said it's well known that if the department needs more money, then "just admit
more Chinese grad students." The foreign students pay more, and receive poorer
service in both from the school, and often from the professors.

This is of course by no means unique as the article says, Brown University
almost went bankrupt in the 90s, so there was a program to target wealthy
European families and admit their children to the school, in exchange for
large donations and full tuition.

Many of these schools talk a big game about valuing education, but there is a
reason many of them are older than the most storied for profit companies, and
the fact that Universities are private and non-profit protect them from being
audited.

------
travisoneill1
Would be a real tragedy if they had to cut back on administration to make up
for the lost revenue.

~~~
thawaway1837
Im sure that’s exactly what will happen.

/s

------
dirtyid
Diploma mill tourism is one of those phenomenons I really want to see all the
externalities accounted for. My only significant issue is disrupting local
housing-prices but student VISAs is one vehicle among many. Otherwise I don't
really see the difference of gambling on a Chinese fuerdai vs trust fund
legacy vs athletic scholarship. They're just different avenues of to building
non-academic institutional prestige - the kind that's... important. Tuition
aside, a bunch of rich kids that spends big into the economy is also a perk.
They're perennial tourists that also occasionally shell out for an exotic car
or three. I've known a few of these types, and they're kind of a mix bag. Some
are just here to coast. Some are middling. Some are very intelligent, the kind
of assets western educational institutions are designed to brain drain.

The latter point gets overlooked, enticing/stealing and retaining talent is a
huge western soft power advantage. After separating the wheat from chaff
higher up the academic chain, there's a disproportionate of foreign students
in PhD and labs [1]. Without going into specific criticism of western
secondary school education, the broad point is most countries just don't
produce enough talent to fill demand. Also credentialism and educational
inflation means many masters programs bend over backwards not to fail anyone.
At least among my cohort who spans many types of masters and professional
degrees, you get proportionally more unqualified locals getting pushed out of
the program with just passing grades as foreign students who bought their way
through. There seems to be pervasive pressure to hold graduation metric up
because most people recognize, outside of some fields, what you learn is
rarely applicable to what you do. And even fields where theres overlap, you
have too much unqualified people getting the pass. Regardless, my point is, if
we need to acquire talent, hedging against rich international students isn't
the worst bet. The odds are overwhelmingly in the house favour. They pay you.
Some of them are slackers, but many also received the best education from
their home countries but can't make it to the top 1% cut off to enter
extremely competitive and prestigious local institutions. Foreign students
wanting to pour guaranteed money and potential talent into our society is
something to be optimized for.

[1]
[https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-599-x/2016011/c-g/c-g...](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-599-x/2016011/c-g/c-g02-eng.gif)

------
twomoretime
This is quickly spreading into the corporate sector. I recruit occasionally
and even at top tier schools, 90%+ of our applicants and career fair
participants are foreigners. I've counted the resumes.

I don't have anything against immigration per se, and I don't want to be
accused of xenophobia or any such nonsense, but this is not ok. We are
catering to international populations while essentially leaving our countrymen
behind.

It isn't just some blind nationalism that fuels my concern; if you don't fix
your domestic problems, soon foreigners won't have any more incentive to
immigrate...plus, in addition to the pitiful devaluation of the degree,
there's already a glut of grads in almost every sector, including STEM.
Something has to change. We will also see wages rise as the employee pool
shrinks and locals are less likely to work for lower wages because they're not
escaping third world poverty.

It's high time to limit foreign students attendance. And maybe after that we
can raise standards to recover what little prestige our schools had because
between this international cash cow and diversity initiatives I can easily
explain why so many people are graduating college today with minimal
competence. Lowering standards makes us all worse off in the long run, even if
your metric of "national college graduation rate" improves.

~~~
geebee
Elite US students scheme to get into top law, MBA, and medical school
programs, but they don't show nearly as much enthusiasm for graduate
engineering programs. This is probably rational market behavior, the result of
opening engineering up to international competition while sheltering the
professions from it.

As policy, the US government gives the bar and AMA tremendous power to exclude
foreign degree holders and greatly limit the number of foreign nationals at US
med and law schools. At the same time, the US government created a visa
program to bring in hundreds of thousands of competitors in STEM fields, and
created special exemptions to the lottery that encouraged US graduate programs
to fill their classes with students from overseas.

People can agree or disagree that this is good policy, but it seems pretty
clear to me that the US interfered with the markets and created policies that
encourage people who would like to live in the US but don't have that right to
study engineering, and it encouraged people who already have that right to do
something else, like law, medicine, or other protected fields.

Even if you agree this was bad policy overall, there's a tremendous amount of
room to disagree about how to solve it. Restrictionists might say that we
should restrict all professions equally. Libertarians might say the problem
isn't that engineering is wide open, it's that law and medicine and everything
else aren't open enough.

------
KoftaBob
Why stop there? They should be forced to face their addiction to easily
accessible government backed student loans. It’s essentially a blank check
that the gov has handed universities, and the gov is the one left to collect
the repayment.

And then we wonder why college is so expensive? The current system gives them
every incentive to charge whatever they want.

------
balola
If it can subsidize native students, it's not a bad thing, what's needed is an
enviroment in which cheating and political manipulation can be freely called
out.

~~~
smt88
I had the same attitude as you, but many of the wealthy, Chinese-raised
students at my local (prestigious, private) university can't speak basic
English.

The school then has to choose to either fail the student or ignore their
cheating. With a $250k incentive to choose the former, that's what they
choose.

~~~
8f2ab37a-ed6c
Has this been documented anywhere, by the way? You'd think that there would be
more reporting around this topic.

~~~
pnw_hazor
My brother in law is a CS professor at a US state university. Failing foreign
students is highly discouraged even ones caught cheating. He has learned to
not do it anymore.

~~~
ridv
Former TA here. I saw this happen several times with foreign students and
domestic students. Maybe I could shed a little light on why this is this the
case in most universities (mine was a public one in a large state for what
it's worth).

Failing someone on the grounds of cheating at the university where I attended
was a huge time investment. If the student contested their failing grade, the
professor/lecturer who was the accuser had to go with evidence and present it
before an internal panel. The student would obviously be allowed to defend
themselves.

The outcome of the panel would rarely be in the favor of the accuser and
against the student. The student would have to have been accused multiple
times before the panel would take the complaint seriously. The punishment
would end up being something like turning the failing grade into just one
grade above failing.

When you consider how much a lecture gets paid, and how little importance
teaching is given for researchers, you begin to understand why
lecturers/professors just hand out Ds and move on with their lives.

The amount of times I caught people with MOSS[1] was too damn high. Never had
anything come out of it so I stopped going the extra mile past sending the
results to the person teaching the course.

[1]
[https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/](https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/)

~~~
pnw_hazor
My daughter has been TAing for undergrad intro-to-programming courses at her
university (she is ugrad too). Her heart was broken more than once when she
discovered how blatantly people she otherwise liked a lot would cheat.

Initially it posed quite a dilemma for her since she had the power to give
zeros for cheating, we determined the best course of action is to forward the
evidence to the professor and forget about it.

------
aschatten
Not just foreign. In the US even many university prefed out of state students,
but will never admit to it.

~~~
non-entity
My opinion on university education has flip flopped overtime with me leading
toward it being a massive scam at the moment, but this time for reasons like
what you mention.

Case in point: I found the perfect program for me: online CS bachelors, from a
respected state school, very affordable. However, I cant even be considered a
resident of the state I live and work in for several years and would be forced
to pay out of state tuition, making it prohibitively expensive unless I want
to be paying down loans the rest of my career.

~~~
thawaway1837
So you will be paying what foreign students always do, without access to cheap
loans, or scholarships, the majority of which are restricted to citizens. And
they don’t even have a guarantee that they will be allowed to work afterwards
even if there is a company who wants to give them a job.

~~~
non-entity
If that's true than I feel sorry for them because that's a shitty deal. On the
other hand, if this is just wealthy people with large cash reserves throwing
them out in a chance obtain citenzship, then congratulations they have the
extreme privilege of being born into the right family, which many of their
countrymen didnt have.

------
jimbob45
Spin off college sports, cap foreign student numbers, cap acceptance of
student loans, and kill off Admin staff.

Everyone knows how to solve the college problem. It’s just that colleges have
no incentive to do so until they’re forced somehow.

~~~
Robotbeat
Why cap foreign students (or acceptance of student loans), though?

Foreign students are not a bad thing. There’s not a limit in the number of
professors. In fact, we’re graduating way more graduate students than there
are slots of tenured teaching positions.

The problem isn’t too many foreign or domestic students or not enough people
qualified to be professors, it’s administrations ran by greedy MBA types.

~~~
jimbob45
Foreign students because too many of them perverts the motivations of
universities (and we have more than enough universities to go around for all
prospective foreign students.

Financial aid because unchecked student loans allow universities to charge as
much as they want for tuition. Student loans being the most predatory type of
loan (being non-dischargeable)

~~~
Robotbeat
Sounds like the solution for #2 is to make student loans dischargable and #1
to eliminate profit-seeking from university motivations. Capping foreign
students sounds like a bandaid solution that wouldn't address the core
problems and would make other things much worse (decline of rural communities,
quality of American education system, America's influence, standing, and soft-
power, plus reducing highly skilled immigration rate).

------
qubex
The more I read about how universities worldwide are becoming profit-driven
enterprises focussed on providing enjoyable experiences to their ‘clients’,
the more thankful I become for my mirthless days at LSE.

------
Causality1
I would like a detailed analysis to solidify my opinion. On one hand, some
argue that accepting foreign students means there are fewer slots for native
ones. On the other hand, some argue the higher tuition paid by foreign
students allows universities to subsidize the cost of tuition for natives. The
first group responds that foreign students only create increased demand and
thus increase the cost of tuition and that even if universities were able to
pass savings on for native students they choose not to do so.

I want numbers on these arguments.

------
neonate
[https://archive.md/cCnqz](https://archive.md/cCnqz)

------
Robotbeat
Why is this portrayed as an “addiction”? This is one of America's important
exports, and it is also really good for rural areas (usually would otherwise
be in decline) with a college.

What we need is to strengthen this by granting green cards to those who get
advanced degrees in key fields.

Yeah, overspending is a big problem (cut Administrative overhead and highly
paid deans, etc!), but foreign students are a sign of a healthy and
competitive higher education system.

------
jccalhoun
I was in grad school in the midwest of the USA when the 2008 recession
happened. States cut funding to colleges so the colleges had to look somewhere
for money. The next year I noticed a lot more students from Asia. Even when
the economy was good, most states didn't increase funding significantly.

------
arbuge
Of note: shopping malls in the US have a similar dependence on foreign
tourists' money. It's why you see all those currency exchange bureaus in each
major mall.

------
Leary
It's not like they are refunding the tuition for this semester. Hopefully
things will get better in the fall and the universities can reopen.

~~~
hhs
There are student associations that are asking for at least partial refunds.
Here are recent examples in Baltimore [0] and Chicago [1]:

[0]: [https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-johns-
hopkins...](https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-johns-hopkins-sga-
tuition-refund-20200405-xze7s7tkyzbg5azrmpg7j35r5m-story.html)

[1]:
[https://chicago.suntimes.com/coronavirus/2020/4/3/21207613/u...](https://chicago.suntimes.com/coronavirus/2020/4/3/21207613/uchicago-
tuition-strike-university-coronavirus-covid-19-unemployment-college)

~~~
the_svd_doctor
Same at my university, they are asking. The administration said, basically,
“no way”.

------
threw24576443
Obligatory clip from Yes Minister

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WW7mhtp5a5E](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WW7mhtp5a5E)

~~~
lordnacho
Bailey College sounds a lot like Balliol College. I guess this was from the
era where you didn't use actual names, though the universities themselves were
named correctly IIRC (Hacker went to the LSE). The show also had imaginary
countries that sounded like they belonged in certain regions.

The comments about having classrooms is because the Oxford and Cambridge
colleges tend not to teach people in groups the size you might be used to at
high school. You'd have tutorials with one or two students and a Prof in their
office, and if your Prof was nice they'd even give you some booze while
sitting like the characters are doing there. There are lectures as well with
hundreds of students in huge halls. Depends a lot of what you're studying but
I did a mix of engineering and social science, so had a sniff of both.

~~~
peteretep
> though the universities themselves were named correctly

Both of them! [0]

0:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOvEwtDycs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOvEwtDycs)

------
aurizon
The quality of life of a (cash) cow declines after it is no longer milkable -
they usually end up in some sort of stew - which seems to be looming.

------
jstewartmobile
Good. For every elite university performing actual " _brain drain_ ," there
are a dozen others importing a fifth-column of mediocrities for cash and
prizes.

Now corporate espionage is off the charts, and our elite are too short-term
and rootless to care about the long-term consequences.

------
DiogenesKynikos
What about "addiction" to foreign students' talent? STEM research in the US
benefits hugely from its ability to siphon off the top students from all over
the world. In China, for example, the best students from top-tier universities
tend to go abroad for their graduate studies. American labs get a steady
supply of the top international grad students. Many of them remain in the US
afterwards, which boosts related industries in the US.

~~~
bluenose69
Yes, this has long been true for postgraduate students, who are very valued
members of most STEM departments. The worry relates to undergraduate students.

