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As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting

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Re: As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting

#141

Post by dragonwriter »

junkscience2017 wrote: post #14
iainmerrick wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like foreign students are stealing resources from the US. To the contrary, they pay a lot for the privilege of studying, and they're likely to try to immigrate later -- and even if you're anti-immigration, it's madness to be against young, educated, skilled immigrants who've experienced your country at an impressionable age.

The UC system was created to serve residents of the State. These are publicly funded institutions. They are here to serve the taxpaying public. Private schools exist to serve aspirational foreign students. If residents feel the system does not serve them, they will defund it, and everyone will be worse off. We have these things called Propositions, and they tend to elicit emotional responses. Most California resident…

> These are publicly funded institutions.

They are institutions which are less and less public funded, and heading in the direction of the fully privatized formerly public institutions in much of the country.

> If residents feel the system does not serve them, they will defund it

They've been effectively defunding UC and CSU for decades through a number of measures, particularly the Prop 98 mandate that forces nominal budget increases to go largely to K-14 education.

That defunding is actually at the root of many of the complaints against UC, including it's reliance on non-resident students and their higher tuition.

Re: As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting

#142

Post by Simulacra »

jjoonathan wrote: post #38
curiousgal wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am yet to meet a single American who didn’t have access to college because of an international student. High tuition and fees are always the number one culprit.

I suspect he means graduate school. I'm white and have a native accent, but in my 2 short years of grad school I had four (!) instances of someone responding with shock at learning that I was a US citizen. One postsdoc even asked flat out what the hell I was doing in grad school if I wasn't working towards a green card.

My engineering advisor stressed that, despite the fact I'm a woman, it's critical the university does all that it can to keep me in the program because it was so bloated with international students.

Re: As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting

#143

Post by conjecTech »

dmode wrote: post #128
conjecTech wrote: post #89

This can be largely explained by the drop in birth rates in China associated with the one child policy. The number of college-aged Chinese in 2020 will be roughly half what it was a decade before[1]. People have seen this coming for years. The administrators blaming this on politics are most likely scapegoating for their poor planning. [1] https://www.indexmundi.com/china/age_structure.html

If this was the case, it would be a gradual decline, instead of a dramatic decrease in one year. Also, anecdotally, none of my family members want to study in the US anymore.

How gradual would it have to be for you to find this plausible? The prior NYT article referenced in this work mentions that first-time international student fell 3% from 2016. Those were numbers collected prior to the election, mind you. And a 50% change in the largest cohort of international students over only 10 years is going to make for a pretty big impact. Especially considering that these middling American schools are seen as alternatives to better domestic choices like Tsinghua. If the schools being discussed here were low on the priority list of potential students, the change would be even more exaggerated.

Imagine the hypothetical where there were 2 schools, each of which could educate 50 students per year and where all students prefer school 1 to school 2. If the population drops from 100 to 80, school 2 would see a 40% decrease in enrollment, even though the general population only dropped 20%. Now if school 1 is in China and school 2 is in the US...

Re: As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting

#144

Post by Simulacra »

sitkack wrote: post #131

Even my old community college stuffed itself on mediocre kids from overseas paying 3x market rate, but god their parents were probably really stoked to see them be someone else's problem. Universities need to cull their bureaucracies and stop wasting their time, money and effort with their spin-out accelerator programs. Research, teach and keep the roof patched. Problem is, they will probably double down on out of st…

A lot of my professors in undergrad engineering hated teaching. They openly derided it as a chore. This was very disheartening as a student to hear.

Re: As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting

#145

Post by a-nikolaev »

dmode wrote: post #128
conjecTech wrote: post #89

This can be largely explained by the drop in birth rates in China associated with the one child policy. The number of college-aged Chinese in 2020 will be roughly half what it was a decade before[1]. People have seen this coming for years. The administrators blaming this on politics are most likely scapegoating for their poor planning. [1] https://www.indexmundi.com/china/age_structure.html

If this was the case, it would be a gradual decline, instead of a dramatic decrease in one year. Also, anecdotally, none of my family members want to study in the US anymore.

Yeah, isn't that the general attitude in China that a US degree is not as valuable as it used to be? That should be contributing to the observed decline as well.

Re: As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting

#146

Post by seibelj »

dang wrote: post #124
seibelj wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems right to me, given the job prospects for someone whose talent is speaking two languages. Do you think the market for Italian / English specialists is super hot?

That's obviously not the only skill involved. Please don't post reflexively dismissive comments to HN.

I would argue the primary qualification of teaching Italian is knowing Italian, but yes, many other skills are involved. Every job that exists requires a multitude of skills, but there is usually a primary skill. I would disagree that I was being “reflexively dismissive” and given the following commentary and upvotes, would appear a majority agree than disagree. But I appreciate your opinion.

Re: As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting

#148

Post by swampthinker »

mc32 wrote: post #36
petilon wrote: post #10

This is bad news. People like Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, not to mention CEOs of Google, Microsoft and Adobe all came to the US as students. Without the immigration of the brightest on the planet, the US will, over time, lose its edge.

As other have pointed out, this is mostly about the schools losing full-tuition international students, ie.e "International students pay double the $6,445 tuition of Missouri residents" --which is insane. I mean, it's insane for in-state students to have to shell out 6.5 thousand a year for higher ed... The international students are typically those kids of parents who are perhaps middle to upper middle class in a fo…

Here I was thinking that 6.5/yr was cheap...

Re: As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting

#149

Post by rdtsc »

melling wrote: post #95
lewis500 wrote: post #40

There are really three different downsides to this. First, the foreign students cross-subsidize the locals' education. There are large fixed costs to running a university and these students pay way above their marginal costs. So now the universities have fewer resources; hence cutting the newspaper funding etc. Second, the foreign students increase the schools' reputations and can collaborate with the faculty. Resear…

This is all negative for the US but our loss is the world’s gain. China’s economy will pass the US’s in the 2030’s, for example. India will rise to #3. We should expect more R&D from the rest of the world. China may lead the world in AI and space exploration. India in drug research. Billions of people will come out of poverty. American students may flock to India to get a better education at a fraction of the cost.

> This is all negative for the US but our loss is the world’s gain

That's fine, why shouldn't other countries do well and achieve success. There was a story about China offering a house and a huge research budget to a Chinese national who just graduated from a US school. And people were upset and kind of negative about it, but I think it is great that China can do it.

> American students may flock to India to get a better education at a fraction of the cost.

Yeah, it would be good to see more international cooperation. And it can and should come from other countries becoming centers of research and learning.

Re: As Flow of Foreign Students Wanes, U.S. Universities Feel the Sting

#150

Post by anxrn »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #87
lewis500 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding PhDs, grad international enrollment is declining. Regarding the full-paying foreign undergrads, their tuition contributes towards the costs of the university that are shared. American students, especially at middle-ranking public schools, are hurt when schools lose their funding. Regarding the "racism against Americans," there is no such race, and if there were one it would not explain research productivity…

> Regarding PhDs, grad international enrollment is declining. Your source on that? All the schools I’m in contact with are still as international as ever in their CS PhD departments. I’m not sure what the trends are outside of CS, but I can’t imagine they would be very different. I think you are just pulling this number out of thin air. Research is funded quite differently from undergrad programs. Sure, fewer TAships…

Recent surveys do appear to support a slowdown in international graduate school enrollments ([1] summary, [2] original study).

Furthermore, this trend predates the immigration policies of the current administration, and I suspect this trend has further strengthened.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/28/graduate-scho... [2] http://cgsnet.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/CGS_GED16_Report_...

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