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So more spots for Americans? Doesn’t necessarily seem like a bad thing to me.
The flow of smart and talented people to the United States has historically been incredibly beneficial for the latter. EDIT: further reading here: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/05/28/demand-f...
All those students, along with their talent and money and connections went _somewhere_ so that’s a shame for USA.
Huge win for US high school and college students. Not so good for bloated college administrations.
So more spots for Americans? Doesn’t necessarily seem like a bad thing to me.
If you're prepared to pay the same fees as foreign students and get the same grades, they might be happy to have you, but more likely it'll just mean more colleges have to close - foreign students never really took places from domestic students, they subsidised them.
We are going through a similar issue in the UK where a lot of University finances have been setup to rely on being able to attract foreign - mostly Chinese and Middle Eastern - students who pay 2x-4x more than domestic students. Now those students are being pushed away or are turning away, those institutions are questioning their own viability, and are at risk of bankruptcy.
At Ivy League or Oxbridge levels, this might be an acute issue: the running costs are insane, and despite having large endowment pools of cash, those pools aren't deployable to address the problem. Donations to such funds are often earmarked to support certain seats, tenures, scholarships and so on, and can't be used for general spending and teaching costs.
For the poorer schools without endowments (think JuCos), they might not have relied much on foreign student money anyway, so might weather it better. You are just as likely to get to junior college tomorrow as you were yesterday.
A middle schooler's aspirations of MIT, Stanford, Yale, Berkley and so on might now look more likely on paper, but in truth, those colleges might not be there or not able to offer as many courses by the time they're ready to attend.
I wouldn't be totally surprised to see a couple of Ivy League and some lower tier colleges go under in the next 5 years, and for about half the Russell Group in the UK to face a similar fate.
All those students, along with their talent and money and connections went _somewhere_ so that’s a shame for USA.
99% of those students were not any more talented than the average US citizen
Gifted, driven kids, the kind who will leave their family and everything they've known, to cross an ocean to study in your country, are a scarce resource.
I'm not saying you shouldn't prioritize locals, but if you want competitive, world-class educational system, you should be open to foreign students and faculty helping to keep your system competitive. It's the same worldwide, whether it's in Singapore's NUS, or Oxford, or Saudi Arabia's KAUST.
But, what do I even know?
All those students, along with their talent and money and connections went _somewhere_ so that’s a shame for USA.
> All those students, along with their talent and money and connections went _somewhere_ so that’s a shame for USA. Money? Yes. Talent and connections? Not necessarily. Top PhD students are still coming to America. It’s the money-grabbing 12-month masters programs that are the problem. Come buy a F-1 student visa for $200k! It’s the Trump silver card.
They probably are, and that won't stop anytime soon. The question is how much talent is being lost now.
It's going to be a rough time for a lot of colleges that have been using foreign students paying full price to fund their operations. Especially now that the incoming college aged population is beginning to shrink and the percentage attending college has peaked, so the domestic population probably won't be able to fill the seats at less competitive colleges.
Perhaps they should tighten their belts and reduce administrative bloat. It’s not as if American society hadn’t collectively called for this for decades while tuition has risen astronomically.
Which is a completely unrelated effort from the free money you're getting from abroad.
Unless governments institute policies that require them to "tighten their belts" they won't tighten their belts by cutting their own pay. They'll tighten belts by cutting out the least paying students, and scholarships, instead.
If this does push governments to get universities to tighten their belts, then why not have governments make them do that anyways without losing a massive chunk of export earnings, and a form of export earnings which has demonstrated positive effects many times greater than the dollars they bring in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But personal experience is not. I went to college and was friends with the foreign students. They were average.
We had 'Asian road chaos' every fall where the rich ones would show up with their new Bugattis (edit: Maseratis) having never learned how to drive the thing and much less on the open American roads where you can really let the accelerator loose. They would cause endless crashes. One or two of poor ones would end up committing suicide in the spring when they flunked out and had spent their entire little farming family…
Depends on tier of university.
At Harvard, MIT, Stanford, the asian international students are moderately rich (US$10 million+ net worth) from tech or manufacturing businesses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're assuming that there weren't enough spots for Americans and that they were getting denied due to foreigners. That's not true. For Americans who want a college education and don't get one is mostly because of the cost of education, which foreign students subsidize. This is a classic case of shooing yourself in the foot only because of a fear of the foreigner.
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