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.
It's not administrative bloat that makes colleges so expensive. "Administrative bloat" happens when a school becomes a city. Harvard/Stanford/MIT et al. cannot go back to some time when tuition was affordable while still being the research powerhouses they are.
Bigger organizations require more overhead and those costs don't grow linearly. I'm not saying that I think all those administrators are necessary or they all make things more efficient, but at the same time many of them are in place precisely because they are running an office that does make things more efficient. You get rid of one administrator and you may end up increasing the workload on everyone else by 20%, which seems like a win on paper because you lose their budget while not giving anyone else a raise. But getting rid of them made the whole organization less efficient.
e.g. My university's IT office has a huge budget and a bunch of administrators. It makes my life as a professor easier, and it gives students a better experience. It's very easy to say that the entire IT office should be eliminated to "tighten their belts and reduce administrative bloat". Which may be true, but at the same time it exists for a reason, and getting rid of it doesn't teleport us back to the 70s when campuses didn't need an IT office.
> It’s not as if American society hadn’t collectively called for this for decades while tuition has risen astronomically.
American society has called for better education, more teaching styles, more research, more technology, more subjects and classes, more majors, delivered to more students every year. There's no way we are going back, it's just not happening, the expectations are too high at this point. We can either decide maintaining these kinds of institutions are worth it, or trade off for worse outcomes and just give up on being serious about research. Seems like that's actually what this administration wants to do, but the public decidedly does not. However the public wants to have their cake (world class research institutions) and eat it too (low tuition affordable by the general public) and that's just not going to happen.
Education is weird as a product, because you're delivering the same experience to students but they each pay a different bespoke price. Sometimes schools even pay their own customers!
When a rich person sends their kid to school they get charged full sticker price. Then schools use some of that money to subsidize the educations of the other students. Given those dynamics, there's really no reason for the tuition sticker price to ever go down unless the uber-rich can't afford it anymore, because the actual price anyone pays is floating and can be whatever it needs to be for them.
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.
Yep. This is, of course, what's really happening, same as before. The next step is that highly educated jobs in the industry disappear, which then gives you cheap colleges with great teachers, but not much reason to study, and then we're back where we started this whole debacle in the 1990s.
Next step is expensive grifty colleges with bad teachers, as all the good teachers will flee or just not go into teaching, and nothing will be cheap because then what’s the point of the grift?
Picture Bob Jones U at Harvard scale. Or the Musk school of engineering where they teach that sensor fusion is a bad idea actually.
The loss of foreign students is already having an impact on the Boston rental market, with thousands of fewer students coming to the city this year:
“I’ve been doing real estate and technology for 30 years. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Demetrios Salpoglou, CEO of Boston Pads, told Boston.com. “It’s very acute. It’s not impacting all neighborhoods … it’s really proximity to a lot of universities that have a heavy reliance on foreign money or foreign enrollment.”
Not familiar with Seattle U-distict, is it rental market? Because I hope foreign students are not impacting single family house prices.
When I was grad student rent was indeed 50% of my stipend. Tuition was covered as part of research grants. Only way to reduce expenses was to get roommates.
Having said that, mortgage is also 50% of our household income now. American dream is expensive...
Some of my favorite people to meet in college were foreign students. You get to meet diverse people and learn about the world. It's only a win if college is 20% cheaper this year. It's not.
Foreign money coming in will have to be made up elsewhere. It will be made up by raising tuition on remaining students. Schools that have a small enough applicant pool will price out their applicants and close. Likely they will be replaced by for-profit grifts that are much more affordable but don't actually do anything for the students except bilk them. The largest most international most diverse most administratively bloated schools will be fine. It's the small mostly-white rural colleges that will suffer the most.
Student enrollment in the US is declining and the big problem for colleges the past few years has been a worry about not having enough students. So it's not clear why US students were struggling to get a college spot.
And if you mean them getting spots in the more prestigious institutions, well, it's not clear whether that will even happen (the few thousand international students admitted to the top universities are not the ones that are likely to decline their acceptance letters), but even if it did, well, those universities are simply not as prestigious anymore.
Attracting the best talent from anywhere in the world is a huge part of what created their prestige, and that's even before we get to how they're losing funding, and professors and researchers to other countries.
Zero sum ass mentality. Top performing international students are likely to start companies and create jobs which is great for US high school and college students.
Immigrants make up 14% of the population but start more than 20% of businesses.
44% of fortune 500 companies are founded by immigrants or their children. Steve Jobs' dad was a Syrian immigrant student. Elon Musk was on F1, J1, and H1B visa.
Well, the only astrogeologist I know chose northern Europe, and the two nuclear physicists I know are doing their thesis in Zurich despite one of them having been proposed a subject by the MIT and a Singaporean university (I think he took the better subject tbh, probably didn't have anything to do with the current immigration policies in the US).
The admin stopping some research for no reason probably got a lot of PhD students quite distrustful of the US, that could cause some of them to go back after their thesis. Top PhD often choose countries for the lab director and the thesis subject. The US lost a few lab directors in the last 6 months, and at least in therapeutic engineering this year doesn't propose a lot of new thesis subjects (less than last year it seems), but maybe they keep them for their own students.
Fixed that for you. Wealth distribution is far from equitable and immigration by and large benefits the wealthy. They financially benefit from the cheap labor and are mostly immune from the downsides.
The US did great for hundreds of years with the limited immigration we had from primarily European countries. The world we live in today was built with that approach. Remains to be seen if importing from recently modernized / 3rd world countries provides any long term benefit for median Americans. We’d be much better off installing billionaires who wish to invest in the people because they feel an attachment to the people (noblesse oblige).
I can’t really see a good argument for foreigners outside of the Meiji government approach (learn from them to invest in our own) if you care about your people.
A visit to Ellis Island museum would suggest many waves of disfavored/impiverished “European”
immigrants that faced significant discrimination for a generation.
Or a visit to California railroad museum documenting Japanese immigrants building railroads?
Sorry to break it to you, but the average American is quite...let's say, average. That's why they're average, lol. Likewise, the average Chinese. That's why their school system filters out tens of millions of schoolkids from higher education and puts them in trade school early. Same goes for India, Europe, etc.
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.
There's so few seats at these schools we could fill them with Americans and not notice a difference is my belief. We're talking about single digit acceptance rates where it's probably hard to distinguish students who apply at all.
Also I feel like it's not a good assumption that talented international students that come to top tier universities also have the same western vision of meritocracy and sharing their achievements with the globe.
because the infrastructure in their home countries likely don't exist. some people are just that much smarter and need such an environment.
Or, there's risk to being in their home country where academic freedom might not really be a thing.
it's like why if you show serious promise in soccer at a young age, you go to Europe as soon as you can - you will be better developed there in a more mature environment as opposed to, say, the USA where you can only get decent coaching in a few major cities, and even then the gulf between the coaching at a top Spanish or English club versus an American one is huge. Or if you show promise in tennis at a young age, you get your ass to Florida as soon as you are able to.
Some of them actually do that. Like when the US expelled Qian Xuesen, the founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab and he went back and built China's ballistic missile and space program. So, yep. It's happened and will continue to happen to different degrees.
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's fortune back in some austere rice farming village.
It was quite the sight to see. I want to say they were fairly normal in intelligence, relatively, but the set of incentives for them to perform were wildly different.
But they pay several multiples of money more to study than the average US citizen, take on no debt, and most of the time are studying for advanced technical degrees.
Most Americans are not.
If we want to have top-tier universities, and produce graduates capable of innovating and taking big risk, we need to have universities who are strong in STEM.
If we want to have universities who are strong in STEM, we need to fill up those seats because otherwise without students, there are no classes.
The average US citizen voted in Trump, so no. You can't listen to his UN speech and go "that's the man to rule my country" if you're not seriously mentally impaired.
What's your point? That education only belongs to the "talented"? Talented in what way? What good does it do to society that the "non-talented" are not educated?
It's a shame that Canada also decided to shut the door on international students. The point was to ease the housing crisis (understandable) but the knock-on effect is to de-fund universities and surprisingly also public schools, which derive a great deal of revenue by charging international students.
It's colleges they they have been clamping down on, as they were bringing in absolutely massive numbers of mostly Indian students who were coming mainly to work in low-end jobs and get out of India rather than to legitimately study.
The number of graduate students being allowed in hasn't changed significantly, and undergraduate university students are also continuing to be brought in at rates similar to pre-pandemic times.
I don’t know if this was one of the intended outcomes, but this will probably cause some struggling college and universities to shut down.
International students raise quite a lot of money for higher-ed institutions because they pay full price without financial aid. The loss of that income is going to make a bad situation for higher-ed budgets much worse. Unless you are Harvard or Stanford (or a few other universities that are endowments with schools attached), you’re probably already in a budget crunch or eating into your endowment.
A side note, one of the founders of the college I went to has been convinced that higher-ed needs an entirely new business model in order to survive, and is founding a new school called Greenway (https://www.greenwayinstitute.org) that is trying to blend internships and co-op programs into an engineering education.
This was the first year of Trump's new term and most of the anti-immigration executive orders happened in the last few months. By August, most international students had already accepted offers, made travel and stay plans, and likely paid some part of their tuition already, and just continued due to sunk costs and hope that things will stabilize.
However, at this point, I think a lot more people will not even apply to US schools for next year.
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.
I thought colleges only had a limited number of slots to accept students each year. Seems like US citizens would be competing with foreign students in that case.
For most colleges the number of available slots is not constrained by some absolute limit but is instead constrained by their income available to pay for all the people and resources needed to educate these students.
Further, the most competitive universities artificially constrain acceptance rates because low acceptance rates make them more desirable.
Imagine we passed a federal law banning the children of parents who make more than $150,000 annually from attending college. Would this just mean that colleges take their same planned slots and give them to lower earning students? No. It'd be massively disruptive and change the available slots.
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.
Not sure about the economics of it in the US, but in many countries international students subsidise domestic students, because they pay full fees whereas domestic students generally do not. Back during the financial crisis lowered enrolment of international students was a factor in Irish universities having to discontinue courses, say; they just weren't economically possible without that subsidy.