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.
What about them? Competent domestic students are not being crowded out by international students. Competent domestic workers are not being crowded out by immigrants. The opposite is happening, immigrants create new opportunities for natives out of thin air. That doesnt mean that natives dont, they both do.
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.
The path of least resistance is obviously to go where the infrastructure is.
Also, smarts needed to bootstrap modern infrastructure from scratch with limited resources are different than smarts needed to design a popular app, for example.
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.
I agree with you. We don't even have to imagine: the UK and US were planning preemptive nuclear strikes against the entire Soviet Union before they tested their first nuke.
Operation Dropshot and Unthinkable called for hundreds of nukes and conventional bombs to be dropped on Soviet cities to, "to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire."
All in all, I don't even have a dog in the fight, but people like Qian Xuesen won't become retarded if they're expelled from the US. If I remember correctly, something like a third of all top-tier AI researchers are Chinese. If you count all those with an immigration background, they'll be close to 50-70%. They will simply create companies and products that compete and take market share from American companies.
Are Americans - the country that votes out presidents for rising gas prices - willing to make do with a lower standard of living? Because that'd what you'll get when some the world's best innovators are no longer based in your country.
Being okay is a lot different from maintaining academic, innovative, and cultural dominance which provides a standard of living many have grown used to.
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?