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Comment by shas3 | Hacker News Reader

Foreign students are 1.13 million [1] and the sum total of all students in the US is around 20 million ( age < 25 + age > 25) [2]. How much can they really contribute marginally to tuition inflation given that they are only 5-10% of the population? If foreign workers are taking American jobs, Chinese factories are taking over manufacturing, and international students are leading to tuition inflation, in general, US seems to be coping rather poorly with the effects of globalization. More likely, internationals are like Don Quixote's windmills.

Edit: forgot references

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/international-students-stream-in...

[2] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98

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"Coping poorly" is one way of putting it. I prefer "[the American people were] suckered into bad trade deals with countries with nonexistent labor and environmental standards which forced them to compete on the same level even though foreign competitors were handed enormous advantages as though they were US states but immune from regulation, thereby gutting the American middle class and the necessary tax base necessary to foot the bill for the kind of human investments necessary for a large country to succeed in a global information economy," but I guess your way works too.

The US is rocking the information economy.

You can maybe complain that we aren't employing even more people in the information economy.

Maybe in the coastal cities and Austin TX. Aside from that, our economy is barely budging and people are sliding ever further into debt. That's the thing about rot: if you don't address it early enough it soon consumes everything.

Besides, a lot of our "rocking" of the information economy is because of legacy, not current policies. The US emerged from the Cold War as the sole global hyper power at the same time the Internet was being developed as a commercial tool in the very same country.

If Great Britain hadnt conquered half the world their cultural products (Beatles Bond and Harry Potter) would have very little reach, London would have no more reason than anywhere else to be the global financial centre, and their manufacturing and mining economy would be in equal shambles as today.

My godfather - a historian who specialized in Ancient Rome - often said that "It only takes one generation's loss to lose everything forever."

You missed out "... by the American government".

>How much can they really contribute marginally to tuition inflation given that they are only 5-10% of the population?

Being 5-10% of the population does not imply they only provide 5-10% of the tuition. They might also be more likely to be full time, again meaning they pay disproportionally more.

At elite technical schools, the figure is more like 60% foreign

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