it is a strange assumption to make since by all counts the US is already the country in the world with the most diverse population. It is not as if science is only the work of students or even in particular foreign students...
This means that as a country you don't have to pay for the primary and secondary schooling of all these people, but you get to reap the rewards of them working in your country and contributing to your scientific lead, to your economy.
But like all advantages, if you don't pay attention, you can squander it. You can make it easy for smart Chinese students (in this instance) to do science in the US and benefit US academia and businesses, or you can make it hard, and the same people will instead benefit some other economy.
It's not about diversity, it's about not realizing that the free firehose of cheap and willing smarts and labour isn't perpetual, that it actually has to be maintained and encouraged.
You don't have to pay for an order of magnitude more people: education is not a technology yet, it could give no guarantees on a results. To get one bright student you need to teach ten people through primary and secondary school.
Funding was shifted to fees. Although considering how much of student loans is not expected to be repaid it's arguable that a lot is still state funded...
Harvard, Yale, University of Texas, Stanford, Princeton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Texas A&M, University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Columbia University all have 10-30 billion EACH.
Roughly 100 colleges in the United States have endowments exceeding 1 billion dollars. Even with a billion in a broad market index fund they could burn 30 million a year and likely never run out of money, I think the most expensive tuition in the country is like 60k or some such, so the poorest of those 100 schools could take at least 500 students a year for free and not go broke.
There are about a dozen universities in the United States that have research budgets alone exceeding 1 billion dollars a year.
Kinda makes you wonder why college tuition is so expensive at those 100~ schools...
And I don't think those endowments include real estate value or income from IP the schools own thanks to research conducted there.
And it's really, really actively fighting against it: electing Trump (and the consequences with it) is not the least they did in that perspective.
You could make the exact reverse point, that universities in the US have built their expertise over decades if not centuries and Foreign students are largely benefiting more from them than whatever they could get in their home countries.
Except that this isn't true at all.
CS went from less than 50% to nearly 80% foreign graduate students over 10 years. Quite interesting!
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...
"Science" is addicted to cheap foreign labor, which has ruined the market for natives.
I'm not sure what your point was with the casual dismissal of 70 years of research in every field besides lithography. Am I supposed to think that international students only work on lithography? Most lithography research, as far as I'm aware, doesn't even happen in academia.
Your first point is a red herring: the presence of cheap labor in the sciences and the lack of decent jobs makes it unattractive to any sane person who was born in a first world country.
Schools aren't accepting foreign students because they're cheaper. They actually have greater apprehension about foreign students, because their language skills might be lacking, and because the American professors judging the applications might not personally know the foreign professors writing the recommendation letters.
Science is largely done by graduate students and postdocs. Professors are busy writing grants, teaching classes, advising students and sitting on committees. Their role in science is largely managerial, and in providing overall vision. All the grunt work and detail gets done by people below them. My point is that having smart and capable students is critical.
If you go into a top STEM department in the US, you'll probably see that a large majority of students are foreigners. If you were to exclude them, you could replace them with Americans, but those Americans would, on average, have lower grades, lower test scores and less previous research experience. Their work would not be as good, and the productivity of the department would fall.
The excluded students would instead go to top universities in other countries. Those universities would begin doing better research as a result. My prediction is that within a decade, you would see Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley et al. fall off the top of the rankings, replaced by the top universities in Europe, one or two universities in Canada, and perhaps a few Asian universities.
If they are replaced by less capable students then the work being done will be of a lower quality.
They often do have more money. And rampant cheating. But regardless, Chinese students can attend any university in China or the US, while an American cannot realistically attend school in China. Obviously that means China is going to have a brighter educational future, as they use our system to advance their own.
It makes a very big difference in getting there.