Coronavirus will end the golden age for college towns
chicagobusiness.com
chicagobusiness.com
https://www.austinchamber.com/economic-development/austin-pr...
Austin is gorgeous. Semi-arid but the big river gorge running through it means downtown is lush. Big hills/mountains a mile west. Tons of nature, water. Colorful history. Great downtown thats a regional vacation destination. Within 3 hours of Houston, Dallas, the ocean, and only 45 mins from San Antonio. That means 50 million people within a few hours, densest area you can find besides east and west coast. And of course the capital, which means a lot more in Texas than elsewhere due to secessional tendencies (ex the TX state capitol is taller than US capitol)
Tech triangle is again in a gorgeous area. A few hours from NC coast and Blue Ridge mountains. Weather is an interesting hybrid between cold-winter northeast and humid deep south. It doesn't get very hot or cold. Probably the closest you can get to west coast weather in the east, and the nearby coast and mountains heighten the illusion. Nicely positioned for business, Miami and NYC are less than 2 hours by plane.
They're both safe with great weather and a low cost of living (for tech hotspots). I have deeply considered living in both.
Houston is swampy because of the coast. Austin is dry and not very humid, like Dallas. The wind often comes from the deserts out west.
> Austin is located within the middle of a unique, narrow transitional zone between the dry deserts of the American Southwest and the lush, green, more humid regions of the American Southeast. Its climate, topography, and vegetation share characteristics of both. Officially, Austin has a humid subtropical climate under the Köppen climate classification. This climate is typified by very long and hot summers; short, mild winters; and pleasantly warm spring and fall seasons in-between.
> An uncommon characteristic of Austin's climate is its highly variable humidity, which fluctuates frequently depending on the shifting patterns of air flow and wind direction. It is common for a lengthy series of warm, dry, low-humidity days to be occasionally interrupted by very warm and humid days, and vice versa. Humidity rises with winds from the east or southeast, when the air drifts inland from the Gulf of Mexico, but decreases significantly with winds from the west or southwest, bringing air flowing from Chihuahuan Desert areas of West Texas or northern Mexico.[76]
I never saw a cactus in Austin before...at least one that wasn't being cultivated in someone's yard. I do remember my time there for one hot and very humid summer...it made Mississippi feel nice in comparison, it definitely wasn't like Salt Lake City in climate.
Austin, yes, its hot as hell in the summer :)
[ADDED: Ah. Probably referring to Springfield IL.]
This is to say nothing of RTP and other areas outside of downtown.
Raleigh is well-positioned to handle this and while NC State is a huge draw, not the only game in town.
I do see academic towns really hurting from the lack of undergrads. That's a big decrease in population, and even if most businesses are allowed to open in the fall, lots of universities will take conservative measures and not let undergrads back on campus --- dorms etc. being an ideal transmission environment.
Students graduating this year will not be able to remain and work in the US because the US has stopped processing work visas and are explicitly preventing immigrants from getting new jobs.
This is in addition to the fact that international student numbers had already dropped over the past couple of years thanks to US hostility towards immigrants.
What story are you referring to? I've seen stories around the edges of this kind of thing for H1B's, but nothing so definite.
A student graduating now wouldn't need one yet anyone because they get two years of OPT if they were in STEM.
Yes, but it's also possible to use some (or all) of that OPT time on internships in industry. I have colleagues who were in that situation, and had to spend a few months back in their native country after graduation, while their visa was being processed because they had no OPT left.
That is a shocking number to me. Entire grad programs are in serious jeopardy if the worst case scenario plays out.
Those may all be more or less true, but the broader issue of why these programs are mostly populated by foreigners is that they're too expensive (for master degrees) and vastly underpaid compared to market rates for PhD degrees. (Consider the strike at UC Santa Cruz by PhD students for a wage that would allow them to cover their living expenses without having to commute hours to campus.)
US students, which most likely have already contracted debt to finance their undergraduate degree will simply go get a job that both pays better and may boost their carreers more, and may come with more social status, given the current wave of anti-academic sentiment.
In the PhD program I went through, it was predominantly populated by foreign students and Americans whose parents paid for their undergrad (like me). Unlike in the United States, foreign college graduates typically don't have a massive amount of debt to pay off. When you graduate college and owe $35-120k in student loans, deciding between "lets get a job with actual pay" versus "lets make essentially no money for another 4-8 years" is a very easy question to answer, and it doesn't favor going to grad school.
If you're American, your options are (1) very cheap undergrad, which makes it more difficult to go to grad school, (2) large amounts of debt, which makes it infeasible to go to grad school, or (3) have had your undergrad paid for, which is inaccessible to most.
America must ask itself why its students are not interested in grad school. Unaffordability (especially after an expensive undergrad) is absolutely a major issue, but from my experience at an Ivy, very few Americans were interested in grad school. And maybe that's fine, because doing research* is probably something that makes sense only for a small percentage of students. So there may not be a problem here, unless increasing this is an actual goal.
Without explicit measures, and with a more globally accessible approach to admissions, it stands to reason that the PhD demographics would move towards global population ratios, adjusted for access and affordability. And that's been the secular trend of the past 20 years.
*Master's is not research, and is primarily a way for universities to make money.
A friend of mine in a graduate physics program recently told me that he felt that 90 percent of the students lacked the aptitude to capitalize on the program at all, but that the university was financially incentivized to keep them in.
Obviously, this applies to both foreign and domestic students, but the point is that these programs are grossly inflated.
This is doubly sad because Northeastern BS in CS grads are probably the most successful group I interview and hire.
Makes me wonder what the typical curriculum is in a CS masters degree? How can so many people get a Masters without actually knowing fundamental programming skills?
Not a great analogy perhaps, but you can't get a Masters in French without speaking the language right?
My understanding is that a big part of the economic hit for universities is the profit from providing housing. If undergrads are not on campus, the profit vanishes. Dartmouth has historically cut staff and expenses rather than use it's endowment to weather crisis. They say it's because much of the endowment is tied to specific purposes, like building new buildings with the donors names affixed there-on. So a big endowment may not be of much value in weathering the current crisis if you can't spend it and your cash flow dries up.
Wait till you realize how much young engineering and sciences talent would remain outside the US and how much investment they will attract.
Makes sense. American universities are top-tier and lots of talent is abroad!
CS and EE in particular carry over in another country.
My take-away is that as the formerly safe and relatively simple general state funds dried up, universities invested more in securing funding through various creative means. Which requires more and better administration.
International student tuition is a big source of general funds. But attracting and supporting them takes some investment. So universities grow and they pay more for people who can better balance the books.
University finance is very diversified now. You can't directly see most of it. But you can see a bunch of foreigners walking around campus, and you can look up state employee salaries online. They're symptoms.
The problem is that finance is getting more complicated.
I think. This is just my layman's understanding.
For instance, at the University of Wisconsin, there is an VERY large, extremely expensive bureaucracy called DoIT. It stands for "Division of Information Technology". Basically, it's the department for all of the IT people at the University. It's enormously expensive because of the nature of the work they do. And that's just one of the operations level bureaucracies required to pull off something like a University of Wisconsin. There's Facilities. There's Campus Police, which are very important at a place like UW these days. Student Housing. Health Services. The list goes on and on.
These sorts of costs are not cheap, but they are necessary. (Or were necessary prior to covid, now? who knows?) Be that as it may, honest people can debate whether or not operational arms like DoIT are functioning as efficiently as they could be. My main point here was only to shed light on operational costs that many universities have which tend to be overlooked in conversations like these. Especially as those expenses are most likely the key contributors to the overall cost structure being discussed. At Wisconsin, due to a multi year campaign of cuts we have gotten the ratio of academic staff to non academic staff down to about 1:8 at one point. But at most large universities you'll find it in the range of 1:12 - 1:20.
Just pointing out that if you want to bring costs under control, getting rid of some dean and a professor is not gonna get you there when you have 20 or 30 systems analysts, programmers, db admins, or campus cops on that same payroll.
Stanford has a bureaucracy so big that it has its own campus, in Redwood City. 35 acres, 2700 staff, a gym, a pool, a bus line, an auditorium, and an art collection. That's only Phase I. It's growing.
This campus has no students. No professors. No labs. It's all support staff.
Stanford has only 2,276 faculty.
I'm not sure I believe that's the whole story, but I kind of want to see a more detailed breakdown to be sure it's not just a matter of silly categories for reasonable jobs.
If tomorrow the government decided that every university would have to fund itself on half its current budget would universities cease to exist or would they just be different.
I'd say the latter. I'd agree they're necessary to how a college functions today, but not necessary to what we think of as the core functions that make a university a university.
8 admin workers for each faculty member? Yeah that's a ridiculous number.
Maybe why US universities have ridiculous tuition as well.
But hey, you gotta convince the students that the 6 figures tuition and the "campus life" is worth it right? Oh and don't forget parking is not included nor are the "books" that require a "code" for you to pass the class.
Edit: University College London has 7700 academic staff and 5375 non-academic staff. (it's a bit annoying but the data is there) https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/staff/working-in-he...
Because I can't quite see how it's an actual factor? If we're talking deans and university presidents, the numbers are just too low to make a difference for universities with tens of thousands of students. Plus, obviously, some Dean of Harvard Law might be earning millions but would still be underpaid relative to what they could command in the private sector.
If it's "administrators" as in "lowly" bureaucrats, how do they have the power to be given salaries beyond what's needed to attract them in the marketplace? If we compare their relative level of education with your average San Francisco Javascript coder, are their salaries still too high?
Speaking of COBOL: University IT staff, which would seem to be among the categories of "administration", is almost stereotypically underpaid compared to the private sector. Staying within the PhD comics universe, graduate students, postdocs, and other non-tenured faculty often have to fudge the numbers to delude themselves into believing they make more than minimum wage. This would also seem to disprove any theory that universities are particularly generous or incompetent when it comes to labor exploitation.
Beyond that, it seems strange how you are linking these two issues, of administrative salaries and foreign students. There is absolutely no reason to believe that money coming in via these students is different in any way to, say, grants or patent royalties or donations from alumni or really any source of income.
Foreign students pay more than their relative share of costs. Thus, they lower costs for everyone else. They take nobody's spot, but allow for more (subsidised) US students to attend.
This holds as long as an additional $1,000 made from foreign students does not, on average, result in admin salaries rising >$1,000. That would seem to be a pretty safe assumption, and I doubt anyone can come up with a plausible mechanism for why it should not be the case.
It really seems to me like you have two rather specific grievances, the choice of which I can't really explain except that I have a tingling sense they might have distant roots within the same corner of the ideological spectrum. And because these are your associations when the topic of universities comes up, or because you believe it helps to validate each, you've drawn some connection between the two.
But since neither is particularly well-tethered in reality, they really don't have much support to offer each other.
Admin salaries aren't enough to raise tuition much for everyone. If a university president makes a megabuck, and the school has 5000 students, that's $200/student. If it's a dozen admins making a megabuck, and the president making a few megabucks, that's a couple thousand dollars per student.
But that's not the point. Megabuck salaries draw in the wrong people for the wrong reasons. That dean of HLS you talk about: Should it be someone who retired from a high-profile law firm or government job and took a pay cut to help make sure a new generation of lawyers get mentored RIGHT? Plenty of people would do that. Or should it be someone looking to maximize quarterly KPIs and find ways to leverage that position for personal political/career/financial growth? That's the change which happened in elite academia in the past 25 years, with megabuck salaries.
And yes, universities do try to attract foreign students, especially into Master's programs, as cash cows. I'm not sure what's wrong with that -- people need educations, immigrants of this type grow economies, and universities need money. It seems like a win-win-win all around.
But there does get to be a problem when that money is managed by admins of the type described in the previous paragraph. More money doesn't make for better schools if it goes into spending hundreds of millions on fancy buildings, faculty clubs, and similar. General funds don't come with even the minimal financial controls of grants and donations.
Without having studied any university financial reports in detail lately, anecdotally one of the issues isn't so much megabuck salaries at the individual level but general administrative sprawl--which there have been complaints about for decades.
Some of this is just Parkinson's Law stuff. (As he originally wrote about the British Admiralty.) Bureaucracies tend to grow.
It's perhaps also the case the today universities need more administration to handle increased compliance and other requirements.
That's exactly what is happening, and the mechanism is simple. It's the original bundle and upsell model. It doesn't take terribly much imagination to consider why this might be the case:
- second largest purchase (maybe single largest purchase) most Americans now make in their life
- purchased when prefrontal cortices haven't fully developed (~18yo in most cases)
- sold as an "investment" to parents (you "need a bachelor's degree to get a good job")
- purchased as an investment by students (I want a career after college) but also as an "experience" (I need to party, mingle, socialize with the opposite sex for the only 4 year span of your life where I will ever experience actual freedom)
- financed with debt products guaranteed by the government
- .. but which often cannot be discharged in bankruptcy (!!)
Why wouldn't such a "product" balloon in breadth, depth and average cost given that it's an enormous industry? The US student debt market alone is ~$1.6T. To give a benchmark for comparison, the US mortgage market is $11T, and those consists of bonds securitized by assets.
> There's like five comments with this "huge salaries for administrators" theme. Is that some political party's talking point? Did it feature in some Netflix hit?
Your argument boils down to "I can't haven't researched any of the details here and I can't come up with any off the top of my head so it must be the result of ideological astroturfing." In doing so, you completely ignore one of most insidious modern forms of legalized debt slavery. Don't reduce and flatten arguments you don't agree with. It's not just wrong, but it conditions you into ignorance and against engaging in a basic investigation of the details.
Provided by the government, not guaranteed.
You seem to be arguing that it's impossible for anyone to be paid too much, because of the simple existence of the free market system.
But that way of thinking completely ignores the outcomes of that tuition spent. If other countries produce graduates that are the same or better, for less tuition, then you should be looking at that as a flaw in our system. That means the free market is not working efficiently, and more competition in the sector would drive prices down without loss of quality.
As for the questions about international students, I decline to comment, as I agree it's specious.
That's sort of the definition of a salary subject to market forces, yes. But, as an alternative, I even suggested comparing administrators' salaries with education-matched employees in IT startups.
You're not offering any specific alternative, but OP's comment and yours seem to basically amount to "I know what people should earn, and 'administration' is useless anyway."
> If other countries produce graduates that are the same or better, for less tuition, then you should be looking at that as a flaw in our system.
Many countries produce many things cheaper than the US, often at the same quality. Foodstuffs are an obvious example, but there are many more: a pilot in China or South Africa earns far less than an American, even though they are trained to the same standard. Does this mean US pilots are overpaid? Taxi drivers the world over provide pretty much equal service, but does that mean US taxi drivers should earn $1.20/day (average Iraqi daily income for taxis)?
But even assuming US universities are too expensive, which I would tend to agree with, I was specifically challenging the idea that high salaries are as dominant a part of the explanation as the relative number of comments here focussing on it suggests. And because "administrators" was and remains ill-defined, I offered specific reasons why that is unlikely for a number of groups that people might be referring to.
While you've devoted a paragraph to reading the emotional subtext of my comment, you neglected my rather plain request to be a bit more specific: by "administrator", are you referring to the Dean of the Law School, the Quinnipiac Polling Call Center Temp, the Executive Assistant to the Greenkeeper, the Physics Postdoc,...?
Anyway, here's four alternative explanations that make more sense, IMO:
- US universities spend more on research, and use tuition money to (partially) fund these activities.
- US undergrad programs spent far more on student life, such as luxurious dormitories or sports centres
- US tuition includes medical care, doesn't it? US medical care is famously inefficient.
- US universities, even public ones, rely far more on tuition than universities in other countries, that get comparably higher government subsidies
More broadly, there seems to be a lot of money coming in as student fees, and very little going out in academics' salaries. If things in-classroom are so profitable, there must be a heck of a lot of out-of-classroom expenses going on.
For the 1980-81 school year, $20.7B at 41% for instruction and $13.0B at 26% for administration yields $16.6B at 33% for other than instruction/administration.
For the 2014-15 school year, $148.0B at 24% for instruction and $122.3B at 29% for administration yields $239.7BB at 47% for other than instruction/administration.
That means, for approximate multiples, instruction increased 7.15x, administration increased 9.41x, and other than instruction/administration increased 14.44x. When I recalculate what the 2014-15 expenses would have been had they all increased at the same rate as instruction, I get $29.35B excess for administration and $121.02B excess for other than instruction/administration.
It seems to me, based on those estimates, that the elephant in costs is somewhere in that "other than instruction/administration" category. Overpaid administrators are certainly a problem, but they appear to be a relatively minor problem.
Even if you aren't making the salary you could elsewhere, universities usually have pretty good working environments and benefits.
Free tuition, great retirement plans, good health insurance, lots of holidays, relaxed work schedules and dress codes.
Source: I worked at a top 5 US university as an employee, on both the business and academic sides, for 7 years.
The key difference is: our universities do not run expensive world-class sports teams (while there are amateur things such as racing, these do have an educational focus as they tend to be a side gig of the mechanics courses) and at the same time are properly financed by the state.
On the other hand, college educated citizens are less likely to enter the army out of desperation (so no more cheap replaceable cannon fodder for the endless wars) or to agree to usurious 20%+ APR payday loans or end up in private prisons or work as replaceable cogs in Amazon warehouses, "gig economy", farming, meatpacking or whatever else exploitative labor market. This costs the rich elite donating to politicians actual money in profits.
Incentives for politicians are not aligned with the targets for a better society, that is the core issue.
Most universities have some form of dorms, however they're usually wildly inadequate in numbers - but as most students come from the town or nearer region of the university and don't move across half the country they can live at their parents' houses.
As for amenities: who needs special "college amenities" here? Sports is provided by the town (public sports training grounds), its clubs (for team sports) and for really niche stuff sometimes by the universities themselves, drinking is allowed both in public and in a number of bars, discos and other venues... so what is missing? (Honest question, my knowledge about US campus culture is based upon more or less shitty comedy movies)
As for TAs: yes we absolutely have higher-grade students doing teaching or scientific assistance at university, source: many friends have done this.
> As for TAs: yes we absolutely have higher-grade students doing teaching or scientific assistance at university, source: many friends have done this.
Neither of those are called TAs. The first kind is a graduate student lecturer, the second is called an RA (research assistant). One or more TAs for a large course typically helps the professor in running sections and grading homework, those two things being missing from most German courses (from my understand being told by my friend about his college experience in Germany; they might have homework, but it wasn't graded).
Academia should be academia and only dedicated to further scientific knowledge and teaching, not to spend boatloads of time and resources to hunt for half year grant money or sports revenue. Just imagine all the management time of what is consumed by sports go to helping the professors deal with grants/funding issues - that would be a major boost for science if scientists could actually do science things instead of management things!
https://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athle...
Are they actually, when all's said and done? (Genuinely asking, I've no idea). In particular, after the facilities are paid for? Non-education-related sports facilities (stadiums and such) are notoriously nearly always net costs to the government who subsidise them.
Stadiums can sometimes look for public subsidy when being replaced or re-built, but they can equally make a claim that their presence brings in millions of dollars of revenue to the local area over the course of a season and that the cost of the stadium can easily be amortized over decades (something that is actually easier for a collegiate program in a mid-sized city to claim than a pro team in a major urban center.) The ancillary facilities like practice space, offices for coaching staff and other infrastructure are almost always paid for by the athletic programs to the best of my knowledge.
Running a college is expensive. Everything costs more, including the blue-collar work force, so tuition correspondingly costs more. Public schools must also deal with drastic cuts in state support--the UC system, for example, only receives 10% of its budget from the state of CA (but used to receive more than 90% of its budget from the state).
I don't know how the numbers work out but I suspect you could run a private college in the US for less than the mid to high 5-figure $ per student per year they seem to charge.
My daughter is going to school in the fall, and I ran into this pricing strategy immediately. Her choice of college started tuition at over $50k/year, but offers "scholarships." These aren't Pell Grant etc, but scholarships that apply only to this institution. You get a scholarship for touring the campus. You get another scholarship for being a state resident. Eventually, you're effective tuition rate is cut in half.
This strategy is brilliant because it works on 3 axis; first, the parents feel like they're getting a good deal (since the effect of anchoring the tuition at $50k is hard to resist). Second, the school can appear elite since it charges a high tuition. Third, the student (and parents) feel good because their kid "earned" scholarships.
Page size is 11.64MB without any ad blocking and 3.91MB with. For a 3 image article with ~600 words 3.91MB is still a bit much.
Would you trust an architect who aced some online course with a building that you will live in? Or doctor to perform your surgery?
How did you come to that conclusion? I would agree on the money-making machine part, but I had rather a different and mostly positive college experience on the education side, both in undergrad and graduate school.
This part made me curious. Is grad school not all that competitive to get into?
Journalists just want things to say they think people might read.
Maybe schools can pay competitive wages to their researchers while state schools focus admissions on state students?
I am not sure why state schools exist if not to teach the state students, esp. if taxpayers have to fund them. Is it strictly a jobs program then, to feed local profs, staff, restaurants and so therefore they have a duty to the taxpayer to just bring in the most income?
For example, in the 1970s, the state of CA covered more than 90% of the UC system budget. In 2020, CA only covered around 10% of the UC budget.
My alma mater, Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, pays their coach $533k/year. That is half-a-million dollars for a mid-tier team in a mid-tier conference. They also built a $13 million indoor sports practice facility a few years ago. https://miamiredhawks.com/sports/2018/6/7/facilities-indoor-...
As the coach of a multi-million dollar business, 533k is justified. Especially since the talent is currently not compensated. If you want to compete you have to spend a decent amount. You're right that Miami of Ohio is mid-tier but the 533k is a mid-tier salary these days (#112 in rankings). There are 6 other MAC schools with higher coach salaries than your school. [2]
Also, from your own article "The 91,000-square-foot facility was built completely with donor contributions and is used by student-athletes, intramural and club sports participants and youth athletic tournaments."
Donor contributions.... And used by everyone for various sports including youth... So I'm not sure why you are so upset.
Aside from that - there are 108 schools with athletic revenue of 30+M. [1]
And, "The average college football team makes more money than the next 35 college sports combined" [3].
[1] https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/
[2] https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/salaries/
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/college-sports-football-reve...
[4] https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/miami-university-oxf...
Additionally, many states require that coaching salaries above a certain threshold not be paid out of tuition dollars, so boosters are actually funding the salaries of many coaches at the FBS (fka Div I-A) level.
Masks reduce R0 so much that in Austria the infection rate plummeted after Apr 6 when masks were required.
The lockdowns are a last resort, the result of a public policy failure to contain the virus.
The entire US establishment including the CDC, Fauci even Mike Pence said until mid March not to wear or buy masks. Mind you, not even the cheap surgical ones that are 50 in a box.
I have pamphlets in NYC written by the city’s health agency Feb 26th that insist there are no confirmed cases in NYC and the risk to new yorkers remains low.
NO ONE was willing to get ahead of this thing and look silly requiring masks when there was no emergency.
So the outbreaks were swift and led to exactly the lockdowns we were in now.
We will face this situation again as we emerge from the lockdowns.
We can’t rely on government to create a clear framework for businesses to follow. We need businesses to step up and sell a standardized solution.
At Qbix we are doing our part. Contact me if you want to help in your community.
Even the most staunch libertarian can’t say no when a private building enforces a mask policy in their lobby and in public areas like elevators. No amount of social distancing will help in elevators - only masks can.
But the stupid attitude is “a mask can’t protect me, so why bother?” No!! The masks are to prevent everyone from spewing virus particulates into the air.
Seriously this is the 21st century and several months after China got the epidemic, the richest countries in the world are still complaining about not enough masks.
Meanwhile in Taiwan the buildings are handing them out and you can drop them off. That’s how it should be.
AFAIK it was because there was a mask shortage and giving masks to healthcare workers provided greater utility than giving them to everyone else.
Sometimes I wonder if the U.S. is purposefully trying to move down in world rankings... I'm not sure why anyone would think it's a good idea to intentionally limit the opportunities to the best and hardest working people in the world; those opportunities will just spring up elsewhere instead. I have a theory that a society cannot maintain leading world standings without also leading in science and technology, and it's not long before the U.S. loses this (if it hasn't already). Most of the greatest recent technological advances are already driven by people born outside the U.S. that work within the country; it wouldn't surprise me if they decide that coming to the U.S. is just no longer worth the hassle.
So it will take some time to lose that lead, and there will be push back from the immediate beneficiaries: DoD, national science labs, Tech sector. In fact some drastic parts of the recent immigration restriction plans were removed due to pressure from tech CEOs.
In the meantime this is a golden opportunity for Canada. Toronto and Montreal already have world-class CS research cluster which they can build on, and attract scientists frustrated with anti-immigrant sentiments in the US and EU.
That's not the majority of international students in the US. It's those whose parents can afford to pay for them to study abroad.
There's already something very fishy about the university system that anyone who can pay more than they cost isn't let in. Why do admission slots even exist?