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.