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Comment by tmoney9999 | Hacker News Reader

Only possible good thing I can see from a US student perspective is that it's now more reasonable to go to grad school in US. Many programs in STEM have gotten out of hand with the number of the foreign graduate students--in some programs the number is over 80% [1]. I think this has led to the US educating many persons who later leave the country for visa issues. Also, some of the competition to get in can be considered bogus: near perfect GRE math which measures high school level math skills is hardly germane for research.

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...

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> I think this has led to the US educating many persons who later leave the country for visa issues

I’ve never been to the US but, if this is the problem then wouldn’t it be better to make it easier for people to stay also after they have finished their degrees? If the goal is to have a lot of highly educated people in the US I mean.

USA educates more international students (by far) than any other country. I think the goal of policies like this is to prefer US students. But you're right that it would also be nice if foreign students had an easier time staying in USA after they graduate.

It wouldn't just be nice - it'd be smart. We could probably have more immigrant-owned business and immigrant-developed inventions of we made it easy for foreign born US graduates to stay. Both of which should add jobs to the economy and make the US more economically competitive.

I think everyone would support that kind of policy except where it would have an adverse effect on American students. The goal of policies like this are to promote USA students admission to higher education over foreign students. But the reality is that foreign student tuition is a huge money-maker. So USA students are at a disadvantage in the admissions process.

I agree. I'd like to see more educated foreigners stay in the US through a more sensible immigration policy. But another way to attempt to fix the weird brain-drain is by controlling who is getting the education.

I highly doubt that's what will happen. How many of these programs are dependent on foreign tuition? These aren't efficient institutions, mind you, so a downturn could lead to collapse of the weakest ones, leading to increase domestic competition at the remaining ones.

How many of these programs are dependent on foreign tuition?

At least some are. And this is nothing new.

When I went to college decades ago, I and a bunch of my friends got kicked out of our university at the end of the semester because it was over its legislatively-mandated limit for out-of-state students. The university had loaded up on lucrative international students in previous years, and when the ratio was changed, people like me got the heave-ho.

The problem is that we have to remove the greed from the university administrators. But good luck with that.

My comment was only considering graduate students, whom I think, are the group most affected by this change. Graduate students in STEM usually don't pay tuition--their lab pays the fees for them to be enrolled.

International Graduate students, even in STEM, are mostly Masters candidates paying extremely high fees.

https://cgsnet.org/master%E2%80%99s-or-doctorate-internation...

Well yes, of course, international students pay significantly more than in state. Money makes the university go round, that’s how the Confucius Institutes got started.

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