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Comment by unishark | Hacker News Reader

> International students, however, by and large, pay the full ride in most schools in undergrad and in master’s programs. Very few schools offer any scholarship to international students, and of those that do, the terms are often not as comparable.

In my experience this is almost completely false. They do have to pay out-of-state tuition to public schools, and they generally aren't eligible for taxpayer-funded need-based aid. But we don't blink at giving scholarships to international applicants just as often as domestic. Often international students dominate the applications to master's programs, and get all the scholarships too.

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I was an international student (undergrad) and your impression is... well, it differs from mine.

No need-blind admission (except at the school I went to, the others literally told me I was too poor) and no government funded student loans (my private loans, which were still non-recourse, started accruing 12% interest the day I took them out)

Graduate school is slightly different in that you're often working for the school to cover the tuition, and who is eligible will be based on the donors and the program administrators.

I have been on the admissions committee at a university and literally chose students to award scholarships to.

You can be too poor to be eligible for a visa (which goes for any country I'm aware of), there is a govt requirement to be able to support yourself. Otherwise I find it odd that schools would tell you anything about why you weren't accepted.

As for "no government funded student loans", I said there were no taxpayer-funded student need-based aid.

Graduate school includes Master's programs which the blog post was also talking about, and which only rarely come with teaching or research assistantships (those are primarily for supporting phd students). But international students are just as eligible for those as anyone else. It's much more common for MS students to get a scholarship than an assistantship.

For phd students, the primary sources of funding is overwhelmingly research grants the faculty member themselves get from the NSF and NIH. These grants almost never require the supported students to have permanent residency. Many programs (e.g. phd in electrical and mechanical engineering and many schools) would cease to exist if that were a requirement.

So, in your estimation, do you think that

1) international students are a major source of revenue for many US colleges and, more strongly,

2) they bring in a higher share of the revenue than what their share of students is?

Is this curiosity, or a moving goalpost as part of an argument?

Seems to me that completely depends on the school. Maybe international students will only come to a particular school if they get a free ride, while local domestic students will pay the tuition for the convenience of being near home.

At tuition-driven schools (i.e. most schools, but not the big ranked research schools we always hear about), most students are there as sources of revenue, except for the stars they can entice with full scholarships.

At research schools, research grants are the main source of revenue. The rest is a sideshow.

Also in either type of school, if they live off campus (far more common for MS and phd students than undergrad) then they are less revenue per student. Schools are essentially in the hotel business too. We are learning all about this lately.

> Is this curiosity, or a moving goalpost as part of an argument?

The reason I ask is because there seems to be a side argument on who is paying more, domestic or international students. I would’ve thought foreigners pay more (that seems to be the case in the UK), but would defer to your first hand expertise.

However, what the article is predicated on is just that international students bring in “enough” revenue that they can be used as leverage against the universities. I was wondering whether you’d concede that.

not sure if this applies in states, but here in Canada, the graduate studies simply see more international students because local students are more interested in working rather than continuing education beyond an undergrad degree.

Yes this is exactly what happens in STEM. It is less well-regarded domestically as a vocation, while in many other countries it is considered as a pinnacle of achievement (not to mention a stepping-stone to residency). So our top students go into medicine/law/business or whatever instead, while top students from other cultures come for STEM grad school.

I agree with this 100%. US higher ed is largely funded by tax (direct and indirect). International students paying full tuition, even if true, is insignificant. I think there’s been a misguided focus on admitting international students over the past two decades. Some of the reasons behind it are valid such as diversity and globalization. However, it’s also contributed to skyrocketing tuition costs.

Sorry, what? How do international students, being an "insignificant" amount of the total, contribute to skyrocketing costs?

The post implies that supply and demand is driving up tuition costs, and is stating that higher education is heavily funded by tax.

The latter part resonates with me. Taxes provide major funding to big public schools like Ohio State, where most American students attend school. Phd programs are often fully funded by NSF and other government agencies. The article seems to be talking about private schools, which are much more expensive but not the only option. And while this may not be true at Harvard, across the country most Americans going to private schools are paying full tuition. This is a big part of the reason private school are viewed as unequal, wealth divides. Poorer american students often can’t go to many private schools where they can’t get financial aid to attend. The school will only have scholarships for a small number of students, and the rest need to be wealthy enough to pay the tuition.

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