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Comment by toby | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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