I don't think anyone would have ever imagined that the US government would be nice enough to try to solve that problem and give up willingly their advantage like this. It's rare to see such altruistic leadership willing to sacrifice their own country for the good of others.
The biggest may be the way that it displaces native students who've often been paying big taxes over the years to improve the schools. Yet they get bumped to a lower tier school or forced to pay for private education.
It's one thing when the incoming talent is undeniable, but in many cases schools will actively (and openly!) search for foreign students who pay substantially more in tuition.
There are also problems with language for some incoming students. I know of at least one state school that is actively turning away state residents while scolding the professors for grading foreign students for poor grammar and English writing.
I feel like this is more of an economic issue than an education issue at heart. I agree that in most cases the incoming talent is not undeniable, so there is little argument for favoring foreign students over domestic students besides an economic one. Somehow foreign students, universities acting as corporations, and global trade has created the mess of the current education system which includes our whole student loan fiasco which makes the younger generation quit before they even start. It seems that colleges have lost sight of being primarily a system to educate the next generation.
Its a similar issue to american businesses taking their jobs overseas, but instead american colleges have, in some sense, taken their education overseas.
How about an educational one? Colleges put a huge of effort into recruiting diverse student bodies, one justification being that students learn from interacting with classmates of different backgrounds. This is most often cited as a reason for racial and economic diversity, but when I was in college I found it applied much more strongly to diversity of nationalities. I took a seminar on the history of revolutions which I found was improved by the fact that I got to hear what my French classmate had to say about the French Revolution and what my Latin American classmate thought about Simón Bolívar. I did an art/graphics project with a German student who taught me about the Bauhaus style, which we took inspiration from. My language and linguistics classes were vastly improved by having native speakers of other languages easily available. And it was a bit uncomfortable, but I think it was valuable that I got to talk about LGBT issues with students who had recently come from countries where queer people are much less visible/accepted. As a native student, my education would have been impoverished if I hadn't had as many foreign classmates, and I think I probably would have benefited from having even more.
> It seems that colleges have lost sight of being primarily a system to educate the next generation.
International students are also part of the next generation.
Elon Musk wouldn't have been able to do what he did had he continued living in SA.
The US had a great advantage going on due to a combination of factors that they are reducing with their own policies.