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Comment by xhkkffbf | Hacker News Reader

It is great for the US when smart people move there permanently, but the country shouldn't ignore the fact that there are significant issues for US citizens.

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.

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This seems to be a complex problem to solve. On one hand you don't want to lose access to the smartest minds, on the other you don't want your citizens to suffer from lower quality education because of it. But its also a very economic issue, in the sense that most foreign students pay handsomely to attend prestigious schools, so it makes short term economic sense to trade education for their wealth, meanwhile students at home must take on massive debt to compete economically to be of interest to the institutions.

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.

> there is little argument for favoring foreign students over domestic students besides an economic one

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.

A lot of these schools are using foreign students to subsidize their operations. Government funding to state universities has been falling, so if they can get thousands of foreign students to pay $50k/year that can help minimize tuition increases or spending cuts which impact the state's citizens.

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