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Comment by gkop | Hacker News Reader

Public universities make their tuition money on the out-of-state and foreign students, so your denominator here is an order of magnitude too big. Every marginal out-of-state or foreign student lost, is one or more in-state students whose tuition cannot be subsidized.

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200 out of 3500 is still not enough to care.

Prices are discovered on the margin, I wouldn’t be so sure. I believe university administrators do care, anyhow.

Those students are meaningless to Purdue financially. They can replace those students in a heartbeat.

Please respond to my points. Prices are discovered on the margin, so losing a significant chunk of the students that pay full tuition, could certainly destabilize the market and cause challenges for university administrators.

Ok, say Purdue eats the acquisition cost to replace the 200 students. Those new students now need to be replaced by whatever school they would have otherwise attended, they have to come from somewhere. There exists some tipping point at which the system could unravel, maybe not 200 students but some number of students.

Acquisition cost is zero at this point - there are wait lists and no shortage of talented people from other countries that would love to go to Purdue or any other comparable school. They can also easily pull from the out of state basket. Also, you have to account for financial repercussions if they do nothing.

> There exists some tipping point at which the system could unravel, maybe not 200 students but some number of students.

Perhaps, but again 200 students is inconsequential to Purdue as I stated. They have the ability to replace instantly and they have a > $2.5 billion endowment.

The system would unravel due to overextension of loans and people deciding it's not worth it to take the debt on that they have been doing. That's the unravel risk. And it would hit the low tier schools anyway.

What Purdue or others with similar challenges cannot do, is nothing. Not everyone gives a shit about appeasing China. Maybe LeBron, the NBA and some other organizations care because it has been all about the $ for them. But things are changing. Women's Tennis is standing up. Biden making a statement regarding Olympics. Not many examples out there but they're becoming more frequent.

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