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Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

What do you count as American CS grads? A lot of H-1B holders have a degree from an American school. (Edit) If you hold an American CS degree, aren't you an American CS grad?

If you close that pipeline, you'll lose those students, and then you have to find more funding, because international students usually subsidize local students.

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It wasn't until recently that I found out 40% of students at top colleges were not even American! I'm not specifically against foreign students, but 40%?

That and the H1B issue and American's not having jobs at American companies. Something isn't right.

Yes that something is the rapidly vanishing government funding for public universities.

I'm all for doing anything funding-wise that brings higher ed back to some kind of reality, even if we have to burn it all down to get there. The cost of education is outrageous and grads are not benefitting from their degrees the same way I was able to (at far less cost). We're at the inflection point there.

That comes with the territory of have the vast majority of the top universities in the world. One of the things that has kept the US as the global hegemon for the last 100 years is the fact that every other country sends their best and brightest to study here, and a significant fraction of those people stay here to work.

I agree the US could do more to take advantage of its position to benefit the average American, but torching exactly what put the country in that position is short-sighted at best, categorically stupid at worst.

Colleges and Universities charge the non-local rate for international students which is considerably higher than the domestic rate (example from Georgia Tech:

In state $30,154 Out of state $53,638 International $54,814

This incentivizes them to keep more slots open for those high dollar students making it even tougher to develop a domestic workforce.

Another way of looking at those numbers is that the out of state / international students are subsidizing the education of the locals. AS long as local governments keep up pressure on the universities to not go 100% out of state, then it's by and large a win-win.

That's great, but we're not doing enough for our own citizens at this point in time.

I feel for all human beings, but US education should be first and foremost directed towards helping US citizens. That's not racist, that's just common sense. We haven't even been doing that here! We're failing as a nation because shitty short-term profits always supersede the creation of long-term prosperity.

At one of my grad school classes, the prof could have taught the class in Chinese had it not been for me in there. And that was in the late 1990s.

While I disagree with GP’s premise, there’s no sense in which H1B visa holders are American. It’s a nonimmigrant visa. They are required to specifically disavow any intention of becoming Americans or else the visa can be revoked.

Yes and no. The H-1B visa is "dual intent" [1] and you are allowed to apply for and receive a green card (permanent resident card) while on an H-1B. After 5 years with permanent residence you can apply for citizenship. It is a common path, and the intention for the majority of people on an H-1B visa.

[1]: https://isss.temple.edu/faculty-staff-and-researchers/intern...

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