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Comment by pfannkuchen | Hacker News Reader

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International students are not displacing Americans; they pay tuition, often at higher rates, and help sustain universities. The real problem is that higher education has been underfunded for years, and the current administration has only made things (much) worse by cutting funding further.

Universities and research are already struggling because of poor leadership and lack of investment, not because of international students. In the 2023-2024 academic year, international student numbers only comprised ~6% of the total U.S. enrollments.

Tuition has been increasing at a rate much greater than inflation for several decades, largely through price-insensitive loans. The idea that universities are struggling for money is not supported.

We need these Unis to cut costs and administrators. Propping up waste through courting rich foreigners is not a long-term solution.

I agree that costs and administrative growth need to be cut, and that relying on international tuition is and should not a long-term fix. But international students are not the primary cause of rising costs or problems in universities as the original comment I responded to implied; tuition inflation, loan structures, and administrative expansion are.

Actually, yes, the state pays less per American student then it used it. That is large component of why the price went up, along with the expectation that universities act like a business.

The loans not being dischargable in bankruptcy does not help, but it was Republicans who were against those reforms.

Just a counterexample:

At Stanford, 36% of graduate students are international students (2024-2025 AY). While there are very good reasons for this, I think it's hard to argue that international students are not displacing US students, at least in grad school. For undergraduates, the number is 9% (2023-2024 AY). Stanford has tremendous financial resources and a main campus that is more than 12 square miles in size. They could grow the size of their student body if they wanted to.

International students at places like Stanford are not displacing Americans. Stanford is one of the top-ranked universities in the world, so the competition pool is global by definition. There is no evidence that equally qualified Americans are rejected in favor of international students. U.S. students remain the majority in both undergraduate and graduate programs.

The real barrier for many Americans is the cost of tuition, not competition with international students. That is where government and universities need to step up with better funding and support. Also, many international students stay in the U.S. after graduating, contributing to the economy and research. The problem is underfunding and poor policy decisions at the national level, not the presence of international students.

A few of the very most prestigious schools have chosen to keep their total enrollment low. In this case, sure, an international student is taking a slot away from a domestic student by having a more impressive resume. Once you leave behind a few highly exclusive schools, this pattern collapses and you just see universities growing their enrollment.

Stanford also has a unique relationship with Palo Alto where it is actually really difficult for them to build new facilities without approval from the surrounding area, but that is very specific to Stanford.

Stanford is skimming the absolute top students from around the world into its programs. There's more than enough capacity in US schools for the top 10% of US grad students and then the US gets the benefit of also getting the top 10% of other countries' grad students.

Well, that was the case up until this year.

I'm not actually sure they could: remember we're talking about California. UC Berkeley, just a few miles northeast, tried to increase their enrollment count and was tangled in years of NIMBY lawsuits from people blocking the construction of additional student housing, using CEQA to claim that students were an environmental hazard.

> Did NPR report the thousands of percent that it increased by over the past many years?

Yep.

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/26/g-s1-35654/trump-internationa...

International students pay full price, unlike American students. That's why the loss is such a big deal for them and also for American students, whose education was being subsidized by international student tuition.

Some part of American students’ education, yes, but a large number of colleges have also used the extra money to inflate spending in other non-academic areas such as administrator salaries, athletics, resort style dorms, etc. Of course when the international money runs dry, those are not necessarily the first areas to see cutbacks.

Most states (at least in the midwest) have not kept up with their obligations when it comes to funding the historical land grand universities ("state" university, etc.).

A lot of state universities (not just in the Midwest) have become professional football teams with an educational institution attached. And I say this as a fan of one of those teams.

There might be one or two exceptions, but generally the schools you are referring to are bursting at the seams with students.

Quick web search:

University of Georgia - enrollment up 3%

Ohio State - enrollment up 2.3%, highest in history

University of Alabama - enrollment exceeds 40,000 for first time in history

University of Michigan - couldn’t find enrollment, but it reported a record number of applications

“Subsidized” is inaccurate. A more accurate way to describe what’s been happening is that international students drove up the cost of tuition, forcing American students into debt or out of college.

The reason I characterize it this way is college tuition has skyrocketed. The same thing happens in private schools—wealthy grandparents are common enough that children without wealthy grandparents are much less likely to be able to go to private school.

Correlation != Causation. Do you have any evidence that international student enrollment is driving costs up (vs easy access to loans or other factors)?

I'm sure there's no hard "evidence" in the sense of a college administrator on video saying, "Gosh, I love these international students because they let us charge more!"

But it's just how prices work. If you're selling widgets for $5 each, and a new batch of customers come along who are willing to pay $10 for a widget, guess what your per-widget price is now. If you can't sell them all for $10, you might put the rest on sale for $5, but only after you've served all the $10 customers.

The universities are still taking some domestic and/or scholarship students too, but they're naturally giving preference to the full-paying ones.

Could there be other factors driving up tuition? Maybe, but student loans have been around for a long time, and I don't know that they've gotten a lot easier to get. Maybe the recent talk about student loan forgiveness has made some people more casual about taking on debt, assuming it will be forgiven, but that's questionable. The growth in international student enrollment is the one big obvious change.

It is interesting that you believe this is mainly caused by foreign students. It is a recurring theme in today’s society.

If you look at the data here [1] you can see there is a wide range of tuition costs for the top 100 universities in the USA, going as low as 6000 usd with the average in-state cost at 17,000 usd.

The most prestigious ones are more expensive. Why is that? A very significant part is the network effect people are buying, they are hoping to either get to know well off or connected colleagues, finish a thesis under a prestigious professor or just simply to have a degree from the fancy university. This is all in an attempt to get ahead. This effect is there regardless of any international students.

[1]: https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/best-schools/us-top-10...

Right, you're not being subsidized if you can't get enrolled at all at the school of your choice because the school filled up with full-freight foreign students.

Many top universities in the US have ~10-15% international. Hardly "filled up" with international students.

15% soaks up quite a bit of the excess supply in any market.

If they're filling 10-15% of the seats, that's 10-15% of the domestic student body they would have had that's been bumped.

A university's capacity isn't static. The money that comes in from foreign students can pay for additional capacity. You're talking as if every university was allocated a fixed number of seats in 1955 and now we all have to fight for one.

>A university's capacity isn't static.

Adding capacity isn't cheap. That gets passed on to the "customers". Which also raises the price for Americans.

>The money that comes in from foreign students can pay for additional capacity.

No, the cost gets spread out among all the customers. There are no mechanisms where discriminatory pricing kicks in, and only the foreign students pay for the additional capacity.

>There are no mechanisms where discriminatory pricing kicks in, and only the foreign students pay for the additional capacity.

There is exactly such a mechanism. The foreign students pay more!

I don't have the exact figures to crunch the numbers (and I doubt you do either), but it's pretty implausible to suggest that foreign students are somehow a loss maker for US universities. If foreign students were a net loss, then universities wouldn’t be so keen to admit them. And if they're profitable then they pay for their seats.

The US university system is an incredible national asset. There are incalculable benefits to having the world's best universities attracting the best students from all over the world. That some Americans have managed to convince themselves that this is a bad thing is enough to turn my brain inside out.

Foreign students aren't eligible for the scholarships and in-state bonuses American students are.

> There are no mechanisms where discriminatory pricing kicks in, and only the foreign students pay for the additional capacity.

Uh, state universities often have a mechanism for that, its called “out of state tuition”.

University student "capacity" is similar to Las Vegas hotel "capacity" - if they thought they could 2X the head count, without cutting their unit profit or damaging the brand, then they'd break ground on new capacity before the sun rose tomorrow.

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