Hacker News Reader

Comment by wrp | Hacker News Reader

They won't close. They will just rely more heavily on foreign students. The primary focus of academia is to remain employed, not to serve the needs of the domestic student population.

View on HN

Nearly 20 Percent Fewer International Students Traveled to the U.S. in August - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45503960 - October 2025

U.S. colleges poised to close in next decade, expert says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45171434 - September 2025

Looming 'demographic cliff': Fewer college students and fewer graduate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42634596 - January 2025

Predicting College Closures and Financial Distress [pdf] - https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-... - December 2024

BestColleges: Tracking College Closures and Mergers - https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/closed-colleges-list-s...

(At least 84 public or nonprofit colleges have closed, merged, or announced closures or mergers since March 2020 as of this comment; I think the evidence is strong smaller for profit schools with enrollments <1k will continue to close well into the future)

This only works for exclusive, high prestige schools. Not many rich foreigners are going to pay full freight to send their kids to Western Kentucky University.

Rich foreigners will send their kids to big name schools, and WKU will adapt their pricing to get the kids of middle class foreigners.

America itself and the opportunity to get your foot in the door with a student visa is the prestige factor for many students - the prestige of the university is secondary. That allows a lit of third tier universities to fill their master's programs with international students

Those days are over with the current administration.

Not to worry, China will pick up the torch. They just came up with a new H1B style visa.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg4eeerzrwo

The community college I used to work at made its bread and butter from foreign students. Super mega rich parents sent their kids there. Many of them drove expensive cars. Community colleges in the US are actually highly regarded in a lot of places overseas, believe it or not. And this wasn't in some big city either. It was in kind of a town that isn't very well known for being a safe place to walk around at night.

There’s no shortage of rich foreigners with failsons who can’t get into Prestige U.

The supply of foreign students does depends on their career prospects in the US(which is getting worse at least in tech) and also the current administration is weighing policies that would cap intake of foreign students.

https://thebusinessfrontier.com/trump-tells-universities-to-...

The current administration is directly and indirectly eliminating the foreign student pipeline. Even if we somehow get out of this morass in the next few years, which is far from guaranteed, the long-term damage will take decades to repair if ever.

The foreign student population, incidentally, had been a big subsidizer of the domestic student population. They pay full tuition and get no domestic financial aid. But that flow is getting shut off, and between the domestic cliff and this self-inflicted international cliff, they will close. A lot of smaller liberal arts colleges have shut down in the last decades and we’re busily working to send the destruction up the food chain.

Third-tier private colleges are already shutting down. In the past few years some examples include Holy Names University, Iowa Wesleyan University, Marymount California University, San Francisco Art Institute, Wells College, and the list goes on. Colleges with minimal name recognition have no ability to attract foreign students.

Is there any profession where they aren't focused on staying employed?

You mean, is there any state funded system in which the primary drive of the system is to elrotect and expand itself, even at the expense of providing the good ir service for which it was created?

History says no...

You can literally just strike the words “state funded” from your sentence. If you don’t think companies function exactly this way, I’m not sure what to tell you.

And in a world where every competitor in a given market is owned by one of two or three megaconglomerates, “voting with your feet” stopped mattering long ago.

For one thing, very few markets are like that, and even then they face the threat of new entrants if they suck. e.g. the cab companies that got blown out by Uber. You are right that they fundamentally operate the same way as state funded entities, but having a revenue stream that is completely divorced from providing economic value allows the institution to keep its doors open at levels of rot 10x that which it takes to kill a megacorp.

Uber had to break a lot of laws and grease a lot of palms to do what they did and they still lose mountains of investor money every quarter (almost every? When they aren't liquidating regional divisions and calling those wins).

I don't think we want a system together where the way to make it work is to cheat and increase corruption. Maybe there are better examples of good ol' fashioned honest companies just plan ol' out competing entrenched incumbents without cheating or lying or hurting the public.

> You mean, is there any state funded system in which the primary drive of the system is to elrotect and expand itself, even at the expense of providing the good ir service for which it was created?

> History says no...

Aside from the obvious typos, I think that there is a crucial 'not' missing in the first sentence.

Also, why single out state funded systems? I don't believe that private enterprises have been a great model for provision of goods or services over self enrichment. (I now see that stouset said the same hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45546268.)

In medicine and law, it is unethical and sometimes illegal to choose your course of action based on profitability against the needs of the client. Teaching has been traditionally been held to the same ethical standard.

And to their credit, a healthy chunk of those practitioners seem to hold true to their oaths. The swelling ranks of administrators “optimizing their productivity” for the shareholders, on the other hand…

There are people who will read this, agree with this, and still not realise how absolutely fucked everything is.

I can believe that higher education is vital to an educated, critical thinking electorate (as well as developing well rounded citizens) while also believing that the current US college system is highly dysfunctional, trapping people in non dischargeable student loan debt for little lifetime wage premium or increased employment opportunity. I fully support community colleges, for example, as efficient education infrastructure. I have no degree credential, I am a high school dropout, but have used community colleges to learn (welding and fabrication skills) and was offered a job right after receiving certifications for those blue collar classes.

“The purpose of a system is what it does.” The current system sucks, and improvement is needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com