Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

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I wonder how much generational impacts there are here. My son is a PhD student at an ivy. The most lucrative tuition source for the university is foreign students (as in, they bring in far more tuition dollars for each foreign student than they do native). He has also observed that the payers of these tuitions are usually the parents, who tend to be people who rose through the ideal of "the dream of american education" that is now 20+ years old. As the students (children) go through the programs, they are finding it increasingly more hostile to live and study here. So they end up wanting to "go back home". The Xenophobic rhetoric, as well as the policies, are having an effect. He does not see this as a good thing at all.

Multiple of my children have considered moving abroad to study. It's weird to sit between them and their frustration of the system, and their grandparents (our parents) who seem to think that the crap they're embibing off of fox news, all so that advertisers can target/fleece the older generation, will actually lead to good for their grandchildren.

Why is it necessary to have a flood of foreign money to operate the university? Universities in the past operated without an influx of wealthy foreign students paying outrageous tuition.

Today they are bloated with administration that is nothing but a cost center, meanwhile they eliminate tenured professorships and have classes taught by tenuous adjunct faculty who are paid poverty wages. Universities could easily right the ship by cutting the administration and focusing on teaching and research, but the people who need to make the decision to do that are the ones who would be cut.

Continual cuts to both state funding and federal research support is a large part of it for public universities. Essentially, every time there is a major budget crisis, state support gets slashed, and it never gets put back when things get better.

Tuition is one of the few levers left, and while people will object to tuition hikes for in-state students, very few people will do the same for foreign students.

More money, more income. That's why flood of foreign money is good for a university. But, it is a fallacy to think that this has no cost.

In my experience, the large influx of foreign students are typically at the masters level. MS classes are typically (not always lol!) more advanced than undergraduate classes. So, you need more qualified instructors, such as your tenured/tenure track faculty to teach them. When you take T/TT faculty out of undergraduate classes and replace them with teaching faculty, you lose a lot. (Let me know if you need what's lost to be spelled out.)

> Why is it necessary to have a flood of foreign money to operate the university? Universities in the past operated without an influx of wealthy foreign students paying outrageous tuition.

I guess it is not strictly necessary, but it brings in a lot more money, which the university is of course very eager to take.

>but the people who need to make the decision to do that are the ones who would be cut.

It's devastating when you learn so many of society's problems are due to this.

> The most lucrative tuition source for the university is foreign students (as in, they bring in far more tuition dollars for each foreign student than they do native).

Those probably aren't STEM PhD students, whose tuition (especially at Ivies!) is normally paid for out of research grants or teaching funds.

In 2007 I was an Italian citizen studying at a university in Texas.

For a final project, we built a cool autopilot, and demoed it on several vehicles, including a precision dropper airplane, and a sailboat.

The airplane happened to be slightly better than what the USAF admitted to having at the time.

There were 5 of us working on that project, including 1 US citizen.

The citizen got a NASA internship out of it. The rest of us were put on a list and I for one had a very tough time getting a green card later on even with a NIW.

I shudder to think what this maladministration is doing to foreign STEM students now!

Jesus. That's horrible. I'm glad you finally prevailed. Was this a doctoral program?

There is no shortage of US families who would pay the $100k/yr for top 10 university education.

This phenomenon (which is just an extreme version of out-of-state tuition for state schools) is almost entirely undergraduate driven, not STEM PhDs, who as mentioned in other posts, have tuition either waived or paid for via grants.

There was a whole thing if you recall in the first Trump admin about treating tuition waivers as income, which at an Ivy is potentially a financially catastrophic thing for a grad student.

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