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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit unfair to to US universities to suggest they made this situation. There is a huge demand from foreign families who have the means to pay for a quality education and who live where university capacity it not able to keep up with demand at home.

US schools can raise the quality of their student body, not to mention raise their income by meeting this demand. And on the other side of the ledger, it can be argued the US has too many university seats.

Maybe they need to better prepare students for not being able to stay in the US, via exchange programs with universities in students' home countries, for example. There isn't going to be an H1-B for everyone straight out of school.

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certainly they arn't all the blame, but they are also not blame free. for some reason, engineering programs over favor test scores. In China, their schools prepare their students to take our tests such as the GRE. also in china, they take paper exams (because that makes it easier for them to cheat). As an engineering student, i met several chinese students who got perfect verbal scores for the GRE but could barely hold a conversation. i asked, they said they were lucky. i pressed, they said they bought the questions and answers prior to the test. I'm honestly perplexed that US universities even allow chinese GRE results.

with that being said, engineering programs want to have entrepreneurship in their programs, but 80% of their cohorts are from countries that are risk adverse. the above commentator's students gave up at VISA, you really think they have the chops?

How about just re-evaluating the acceptance criteria. look for other criteria besides standardized test scores instead of complaining that they gave up at VISA so thats why they're struggling to have alumnae who started their own companies. Americans are 'supposed' to be entrepreneurial. not sure if that's true but the top engineering/cs programs are eager to over look them.

If you don't have a visa, you can't stay in this country beyond a certain point. That has nothing to do with having killer chops for entrepreneurship.

I can attest to this. I had to leave US last September due to visa expiration.

i'll bet you if you gave an hour to think about it, even you who made that comment can think of at least 3 ways that statement is wrong.

entrepreneurs find ways.

what? no you can't "entrepreneur" your way out of govt policies. and no, marrying for the sake of greencard is not an option either as sooner or later govt will catch you on that as well.

I have seen where foreign students who are very well prepared by an excellent high school education but who would not make it into an elite school at home due to pretty much infinite demand for a constrained supply get a quality university education here, and I have seen both graduate and undergraduate foreign students cheat their way in, and in too many cases, through a US university education, and everything in between. Though it looks like the numbers favor the former being the majority.

I think we can agree any visa program would need a way to distinguish among them. But also consider that George W. Bush graduated from Harvard Business School. If you have the juice, anything can be made to happen.

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