It's going to be a rough time for a lot of colleges that have been using foreign students paying full price to fund their operations. Especially now that the incoming college aged population is beginning to shrink and the percentage attending college has peaked, so the domestic population probably won't be able to fill the seats at less competitive colleges.
Perhaps they should tighten their belts and reduce administrative bloat. It’s not as if American society hadn’t collectively called for this for decades while tuition has risen astronomically.
It's not administrative bloat that makes colleges so expensive. "Administrative bloat" happens when a school becomes a city. Harvard/Stanford/MIT et al. cannot go back to some time when tuition was affordable while still being the research powerhouses they are.
Bigger organizations require more overhead and those costs don't grow linearly. I'm not saying that I think all those administrators are necessary or they all make things more efficient, but at the same time many of them are in place precisely because they are running an office that does make things more efficient. You get rid of one administrator and you may end up increasing the workload on everyone else by 20%, which seems like a win on paper because you lose their budget while not giving anyone else a raise. But getting rid of them made the whole organization less efficient.
e.g. My university's IT office has a huge budget and a bunch of administrators. It makes my life as a professor easier, and it gives students a better experience. It's very easy to say that the entire IT office should be eliminated to "tighten their belts and reduce administrative bloat". Which may be true, but at the same time it exists for a reason, and getting rid of it doesn't teleport us back to the 70s when campuses didn't need an IT office.
> It’s not as if American society hadn’t collectively called for this for decades while tuition has risen astronomically.
American society has called for better education, more teaching styles, more research, more technology, more subjects and classes, more majors, delivered to more students every year. There's no way we are going back, it's just not happening, the expectations are too high at this point. We can either decide maintaining these kinds of institutions are worth it, or trade off for worse outcomes and just give up on being serious about research. Seems like that's actually what this administration wants to do, but the public decidedly does not. However the public wants to have their cake (world class research institutions) and eat it too (low tuition affordable by the general public) and that's just not going to happen.
Education is weird as a product, because you're delivering the same experience to students but they each pay a different bespoke price. Sometimes schools even pay their own customers!
When a rich person sends their kid to school they get charged full sticker price. Then schools use some of that money to subsidize the educations of the other students. Given those dynamics, there's really no reason for the tuition sticker price to ever go down unless the uber-rich can't afford it anymore, because the actual price anyone pays is floating and can be whatever it needs to be for them.
Which is a completely unrelated effort from the free money you're getting from abroad.
Unless governments institute policies that require them to "tighten their belts" they won't tighten their belts by cutting their own pay. They'll tighten belts by cutting out the least paying students, and scholarships, instead.
If this does push governments to get universities to tighten their belts, then why not have governments make them do that anyways without losing a massive chunk of export earnings, and a form of export earnings which has demonstrated positive effects many times greater than the dollars they bring in.
Yep. This is, of course, what's really happening, same as before. The next step is that highly educated jobs in the industry disappear, which then gives you cheap colleges with great teachers, but not much reason to study, and then we're back where we started this whole debacle in the 1990s.
Next step is expensive grifty colleges with bad teachers, as all the good teachers will flee or just not go into teaching, and nothing will be cheap because then what’s the point of the grift?
Picture Bob Jones U at Harvard scale. Or the Musk school of engineering where they teach that sensor fusion is a bad idea actually.
Some of my favorite people to meet in college were foreign students. You get to meet diverse people and learn about the world. It's only a win if college is 20% cheaper this year. It's not.
Foreign money coming in will have to be made up elsewhere. It will be made up by raising tuition on remaining students. Schools that have a small enough applicant pool will price out their applicants and close. Likely they will be replaced by for-profit grifts that are much more affordable but don't actually do anything for the students except bilk them. The largest most international most diverse most administratively bloated schools will be fine. It's the small mostly-white rural colleges that will suffer the most.
Zero sum ass mentality. Top performing international students are likely to start companies and create jobs which is great for US high school and college students.
Immigrants make up 14% of the population but start more than 20% of businesses.
44% of fortune 500 companies are founded by immigrants or their children. Steve Jobs' dad was a Syrian immigrant student. Elon Musk was on F1, J1, and H1B visa.
What about them? Competent domestic students are not being crowded out by international students. Competent domestic workers are not being crowded out by immigrants. The opposite is happening, immigrants create new opportunities for natives out of thin air. That doesnt mean that natives dont, they both do.
An interesting thought. I think parents who work to instill an entrepreneurial mindset into their children are more likely to end up with entrepreneurial minded children. Whether immigrants do that Im not sure. Maybe they want their kids to have an easier/simpler life than they did
Student enrollment in the US is declining and the big problem for colleges the past few years has been a worry about not having enough students. So it's not clear why US students were struggling to get a college spot.
And if you mean them getting spots in the more prestigious institutions, well, it's not clear whether that will even happen (the few thousand international students admitted to the top universities are not the ones that are likely to decline their acceptance letters), but even if it did, well, those universities are simply not as prestigious anymore.
Attracting the best talent from anywhere in the world is a huge part of what created their prestige, and that's even before we get to how they're losing funding, and professors and researchers to other countries.
Fixed that for you. Wealth distribution is far from equitable and immigration by and large benefits the wealthy. They financially benefit from the cheap labor and are mostly immune from the downsides.
The US did great for hundreds of years with the limited immigration we had from primarily European countries. The world we live in today was built with that approach. Remains to be seen if importing from recently modernized / 3rd world countries provides any long term benefit for median Americans. We’d be much better off installing billionaires who wish to invest in the people because they feel an attachment to the people (noblesse oblige).
I can’t really see a good argument for foreigners outside of the Meiji government approach (learn from them to invest in our own) if you care about your people.
We had 'Asian road chaos' every fall where the rich ones would show up with their new Bugattis (edit: Maseratis) having never learned how to drive the thing and much less on the open American roads where you can really let the accelerator loose. They would cause endless crashes.
One or two of poor ones would end up committing suicide in the spring when they flunked out and had spent their entire little farming family's fortune back in some austere rice farming village.
It was quite the sight to see. I want to say they were fairly normal in intelligence, relatively, but the set of incentives for them to perform were wildly different.
I was being generous when I wrote the comment. Several of the internationals left me baffled about how they got there. The liberal HN audience here clearly has an axe to grind.
That still doesn't mean your experiences generalise in any useful way, and using phrases like 'liberal HN audience' only serves to highlight your own biases.
But they pay several multiples of money more to study than the average US citizen, take on no debt, and most of the time are studying for advanced technical degrees.
Most Americans are not.
If we want to have top-tier universities, and produce graduates capable of innovating and taking big risk, we need to have universities who are strong in STEM.
If we want to have universities who are strong in STEM, we need to fill up those seats because otherwise without students, there are no classes.
Sorry to break it to you, but the average American is quite...let's say, average. That's why they're average, lol. Likewise, the average Chinese. That's why their school system filters out tens of millions of schoolkids from higher education and puts them in trade school early. Same goes for India, Europe, etc.
Gifted, driven kids, the kind who will leave their family and everything they've known, to cross an ocean to study in your country, are a scarce resource.
I'm not saying you shouldn't prioritize locals, but if you want competitive, world-class educational system, you should be open to foreign students and faculty helping to keep your system competitive. It's the same worldwide, whether it's in Singapore's NUS, or Oxford, or Saudi Arabia's KAUST.
There's so few seats at these schools we could fill them with Americans and not notice a difference is my belief. We're talking about single digit acceptance rates where it's probably hard to distinguish students who apply at all.
Also I feel like it's not a good assumption that talented international students that come to top tier universities also have the same western vision of meritocracy and sharing their achievements with the globe.
because the infrastructure in their home countries likely don't exist. some people are just that much smarter and need such an environment.
Or, there's risk to being in their home country where academic freedom might not really be a thing.
it's like why if you show serious promise in soccer at a young age, you go to Europe as soon as you can - you will be better developed there in a more mature environment as opposed to, say, the USA where you can only get decent coaching in a few major cities, and even then the gulf between the coaching at a top Spanish or English club versus an American one is huge. Or if you show promise in tennis at a young age, you get your ass to Florida as soon as you are able to.
The path of least resistance is obviously to go where the infrastructure is.
Also, smarts needed to bootstrap modern infrastructure from scratch with limited resources are different than smarts needed to design a popular app, for example.
Some of them actually do that. Like when the US expelled Qian Xuesen, the founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab and he went back and built China's ballistic missile and space program. So, yep. It's happened and will continue to happen to different degrees.
Being okay is a lot different from maintaining academic, innovative, and cultural dominance which provides a standard of living many have grown used to.
The average US citizen voted in Trump, so no. You can't listen to his UN speech and go "that's the man to rule my country" if you're not seriously mentally impaired.
What's your point? That education only belongs to the "talented"? Talented in what way? What good does it do to society that the "non-talented" are not educated?
The loss of foreign students is already having an impact on the Boston rental market, with thousands of fewer students coming to the city this year:
“I’ve been doing real estate and technology for 30 years. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Demetrios Salpoglou, CEO of Boston Pads, told Boston.com. “It’s very acute. It’s not impacting all neighborhoods … it’s really proximity to a lot of universities that have a heavy reliance on foreign money or foreign enrollment.”
Not familiar with Seattle U-distict, is it rental market? Because I hope foreign students are not impacting single family house prices.
When I was grad student rent was indeed 50% of my stipend. Tuition was covered as part of research grants. Only way to reduce expenses was to get roommates.
Having said that, mortgage is also 50% of our household income now. American dream is expensive...
It's a shame that Canada also decided to shut the door on international students. The point was to ease the housing crisis (understandable) but the knock-on effect is to de-fund universities and surprisingly also public schools, which derive a great deal of revenue by charging international students.
It's colleges they they have been clamping down on, as they were bringing in absolutely massive numbers of mostly Indian students who were coming mainly to work in low-end jobs and get out of India rather than to legitimately study.
The number of graduate students being allowed in hasn't changed significantly, and undergraduate university students are also continuing to be brought in at rates similar to pre-pandemic times.
I don’t know if this was one of the intended outcomes, but this will probably cause some struggling college and universities to shut down.
International students raise quite a lot of money for higher-ed institutions because they pay full price without financial aid. The loss of that income is going to make a bad situation for higher-ed budgets much worse. Unless you are Harvard or Stanford (or a few other universities that are endowments with schools attached), you’re probably already in a budget crunch or eating into your endowment.
A side note, one of the founders of the college I went to has been convinced that higher-ed needs an entirely new business model in order to survive, and is founding a new school called Greenway (https://www.greenwayinstitute.org) that is trying to blend internships and co-op programs into an engineering education.
This was the first year of Trump's new term and most of the anti-immigration executive orders happened in the last few months. By August, most international students had already accepted offers, made travel and stay plans, and likely paid some part of their tuition already, and just continued due to sunk costs and hope that things will stabilize.
However, at this point, I think a lot more people will not even apply to US schools for next year.
You're assuming that there weren't enough spots for Americans and that they were getting denied due to foreigners. That's not true. For Americans who want a college education and don't get one is mostly because of the cost of education, which foreign students subsidize.
This is a classic case of shooing yourself in the foot only because of a fear of the foreigner.
I thought colleges only had a limited number of slots to accept students each year. Seems like US citizens would be competing with foreign students in that case.
If you have resources and energy, anything is possible if you have a system to exploit them. The downside is of course draining the resources and destroying the ecology which also happened. There is nothing special in American blood vs anywhere else.
Not sure about the economics of it in the US, but in many countries international students subsidise domestic students, because they pay full fees whereas domestic students generally do not. Back during the financial crisis lowered enrolment of international students was a factor in Irish universities having to discontinue courses, say; they just weren't economically possible without that subsidy.
If you're prepared to pay the same fees as foreign students and get the same grades, they might be happy to have you, but more likely it'll just mean more colleges have to close - foreign students never really took places from domestic students, they subsidised them.
We are going through a similar issue in the UK where a lot of University finances have been setup to rely on being able to attract foreign - mostly Chinese and Middle Eastern - students who pay 2x-4x more than domestic students. Now those students are being pushed away or are turning away, those institutions are questioning their own viability, and are at risk of bankruptcy.
At Ivy League or Oxbridge levels, this might be an acute issue: the running costs are insane, and despite having large endowment pools of cash, those pools aren't deployable to address the problem. Donations to such funds are often earmarked to support certain seats, tenures, scholarships and so on, and can't be used for general spending and teaching costs.
For the poorer schools without endowments (think JuCos), they might not have relied much on foreign student money anyway, so might weather it better. You are just as likely to get to junior college tomorrow as you were yesterday.
A middle schooler's aspirations of MIT, Stanford, Yale, Berkley and so on might now look more likely on paper, but in truth, those colleges might not be there or not able to offer as many courses by the time they're ready to attend.
I wouldn't be totally surprised to see a couple of Ivy League and some lower tier colleges go under in the next 5 years, and for about half the Russell Group in the UK to face a similar fate.
It's going to be a rough time for a lot of colleges that have been using foreign students paying full price to fund their operations. Especially now that the incoming college aged population is beginning to shrink and the percentage attending college has peaked, so the domestic population probably won't be able to fill the seats at less competitive colleges.
Perhaps they should tighten their belts and reduce administrative bloat. It’s not as if American society hadn’t collectively called for this for decades while tuition has risen astronomically.
It's not administrative bloat that makes colleges so expensive. "Administrative bloat" happens when a school becomes a city. Harvard/Stanford/MIT et al. cannot go back to some time when tuition was affordable while still being the research powerhouses they are.
Bigger organizations require more overhead and those costs don't grow linearly. I'm not saying that I think all those administrators are necessary or they all make things more efficient, but at the same time many of them are in place precisely because they are running an office that does make things more efficient. You get rid of one administrator and you may end up increasing the workload on everyone else by 20%, which seems like a win on paper because you lose their budget while not giving anyone else a raise. But getting rid of them made the whole organization less efficient.
e.g. My university's IT office has a huge budget and a bunch of administrators. It makes my life as a professor easier, and it gives students a better experience. It's very easy to say that the entire IT office should be eliminated to "tighten their belts and reduce administrative bloat". Which may be true, but at the same time it exists for a reason, and getting rid of it doesn't teleport us back to the 70s when campuses didn't need an IT office.
> It’s not as if American society hadn’t collectively called for this for decades while tuition has risen astronomically.
American society has called for better education, more teaching styles, more research, more technology, more subjects and classes, more majors, delivered to more students every year. There's no way we are going back, it's just not happening, the expectations are too high at this point. We can either decide maintaining these kinds of institutions are worth it, or trade off for worse outcomes and just give up on being serious about research. Seems like that's actually what this administration wants to do, but the public decidedly does not. However the public wants to have their cake (world class research institutions) and eat it too (low tuition affordable by the general public) and that's just not going to happen.
If I’ve learned one thing from studying economics it’s that supply equals demand.
If I’ve learned another it’s that prices never go down
Can you explain in this context? Because prices do go down if supply exceed demand.
The economics concept behind this is "price stickiness".
https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/reference/what-is-price-st...
Education is weird as a product, because you're delivering the same experience to students but they each pay a different bespoke price. Sometimes schools even pay their own customers!
When a rich person sends their kid to school they get charged full sticker price. Then schools use some of that money to subsidize the educations of the other students. Given those dynamics, there's really no reason for the tuition sticker price to ever go down unless the uber-rich can't afford it anymore, because the actual price anyone pays is floating and can be whatever it needs to be for them.
Theoretically yes but not when everything has perfect pricing as seems to be the case these days.
Yes, they should.
Which is a completely unrelated effort from the free money you're getting from abroad.
Unless governments institute policies that require them to "tighten their belts" they won't tighten their belts by cutting their own pay. They'll tighten belts by cutting out the least paying students, and scholarships, instead.
If this does push governments to get universities to tighten their belts, then why not have governments make them do that anyways without losing a massive chunk of export earnings, and a form of export earnings which has demonstrated positive effects many times greater than the dollars they bring in.
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
Yep. This is, of course, what's really happening, same as before. The next step is that highly educated jobs in the industry disappear, which then gives you cheap colleges with great teachers, but not much reason to study, and then we're back where we started this whole debacle in the 1990s.
Next step is expensive grifty colleges with bad teachers, as all the good teachers will flee or just not go into teaching, and nothing will be cheap because then what’s the point of the grift?
Picture Bob Jones U at Harvard scale. Or the Musk school of engineering where they teach that sensor fusion is a bad idea actually.
All those students, along with their talent and money and connections went _somewhere_ so that’s a shame for USA.
Huge win for US high school and college students. Not so good for bloated college administrations.
Some of my favorite people to meet in college were foreign students. You get to meet diverse people and learn about the world. It's only a win if college is 20% cheaper this year. It's not.
What is the cost of "meeting diverse people" and can the average US student afford that.
Every benefit must be judged by its cost.
> What is the cost of "meeting diverse people"…
In this case, it's self-funding. International students subsidize much cheaper in-state tuition.
Now that full-tuition-paying international students are gone, the average US students will have even harder time affording that. Congratulations.
Foreign money coming in will have to be made up elsewhere. It will be made up by raising tuition on remaining students. Schools that have a small enough applicant pool will price out their applicants and close. Likely they will be replaced by for-profit grifts that are much more affordable but don't actually do anything for the students except bilk them. The largest most international most diverse most administratively bloated schools will be fine. It's the small mostly-white rural colleges that will suffer the most.
Zero sum ass mentality. Top performing international students are likely to start companies and create jobs which is great for US high school and college students.
Are top performing US students less likely to start companies and create jobs than international?
Objectively yes.
Immigrants make up 14% of the population but start more than 20% of businesses.
44% of fortune 500 companies are founded by immigrants or their children. Steve Jobs' dad was a Syrian immigrant student. Elon Musk was on F1, J1, and H1B visa.
1. No evidence but imo probably. Immigrants are by their nature entrepunerial go getters, thats how they got here.
2. Top performing US students arent being crowded out by international students anyway.
What about the first US child from a family of immigrants?
What about them? Competent domestic students are not being crowded out by international students. Competent domestic workers are not being crowded out by immigrants. The opposite is happening, immigrants create new opportunities for natives out of thin air. That doesnt mean that natives dont, they both do.
Was just curious how you thought they ranked compared to the others since you had an opinion
An interesting thought. I think parents who work to instill an entrepreneurial mindset into their children are more likely to end up with entrepreneurial minded children. Whether immigrants do that Im not sure. Maybe they want their kids to have an easier/simpler life than they did
Sorry I don't believe you.
Student enrollment in the US is declining and the big problem for colleges the past few years has been a worry about not having enough students. So it's not clear why US students were struggling to get a college spot.
And if you mean them getting spots in the more prestigious institutions, well, it's not clear whether that will even happen (the few thousand international students admitted to the top universities are not the ones that are likely to decline their acceptance letters), but even if it did, well, those universities are simply not as prestigious anymore.
Attracting the best talent from anywhere in the world is a huge part of what created their prestige, and that's even before we get to how they're losing funding, and professors and researchers to other countries.
The "best talent" is a major scam. International students/alumni did not make these universities the best in the world or create that prestige.
Look at any tier 1 research university in USA and I’ll find you distinguished professors who were once international students at US universities.
Go look at a current list of people at Princeton’s IAS and count how many are former international students.
> that’s a shame for USA billionaires
Fixed that for you. Wealth distribution is far from equitable and immigration by and large benefits the wealthy. They financially benefit from the cheap labor and are mostly immune from the downsides.
The US did great for hundreds of years with the limited immigration we had from primarily European countries. The world we live in today was built with that approach. Remains to be seen if importing from recently modernized / 3rd world countries provides any long term benefit for median Americans. We’d be much better off installing billionaires who wish to invest in the people because they feel an attachment to the people (noblesse oblige).
I can’t really see a good argument for foreigners outside of the Meiji government approach (learn from them to invest in our own) if you care about your people.
> All those students, along with their talent and money and connections went _somewhere_ so that’s a shame for USA.
Money? Yes.
Talent and connections? Not necessarily.
Top PhD students are still coming to America.
It’s the money-grabbing 12-month masters programs that are the problem.
Come buy a F-1 student visa for $200k! It’s the Trump silver card.
>Top PhD students are still coming to America.
They probably are, and that won't stop anytime soon. The question is how much talent is being lost now.
99% of those students were not any more talented than the average US citizen
It's not really talent, it's that they don't get scholarships and pay tuition in full. It was basically a subsidy program
99% of stats are made up
But personal experience is not. I went to college and was friends with the foreign students. They were average.
We had 'Asian road chaos' every fall where the rich ones would show up with their new Bugattis (edit: Maseratis) having never learned how to drive the thing and much less on the open American roads where you can really let the accelerator loose. They would cause endless crashes.
One or two of poor ones would end up committing suicide in the spring when they flunked out and had spent their entire little farming family's fortune back in some austere rice farming village.
It was quite the sight to see. I want to say they were fairly normal in intelligence, relatively, but the set of incentives for them to perform were wildly different.
> had spent their entire little farming family's fortune back in some austere rice farming village.
Depends on tier of university.
At Harvard, MIT, Stanford, the asian international students are moderately rich (US$10 million+ net worth) from tech or manufacturing businesses.
Holy racism
Fwiw there’s like 1000 Bugattis in the world so you really must have gone somewhere super duper elite! Monaco perhaps?
You must've been pretty busy hanging out with a statistically significant quantity of all of them.
I was being generous when I wrote the comment. Several of the internationals left me baffled about how they got there. The liberal HN audience here clearly has an axe to grind.
That still doesn't mean your experiences generalise in any useful way, and using phrases like 'liberal HN audience' only serves to highlight your own biases.
Thats the very definition of “anecdata”. (Anecdotes you mistake for representative data)
But they pay several multiples of money more to study than the average US citizen, take on no debt, and most of the time are studying for advanced technical degrees.
Most Americans are not.
If we want to have top-tier universities, and produce graduates capable of innovating and taking big risk, we need to have universities who are strong in STEM.
If we want to have universities who are strong in STEM, we need to fill up those seats because otherwise without students, there are no classes.
IDGAF where they come from, to be honest.
Sorry to break it to you, but the average American is quite...let's say, average. That's why they're average, lol. Likewise, the average Chinese. That's why their school system filters out tens of millions of schoolkids from higher education and puts them in trade school early. Same goes for India, Europe, etc.
Gifted, driven kids, the kind who will leave their family and everything they've known, to cross an ocean to study in your country, are a scarce resource.
I'm not saying you shouldn't prioritize locals, but if you want competitive, world-class educational system, you should be open to foreign students and faculty helping to keep your system competitive. It's the same worldwide, whether it's in Singapore's NUS, or Oxford, or Saudi Arabia's KAUST.
But, what do I even know?
There's so few seats at these schools we could fill them with Americans and not notice a difference is my belief. We're talking about single digit acceptance rates where it's probably hard to distinguish students who apply at all.
Also I feel like it's not a good assumption that talented international students that come to top tier universities also have the same western vision of meritocracy and sharing their achievements with the globe.
Why not just stay and bring their gifts to their own country?
because the infrastructure in their home countries likely don't exist. some people are just that much smarter and need such an environment.
Or, there's risk to being in their home country where academic freedom might not really be a thing.
it's like why if you show serious promise in soccer at a young age, you go to Europe as soon as you can - you will be better developed there in a more mature environment as opposed to, say, the USA where you can only get decent coaching in a few major cities, and even then the gulf between the coaching at a top Spanish or English club versus an American one is huge. Or if you show promise in tennis at a young age, you get your ass to Florida as soon as you are able to.
Why not build the infrastructure with their smarts?
The path of least resistance is obviously to go where the infrastructure is.
Also, smarts needed to bootstrap modern infrastructure from scratch with limited resources are different than smarts needed to design a popular app, for example.
Some of them actually do that. Like when the US expelled Qian Xuesen, the founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab and he went back and built China's ballistic missile and space program. So, yep. It's happened and will continue to happen to different degrees.
Yup, that's what they will do now.
Which is indeed a benefit for their countries.
And is a loss for the US.
The brain drain was real and the US was the beneficiary and that may be ending soon.
Not sure what your point is? Are you happy that the US will be worse off than it was before?
I think America will be ok.
Being okay is a lot different from maintaining academic, innovative, and cultural dominance which provides a standard of living many have grown used to.
Are you saying America was a backwater nation until non-european immigrants rescued them?
I think it’s pretty clear that’s not what I’m saying.
The average US citizen voted in Trump, so no. You can't listen to his UN speech and go "that's the man to rule my country" if you're not seriously mentally impaired.
Just on the odds this statement is almost certainly incorrect.
You have not met many average US citizens if you really think that is the case
why do you say that?
I can say, that 99% of those students are much less obese than the average US citizen
What's your point? That education only belongs to the "talented"? Talented in what way? What good does it do to society that the "non-talented" are not educated?
Also, no source for claim.
Not OP but I infer that they're point is US colleges should primarily serve US citizens, not "talented" foreigners
The loss of foreign students is already having an impact on the Boston rental market, with thousands of fewer students coming to the city this year:
“I’ve been doing real estate and technology for 30 years. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Demetrios Salpoglou, CEO of Boston Pads, told Boston.com. “It’s very acute. It’s not impacting all neighborhoods … it’s really proximity to a lot of universities that have a heavy reliance on foreign money or foreign enrollment.”
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/08/21/apartments...
I hope a similar thing is happening in Seattle's U-district.
Housing costs are by far the largest line item expense for a student. Actual tuition/books is pretty affordable [1]
[1] https://admit.washington.edu/costs/coa/
Not familiar with Seattle U-distict, is it rental market? Because I hope foreign students are not impacting single family house prices.
When I was grad student rent was indeed 50% of my stipend. Tuition was covered as part of research grants. Only way to reduce expenses was to get roommates.
Having said that, mortgage is also 50% of our household income now. American dream is expensive...
It's a shame that Canada also decided to shut the door on international students. The point was to ease the housing crisis (understandable) but the knock-on effect is to de-fund universities and surprisingly also public schools, which derive a great deal of revenue by charging international students.
It's colleges they they have been clamping down on, as they were bringing in absolutely massive numbers of mostly Indian students who were coming mainly to work in low-end jobs and get out of India rather than to legitimately study.
The number of graduate students being allowed in hasn't changed significantly, and undergraduate university students are also continuing to be brought in at rates similar to pre-pandemic times.
I'm not sure you can equate university students with the nonsense happening at diploma-mills
I don’t know if this was one of the intended outcomes, but this will probably cause some struggling college and universities to shut down.
International students raise quite a lot of money for higher-ed institutions because they pay full price without financial aid. The loss of that income is going to make a bad situation for higher-ed budgets much worse. Unless you are Harvard or Stanford (or a few other universities that are endowments with schools attached), you’re probably already in a budget crunch or eating into your endowment.
A side note, one of the founders of the college I went to has been convinced that higher-ed needs an entirely new business model in order to survive, and is founding a new school called Greenway (https://www.greenwayinstitute.org) that is trying to blend internships and co-op programs into an engineering education.
Next year will be even worse.
This was the first year of Trump's new term and most of the anti-immigration executive orders happened in the last few months. By August, most international students had already accepted offers, made travel and stay plans, and likely paid some part of their tuition already, and just continued due to sunk costs and hope that things will stabilize.
However, at this point, I think a lot more people will not even apply to US schools for next year.
Education, travel for education, and housing for education were important American export sectors, before Trump nuked them.
So more spots for Americans? Doesn’t necessarily seem like a bad thing to me.
You're assuming that there weren't enough spots for Americans and that they were getting denied due to foreigners. That's not true. For Americans who want a college education and don't get one is mostly because of the cost of education, which foreign students subsidize.
This is a classic case of shooing yourself in the foot only because of a fear of the foreigner.
I thought colleges only had a limited number of slots to accept students each year. Seems like US citizens would be competing with foreign students in that case.
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This is a completely made up problem, there is no systematic persecution of Jews anywhere in us universities.
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The flow of smart and talented people to the United States has historically been incredibly beneficial for the latter.
EDIT: further reading here: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/05/28/demand-f...
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Absolutely correct and HN is going to punish you for that
If you have resources and energy, anything is possible if you have a system to exploit them. The downside is of course draining the resources and destroying the ecology which also happened. There is nothing special in American blood vs anywhere else.
England. Scotland. Germany.
Part of Western heritage.
America was built on immigrants from Europe indeed founded it upon it.
Non Europeans weren't allowed to immigrate (en masse) to America until 1970 Hart Cellar act.
Not saying that's right or wrong it's just a fact.
America is cultural and genetic sibling to Europe.
Not sure about the economics of it in the US, but in many countries international students subsidise domestic students, because they pay full fees whereas domestic students generally do not. Back during the financial crisis lowered enrolment of international students was a factor in Irish universities having to discontinue courses, say; they just weren't economically possible without that subsidy.
TLDR: No, probably not.
If you're prepared to pay the same fees as foreign students and get the same grades, they might be happy to have you, but more likely it'll just mean more colleges have to close - foreign students never really took places from domestic students, they subsidised them.
We are going through a similar issue in the UK where a lot of University finances have been setup to rely on being able to attract foreign - mostly Chinese and Middle Eastern - students who pay 2x-4x more than domestic students. Now those students are being pushed away or are turning away, those institutions are questioning their own viability, and are at risk of bankruptcy.
At Ivy League or Oxbridge levels, this might be an acute issue: the running costs are insane, and despite having large endowment pools of cash, those pools aren't deployable to address the problem. Donations to such funds are often earmarked to support certain seats, tenures, scholarships and so on, and can't be used for general spending and teaching costs.
For the poorer schools without endowments (think JuCos), they might not have relied much on foreign student money anyway, so might weather it better. You are just as likely to get to junior college tomorrow as you were yesterday.
A middle schooler's aspirations of MIT, Stanford, Yale, Berkley and so on might now look more likely on paper, but in truth, those colleges might not be there or not able to offer as many courses by the time they're ready to attend.
I wouldn't be totally surprised to see a couple of Ivy League and some lower tier colleges go under in the next 5 years, and for about half the Russell Group in the UK to face a similar fate.
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Just show your whole ass, little racist hackernews.
No its pragmatic!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45408096
lol it's "racist" to present information on foreign vs US students now??
Yes, trying to parse out whether a name "is American" is the most racist thing, a giant red flag.
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