I think this is a good thing. Universities are giving too many seats away to full pay Internationals instead of Americans.
I think the counter argument to @suzyQ7 's comment would be that tuition for all will have to go up if full pay internationals stay away.
This statement is an oxymoron.
Full pay internationals help cover the cost of low income nationals. And…they contribute almost 33 billion dollars to the economy and make possible almost half a million jobs for US workers:
“NAFSA’s latest analysis finds that the 1,078,822 international students studying at U.S. colleges and universities contributed $36.9 billion and supported more than 450,000 jobs to the U.S. economy during the 2016-2017 academic year.”
@momcinco I tend to be skeptical of studies that purport to find a demonstrable financial benefit from specific policies. One only needs to compare the studies describing the alleged financial benefits of hosting the olympics, public funding of professional sports teams, tax breaks to lure business, etc., with the actual results that never live up to the benefits in the purported “studies.” The proponents of the policies always come up with analysis that seem to support their positions. Why isn’t it surprising that an organization with the mission of supporting international education comes up with a study suggesting it is the greatest thing since sliced bread?
Economic reasons are often not the main reasons behind immigration related actions and controversies, including this one.
I live abroad and DD goes to an International school. Students no longer look to the US as the best place to go to college. Europe is cheaper. Canada is safer and cheaper. Singapore, Hong Kong also offer more attractive options. DD’s friends look at the US as dangerous and expensive. I am not at all surprised to hear that the numbers of applications are dropping significantly.
Could you explain the “dangerous” part as opposed to other areas of the world? I’m very curious about this.
Visas are expensive and hard to get. The cost of processing them has increased and this cost has to be passed on to the applicants. If the students want to go to Europe and Canada, that’s fine.
While this might be good news to the very slim subset of US applicants who are applying right now and are able to afford tuition without aid, it’s bad news overall. Aside from the money the international students spend while they are here, the brain drain to other countries is going to hit us hard. But I’m someone who thinks that advanced degrees from elite institutions should come with a green card stapled to it.
As for the “dangerous” part – I’m sure it has a lot to do with our love of guns. Also, those racially-motivated incidents get a lot of coverage in their countries of origin. The shooting of those two Indian engineers in Clinton, MO, was covered extensively abroad.
I can’t say that I blame international students for thinking twice about coming here.
@twoinanddone -I don’t think the cost of visas are the reason at all. And actually for students they should not be too hard to get once admitted to a college.
Are we even letting in students from the list of “banned” countries? If your country is on the banned list would you even bother applying? What about other majority Muslim countries?
Re: #12
Actual policy changes with respect to visas may not matter as much as public perception. If potential international students get the impression that the US is less welcoming for whatever reason (but particularly if they feel that it is due to race, ethnicity, or religion), then they may be more likely to favor other countries that they see as more welcoming, or stay in their country of citizenship or residency.
The cost of tuition was cited by 57% as a reason to go elsewhere. So the full pay tuition price tag may be getting to be too much.
New Zealand, Australia…I recently chatted with a young lady from India looking at colleges (here) and her top choices so far were in Australia.
I wonder how current and prospective international students view the climate in the US both on and off campus.
So then Yale and MIT would get to control the green card program? Who determines what an elite university is?
That statement was obviously not meant to be proposing real policy. I meant that we should prioritize keeping talent in the areas of innovation and not let that knowledge get on a plane back to wherever.
But yeah, I think we should try our damnedest to keep those graduates here.
Most internationals want into the most impacted programs such as engineering. Perhaps those programs will open up a bit for U.S. students who have long had to compete against students from other countries who often had difficult-to-verify tests scores and GPAs. There have been many threads on CC regarding this issue in the past. Nonetheless, I doubt we’ll see much of a drop in internationals coming here.