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Comment by Noseshine | Hacker News Reader

Do universities that don't have to rely on the money they get form international students have the same incentives as US universities?

From what I read that's a major consideration for US universities why they want to attract foreign students. For German universities that would only be of marginal concern, even if/when they take some money from foreign students it's just pocket change and not nearly enough to finance the institution to a substantial extend. Sure they still have an incentive, but it's much less and not monetary.

I think, that's what I get from what I've been reading in comments over the years.

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It's not just tuition fees.

Consider that cities with top-league universities also have deep links with industry. Oxford and Cambridge —as examples I'm familiar with— both have off-site science parks, secondary research centres. Many tech companies host labs there and operate PhD programmes that link in with the universities.

That has driven the growth of these cities for a century.

All because these universities have the best and brightest. Take away those, and I can only imagine the business support will dwindle.

At least in the UK international students are a big chunk of a decent university's income. Tuition fees for UK residents are capped, while there's no limit to how much a good university can charge Russian oligarchs to educate their children.

There are some issues around that, specifically with business departments being disproportionately well funded, but it does mean that other departments also have more money to work with than they would otherwise.

I know that the UK situation for tuition is comparable to the one in the US. My points is about universities in countries that don't have that financial incentive and pressure. The UK is just one small somewhat "special" country in Europe.

The difference between European countries can be quite high (http://www.mastersportal.eu/articles/405/tuition-fees-at-uni...), so my comment wasn't about any one in particular. When I look at just Germany even within the same country there is a lot of variation depending on the university and the particular program. But in general universities in many European countries don't rely on income from foreign students to the extend that US universities seem to do.

"I know that the UK situation for tuition is comparable to the one in the US"

The rules around university tuition do differ quite a bit depending on where you are in the UK.

e.g. Scottish students or students from the EU outside of the rest of the UK do not pay fees at Scottish universities.

The top few business schools can also get UK citizens to pay £51,000 for a one year MBA course [1] so I think they'd be pretty well funded even without international students.

[1] https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/programmes/mba/facts-faqs/#item-4

No, because I suspect most of their students are non-UK, and you're not going to suddenly magic up a several-hundred percent increase in UK citizens wanting to do a ridiculously expensive MBA.

For top schools, money is secondary to building and maintaining reputation and leadership in research. Money comes as a consequence of being leaders,

Think of Carnegie Mellon Robotics professors and grad students poached by Uber. Think of top graph computer scientists who joined Facebook and Google early on.

A lot of this men and women were bright international students/professors flocking to top US univs. These bright people (directly and indirectly) invited budding geniuses from their home countries to come to these univs in the US.

A lot of countries would love to have such a concentration of bright talent (and the network effects) in their univs.

> For top schools, money is secondary to building and maintaining reputation and leadership in research. Money comes as a consequence of being leaders,

This is not quite exactly how it works in Europe, though. Money is channeled through national/EU government, one way or another.

It's a similar situation for Australian universities. Foreign students are considered a major cash cow.

I know from a reliable source that foreign student enrollment for the spring semester is way down in one significant university in the US.

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