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Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

The US has a massive advantage in science (and business) in that many of the best and brightest from across the world want to come to the US, despite the hurdles and issues of getting student visas or work visas.

This means that as a country you don't have to pay for the primary and secondary schooling of all these people, but you get to reap the rewards of them working in your country and contributing to your scientific lead, to your economy.

But like all advantages, if you don't pay attention, you can squander it. You can make it easy for smart Chinese students (in this instance) to do science in the US and benefit US academia and businesses, or you can make it hard, and the same people will instead benefit some other economy.

It's not about diversity, it's about not realizing that the free firehose of cheap and willing smarts and labour isn't perpetual, that it actually has to be maintained and encouraged.

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> This means that as a country you don't have to pay for the primary and secondary schooling of all these people

You don't have to pay for an order of magnitude more people: education is not a technology yet, it could give no guarantees on a results. To get one bright student you need to teach ten people through primary and secondary school.

If its like the UK International students are a source of income as they pay more and subsidise the locals.

How did universities ever manage to operate whilst charging much lower/no tuition back when there was not a group like this?

They only catered for a much smaller group basically the elites and a few lucky Grammar school kids.

Here is a related and comprehensive article that dives into the subject, for anyone interested: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/15/increasingly-competiti...

State funding.

Funding was shifted to fees. Although considering how much of student loans is not expected to be repaid it's arguable that a lot is still state funded...

They were funded by the state. Funding which has been systematically cut back over the past 2 decades.

There were a lot fewer university students back when you could attend a polytechnical institute and make a living wage in a factory. With globalization and deindustrialization, Britain is now a "knowledge economy" so you have hundreds of thousands more in universities.

A lot of the prestigious schools in the United States could not charge tuition going forward for decades and be fine financially still, they have massive endowments.

Harvard, Yale, University of Texas, Stanford, Princeton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Pennsylvania, Texas A&M, University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Columbia University all have 10-30 billion EACH.

Roughly 100 colleges in the United States have endowments exceeding 1 billion dollars. Even with a billion in a broad market index fund they could burn 30 million a year and likely never run out of money, I think the most expensive tuition in the country is like 60k or some such, so the poorest of those 100 schools could take at least 500 students a year for free and not go broke.

There are about a dozen universities in the United States that have research budgets alone exceeding 1 billion dollars a year.

Kinda makes you wonder why college tuition is so expensive at those 100~ schools...

And I don't think those endowments include real estate value or income from IP the schools own thanks to research conducted there.

primary and secondary education costs virtually nothing compared to college so thats a pretty weak point to make.

You could make the exact reverse point, that universities in the US have built their expertise over decades if not centuries and Foreign students are largely benefiting more from them than whatever they could get in their home countries.

It's a win-win thing for the U.S. and the students. (arguably a loss for the country of origin who sees their best and brightest fly away.) No one here is denying the impact of restrictions on students, we are pointing out it is also bad for the US.

> primary and secondary education costs virtually nothing compared to college.

Except that this isn't true at all.

I said compared to college. Not in absolute terms.

Yes that was understood.

So... can you point me to a source showing high school students having years of debt?

> The US has a massive advantage [...] in that many of the best and brightest from across the world want to come to the US

And it's really, really actively fighting against it: electing Trump (and the consequences with it) is not the least they did in that perspective.

I don't think it's a conscious choice, I think that since the US has been a magnet for talent for so long, a lot of politicians, and a lot of people, have normalized it and think it's the natural order of things. They think that talent will keep coming, no matter what policies they implement, and that is simply not true.

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