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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

The institutions are there primarily to educate our workforce. There are thousands of locally deserving students who don’t have opportunity, either went to wrong schools or don’t know how to navigate the system that’s geared toward connections or wealth.

These institutions could fill their student bodies with thousands upon thousands of our own students who get overlooked.

On the other hand they’ve grown used to foreign money filling their coffers.

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The institutions are not primary there to educate our workforce; they exist to fill a variety of roles including policy development roles, collaborative research roles, and basic research roles that are essential to our nation's economic development. Please explain to me how we are going to fill legions of academic research roles normally held by foreign students and foreign graduates when no one can get a visa or after we boot foreigners out of the country as students and they no longer want to return. You honestly think undereducated Americans are going to rise up and fill those roles? Oh and guess where the well trained and intelligent foreigners who we kick out are going to bring their skills to: our competitors. Over 90% of my lab was foreigners and huge numbers of research lab positions are filled by foreigners. The policy is basically a self inflicted gunshot wound administered purely to get Trump reelected with absolutely no regard for the impact on the country long term.

By better educating our own kids. We have tons of kids in “inner cities” and “rural areas” who are underserved. We could do better for them. We’re to damned lazy to give a shit so we trade them for overseas shinies with money.

This is reductionist. The academic jobs OminousWeapons is talking about are not likely to be filled by domestic workers because they're severely underpaid.

NIH annual stipends are ~$25k for graduate students and $52-65k for postdocs [1]. There is a massive opportunity cost associated with these positions, _particularly_ for people coming from less affluent backgrounds. It's really hard to accept a 50-70% pay cut (assuming you could otherwise take a tech role) if you have an unprecedented opportunity to contribute to your and your family's financial stability.

[1] https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-20-0...

Markets work. Cutting off the vast supply of minimum wage international workers will incentivize Universities to treat and pay their junior researchers better.

As the parent insinuated, stipends are set by the NIH and congress, not the university. They are largely paid out with grant funding from the government. If an entity wanted to pay a researcher more, it can't come from federal funds which is how most labs (outside of big ones that have industry collaboration) primarily fund themselves. So while markets work, this isn't a competitive market, it is a regulated one where a ceiling is being set.

https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/salary-cap-stipen...

Improving education for underserved populations does not necessitate removing competition from PhD programs and post docs, or really even from colleges. Many of the people you are talking about don't even finish high school. It would take at least a decade of concerted effort to improve education in underserved communities to the point where denizens could legitimately be successful in advanced degree programs en masse. Also notice that this announcement did not come on the heels of any such announcement of an investment in education, and that none has been planned. I would be completely behind any effort to fix education here and I agree with you that one is needed, but this policy doesn't address the problem of poor education in underserved communities, it simply creates a new brain drain problem.

Foreign students and better educated domestic students aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, things work better when we have both. Even in the small and non-elite college I went to, there were foreign-born professors. My one math professor came from China and was very willing to run special courses for the senior undergrad math majors. So a foreign student came here for his doctorate, graduated, and went on to educate Americans. Win win.

I got into an Ivy on merit. White male, not legacy, not an athlete, not rich. Just good grades, good SAT score, and luck. I promise you the _vast_ majority of students I met who didn’t deserve to be at my school (academically speaking) were domestic legacies or athletes.

Can’t imagine my undergrad, first job out, or grad school without the many international students I made friends and worked with. Part of educating a successful workforce is teaching us how to work and collaborate with people from other backgrounds. Hard to do that if everyone’s from Newton or Westchester

I agree. We have tons of kids in the San Joaquin Valley , Montana plains, Eastern Washington, inner LA, etc who should have a chance... but they don’t bring the same money.

It's complicated. The kids whose parents pay for full tuition (or for a new building) subsidize the cost of attendance for the rest of us. I definitely couldn't have afforded to go without my financial aid package.

And that's supposedly part of the value proposition of elite schools - mix wealthy and connected students with bright students with ideas.

There's plenty of international students on financial aid too, I think it's doing them a disservice to say they're only being admitted for the revenue. Maybe at larger public institutions with tens of thousands of students, but I don't think that's generally the case at the smaller elite schools we're talking about

The admission lawsuit against Harvard revealed that they do have quotas for U.S. states to ensure that every state is represented in each admitted class. The university even lowers SAT/ACT and GPA requirements to ensure students from these less populous (Montana, Iowa, Dakotas,Idaho etc) and sometimes lower quality school systems (Mississippi) can get into the school and have a chance against applicants from California, Texas, New York etc.

Well, except aren't foreign students essentially subsidizing local students? Since they receive substantially less financial aid and often pay the full price of tuition. [1]

So when all of that money goes away, tuition rises and local students get less financial aid. Or said universities and colleges downsize, reducing the number of professors and students attending which means fewer local students get to go to college.

This seems like a 'cut your nose to spite your face' sort of reaction fueled entirely by xenophobia rather than any sort of rational basis.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/foreign-students-pay-up-to-t...

MIT and Harvard. They have billions in endowments.

I’d prefer a kid from the Bronx or san joaquin valley or butte Montana get a scholarship than someone who could choose any school they want (intl students going to these places are not poor).

Okay, and? What about the smaller universities that rely on foreign tuition? This is a policy that goes beyond affecting MIT and Harvard. You're right these international students are not poor and that's the point, they subsidize the poorer students. University admissions are not a zero sum game.

Well, if it’s for the money then they can do it remotely charge them a bunch for their Ivy League diploma while reserving the local spots for our own student body.

Except if international students are in the US, then they're contributing to the US economy and not their home economy. They're buying goods in the US, paying taxes in the US and perhaps most importantly, they're exporting US culture back into their home country if they go back or resulting in positive brain drain to the US if they stay.

Do you not realize how bad of an idea it is to just completely cut all of that off? For benefits that aren't even tangible because universities grow to fit the number of students attending?

Again, it's not based in any sort of rational basis. It's xenophobia.

Locophilia.

The data doesn't back up your claims. The only Americans who are "losing" jobs to foreigners are males who didn't graduate high school. In every other category, it can be shown that immigrants only add to the workforce, they don't replace it.

Women as well as there isn’t enough demand to pull them in either by choice or by policy.

Even Bernie used to say this (before he went national).

So only the most vulnerable in our society...

I imagine international students are a major source of revenue for most schools, and help subsidize the ever-increasing tuition and fees for domestic students.

FYI, international students have to pay often significantly more as turion fee alone.

Smart local students go to in state public schools to avoid crippling debt.

This policy does not prevent students from attending the universities. It prevents them from living in the US. Since it is July, there is no way that universities would fill slots left open by international students who withdraw their attendance at this point. This policy cannot produce an outcome of enabling more Americans to attend top universities.

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