Propaganda at those times said that Jewish people will get "the best education in the world" for free and then leave the USSR without paying back for it.
My American university provided lots of financial aid to international students. Need-blind! Many of these students came from countries with very un-American political systems. And many of them simply returned to their home countries after college.
And yet these students did not have to go through the Kafka-esque (and just plain wrong) system that this author describes. They were treated like everyone else.