America is closing a college per week due to student population declines.
Most students are coming from countries with significantly worse demographic trends. The population inversion is already here but it is being felt by schools first.
In 10 years it will be for new employees, in 40 years it will be shortages in medical care.
>America is closing a college per week due to student population declines.
This is kind of misleading. There were 16 nonprofit college and university closures in 2024 [1]
I also have reservations about making predictions of what will happen in 10 years, much less 40. There are challenges relating to demographic change but it's not predetermined as you present it.
Every time someone makes a confident prediction about the future 10 or more years out all I can think of is the Population Bomb book [2]
The Population Bomb is a great reference. This was something a family member of mine was seriously worried about in her younger days.
Population is an extremely complex, dynamic system, and I don't think we have any way of actually predicting it -- all we can do is look at trend lines and make projections.
(caveat - not a social scientist; just my current opinion; etc.)
Population Bomb's core claim was about the instantaneous rate of reproduction. This is a complex stochastic process. It could drop to 0 overnight if people decide no more babies.
But population decline is easier to model mid term because you don't need to make almost any assumptions. The next 18 years of university intake are all already born and there ain't a lot of them. The only way for them is down.
Clearly, what's beyond that is hard to forecast, but even then making a pretty good forecast for the next 25 years only depends on forecasting births in the next 7 years.
And now less than half a century later, there are even people who are worried about falling birth rates in some places, because apparently it's concerning if we don't keep growing the population at the same rate.
It is concerning when all of our major social systems are built on the idea of an growing population and a growing economy (most pressing right now is funding pensions).
Maybe we'll have a billion humans living in orbit in a century. Unsure if they'll be willing to pay Earth Tax though.
US Citizens have to pay taxes even in orbit or on the ISS, or even on Mars or wherever in the universe they may be. This is fairly unique though, there's like one African dictatorship that does the same and that's about it.
Immigration at that scale is completely indistinguishable from invasion.
At small scales you can have them give up their culture and assimilate but at replacement scales you just turn your country into a third world country. That's completely unacceptable.
Dubai has managed to not let that happen even at rates far faster than replacement, but they don't give their immigrants voting rights, and usually not permanent residence (unless they are rich).
They definitely have literal slaves there, as well as the highest per capita rate of influx of high-net-worth individuals of anywhere in the world, and then a lot of people in-between.
The TFR decline of the rest of the world over the past decade has been astronomical. There simply aren't that many young people left in the world to pull from. South American countries have seen >50% declines.
# of X closing / time isn't a meaningful measure of decline. You would have to subtract # closing / time from # opening / time. But even a net loss of colleges doesn't necessarily indicate a loss of students, it could be that bigger colleges are absorbing smaller ones. If you are making an argument about a decline in student population, you should just look at student population data. It's more-or-less flat since 2020 [0].
In a market economy, shortages are simply a statement that the buyers value a good or service less than the market price.
Medical care shortages are mostly a function that hospitals don't want to pay nurses market rate and then treat them poorly.
The exception is doctors. The shortage there is completely driven by their guild (AMA) successfully lobbying for a restriction on the number of medical schools.
> The exception is doctors. The shortage there is completely driven by their guild (AMA) successfully lobbying for a restriction on the number of medical schools.
It's not just this. It's also that the career is starting to suck.
Over half the doctors I know who I met while they were in medical school/residency are now out of the practice. They counted down the days until they had their student debt paid off and bounced to non-patient care roles outside the medical system.
The entire profession has been captured by the administrative and managerial class. Doctors have had most of their agency stripped from them, and it's an exhausting career choice for someone who generally has a ton of options at their disposal.
I expect the trend to get even worse as more and more pressure gets applied to the medical system both due to demographics and the endless march of making everything corporate.
The AMA specifically restricts residency spots. They cry about medicare funding, but it is all about keeping the supply of doctors artificially low. Unlike tech, there is no free market in medicine, which is why 20% of the national gdp is consumed on healthcare while doctors drive away in BMWs to the bank
The doctors are not why the US pays more for medicine than other western countries. It’s also a little rich coming from a software focused board when we make equivalent or better than a lot of doctors
You’re going to have to do more work to prove the size of the problem is equivalent or larger than the well documented issues with insurance, before you can start pinning the blame on them as a why.
If the doctors are causing like 1% of the issue, it’s not likely to be worth the time and energy to rectify vs if you can point to it being like 50% of the issue.
I’m pulling those numbers out of my ass so don’t feel like I’m trying to hold you to the literal values but I’d need to see _some_ data to even consider supporting changes to the AMA and laws surrounding them
Doctors can send men in with guns to imprison, and if they resist, kill, those who engage in their profession without going through the gates of their fiefdom, though.
In software you can be a nobody off the street, straight out of prison, if someone pays you money to write software then that is that.
The doctors cannot send in men with guns, the government can if it feels that’s against the law, and you’re not going to be killed for just “resisting”.
In the software world we also take on zero fucking liability for just building software on the street or is your circle full of people who commonly carry Software Malpractice Insurance?
FYI, the men with guns come for software engineers as well if the rich want it. Look up Sergey Aleynikov
The odds of getting collared for practicing medicine without a license/credentials are orders of magnitude higher than getting collared for writing software, or even practice engineering even though that's sometimes a licensed field.
Yes, the odds of getting arrested for breaking the law are higher than if you don’t break the law.
Look you’re obviously against the AMA, and there’s arguments against their guild and its practices that I’m amenable to, but trying to pin the financial problems with our healthcare system on them is ludicrous given how many other large problems are in the system. Insurance middlemen are undoubtedly a bigger cost
>The exception is doctors. The shortage there is completely driven by their guild (AMA) successfully lobbying for a restriction on the number of medical schools.
NPs are starting to get around this by getting independent or mostly independent practices in many states. The Doctors can still kick PAs in the teeth because they are usually under the medical board, but they can't do nearly as much to get their greedy claws on NPs because they are governed by a separate nursing board that nurses have more control of.
We live in a country where many complain that there aren't any jobs to be had, especially jobs with good wages/salaries. It's disingenuous, or at least very confused, to state that "we have a looming, massive shortage of medical workers". These two thoughts aren't really mutually compatible. Sure, there is a training/education issue, but pretending that it's just intractable and that we have to import workers is absurd.
> America is closing a college per week due to student population declines.
It's interesting to see that but then also see boasts of "record freshman class sizes" at major public universities every single year (eg my Alma Mater, Wisconsin).
This is because Republican fascists overthrew the United States of America and threatened to kidnap and torture overseas students attending domestic universities.
It is unclear to me why anyone in the comments here is under another impression. These were newsworthy events.
Given the amount of gerrymandering, active voter suppression, and long-standing measures to ensure that certain groups of people have a harder time voting than others (specifically, those who have to work hourly jobs—especially those that are not a standard 9-5 office job), even leaving aside any other possible method of ensuring votes for anyone except Trump counted, there's plenty of room to cast suspicion on the degree to which the outcome of the election represents the will of the people.
Somewhat related data point - our local elementary school used to have 5 first grade classes a few years ago and now they are down to 3. It's a large % drop over just a few years. This is going to move like a wave through the rest of the years all the way through to university.
I don't think Trump really cares about international students. Trump's real enemy is colleges (and the educated people colleges represent).
Anyone who responds "But isn't it a good thing that there are more opportunities for American students?" is missing the forest for the trees. Trump is not trying to open up more opportunities for education; he's trying to destroy education.
International students are not displacing Americans; they pay tuition, often at higher rates, and help sustain universities. The real problem is that higher education has been underfunded for years, and the current administration has only made things (much) worse by cutting funding further.
Universities and research are already struggling because of poor leadership and lack of investment, not because of international students. In the 2023-2024 academic year, international student numbers only comprised ~6% of the total U.S. enrollments.
At Stanford, 36% of graduate students are international students (2024-2025 AY). While there are very good reasons for this, I think it's hard to argue that international students are not displacing US students, at least in grad school. For undergraduates, the number is 9% (2023-2024 AY). Stanford has tremendous financial resources and a main campus that is more than 12 square miles in size. They could grow the size of their student body if they wanted to.
Stanford is skimming the absolute top students from around the world into its programs. There's more than enough capacity in US schools for the top 10% of US grad students and then the US gets the benefit of also getting the top 10% of other countries' grad students.
International students at places like Stanford are not displacing Americans. Stanford is one of the top-ranked universities in the world, so the competition pool is global by definition. There is no evidence that equally qualified Americans are rejected in favor of international students. U.S. students remain the majority in both undergraduate and graduate programs.
The real barrier for many Americans is the cost of tuition, not competition with international students. That is where government and universities need to step up with better funding and support. Also, many international students stay in the U.S. after graduating, contributing to the economy and research. The problem is underfunding and poor policy decisions at the national level, not the presence of international students.
I'm not actually sure they could: remember we're talking about California. UC Berkeley, just a few miles northeast, tried to increase their enrollment count and was tangled in years of NIMBY lawsuits from people blocking the construction of additional student housing, using CEQA to claim that students were an environmental hazard.
Tuition has been increasing at a rate much greater than inflation for several decades, largely through price-insensitive loans. The idea that universities are struggling for money is not supported.
We need these Unis to cut costs and administrators. Propping up waste through courting rich foreigners is not a long-term solution.
Actually, yes, the state pays less per American student then it used it. That is large component of why the price went up, along with the expectation that universities act like a business.
The loans not being dischargable in bankruptcy does not help, but it was Republicans who were against those reforms.
You could attend a university for about $10k per year in 1990. You are suggesting college now costs $210,000 per year. Thats with a 2,000 percent increase.
University student "capacity" is similar to Las Vegas hotel "capacity" - if they thought they could 2X the head count, without cutting their unit profit or damaging the brand, then they'd break ground on new capacity before the sun rose tomorrow.
International students pay full price, unlike American students. That's why the loss is such a big deal for them and also for American students, whose education was being subsidized by international student tuition.
Some part of American students’ education, yes, but a large number of colleges have also used the extra money to inflate spending in other non-academic areas such as administrator salaries, athletics, resort style dorms, etc. Of course when the international money runs dry, those are not necessarily the first areas to see cutbacks.
Most states (at least in the midwest) have not kept up with their obligations when it comes to funding the historical land grand universities ("state" university, etc.).
A lot of state universities (not just in the Midwest) have become professional football teams with an educational institution attached. And I say this as a fan of one of those teams.
“Subsidized” is inaccurate. A more accurate way to describe what’s been happening is that international students drove up the cost of tuition, forcing American students into debt or out of college.
The reason I characterize it this way is college tuition has skyrocketed. The same thing happens in private schools—wealthy grandparents are common enough that children without wealthy grandparents are much less likely to be able to go to private school.
Correlation != Causation. Do you have any evidence that international student enrollment is driving costs up (vs easy access to loans or other factors)?
I'm sure there's no hard "evidence" in the sense of a college administrator on video saying, "Gosh, I love these international students because they let us charge more!"
But it's just how prices work. If you're selling widgets for $5 each, and a new batch of customers come along who are willing to pay $10 for a widget, guess what your per-widget price is now. If you can't sell them all for $10, you might put the rest on sale for $5, but only after you've served all the $10 customers.
The universities are still taking some domestic and/or scholarship students too, but they're naturally giving preference to the full-paying ones.
Could there be other factors driving up tuition? Maybe, but student loans have been around for a long time, and I don't know that they've gotten a lot easier to get. Maybe the recent talk about student loan forgiveness has made some people more casual about taking on debt, assuming it will be forgiven, but that's questionable. The growth in international student enrollment is the one big obvious change.
It is interesting that you believe this is mainly caused by foreign students. It is a recurring theme in today’s society.
If you look at the data here [1] you can see there is a wide range of tuition costs for the top 100 universities in the USA, going as low as 6000 usd with the average in-state cost at 17,000 usd.
The most prestigious ones are more expensive. Why is that?
A very significant part is the network effect people are buying, they are hoping to either get to know well off or connected colleagues, finish a thesis under a prestigious professor or just simply to have a degree from the fancy university.
This is all in an attempt to get ahead. This effect is there regardless of any international students.
Right, you're not being subsidized if you can't get enrolled at all at the school of your choice because the school filled up with full-freight foreign students.
A university's capacity isn't static. The money that comes in from foreign students can pay for additional capacity. You're talking as if every university was allocated a fixed number of seats in 1955 and now we all have to fight for one.
Adding capacity isn't cheap. That gets passed on to the "customers". Which also raises the price for Americans.
>The money that comes in from foreign students can pay for additional capacity.
No, the cost gets spread out among all the customers. There are no mechanisms where discriminatory pricing kicks in, and only the foreign students pay for the additional capacity.
>There are no mechanisms where discriminatory pricing kicks in, and only the foreign students pay for the additional capacity.
There is exactly such a mechanism. The foreign students pay more!
I don't have the exact figures to crunch the numbers (and I doubt you do either), but it's pretty implausible to suggest that foreign students are somehow a loss maker for US universities. If foreign students were a net loss, then universities wouldn’t be so keen to admit them. And if they're profitable then they pay for their seats.
The US university system is an incredible national asset. There are incalculable benefits to having the world's best universities attracting the best students from all over the world. That some Americans have managed to convince themselves that this is a bad thing is enough to turn my brain inside out.
It's unpopular because it's ignorant, uninformed, and actively harmful.
To add to the rest of the comments, accepting and enrolling international students in our university system confers enormous benefits to this country. We drain the best and brightest from the rest of the world to come here, participate in our economy, start businesses, make research breakthroughs, start a life here, and teach future generations.
This is unambiguously good. It does not come at a cost to Americans, but is an inarguable boon which serves as further fuel for our continued global economic dominance. Willingly sacrificing this advantage is so profoundly stupid and self-destructive it beggars belief.
Most Americans never visit another country (save for immediate neighbors) and so probably aren't aware that having paying foreign students at universities is very standard everywhere in the developed world.
Many international students want to stay in the US after graduation. Getting the visa to allow it is the hard part, they're forced to go back. The "profoundly stupid" part is putting so much effort into giving someone a world-class education and then demanding that they don't use it for the betterment of our country's economy.
What secret American intellectual property is being openly disseminated to university students?
If your concern is educating people here and not doing absolutely everything possible to make them feel welcome and invited in order to convince them to stay here, I fully agree with you. Something tells me that is not your position.
> This is unambiguously good. It does not come at a cost to Americans, but is an inarguable boon which serves as further fuel for our continued global economic dominance.
Are you sure? China is doing the exact opposite and their country is developing explosively.
They aren’t zero sum and international students pay often 2-5x what American and in state students pay. So they are subsidizing things as well. maybe not too much (because international students make up a tiny part of any university) but still.
If you have evidence that international students (often grad school and higher) are actually taking spots away from natives then please provide evidence.
This is bad news because it will severely diminish our many leading research universities. Perhaps, if the government intended to fund education to compensate for crippling these institutions, an argument could be made in favor. But the current government has the opposite priority and is actively suing and threatening universities.
This is only good news if you want to see the decline of the United States.
Let’s look at an analogous situation: a middle-class Brit who buys a home in Spain to retire in. This Briton might speak the language fluently and spend the remaining 15-20 years of their life in Spain, paying taxes and contributing to the local economy. But their ability to pay top-of-market for housing comes at the expense of locals, who wind up petitioning the government to change visa rules to stem the tide of foreigners.
It’s not a simple situation when scarcity is involved, and it ultimately doesn’t matter what nationality you consider long-term immigrants to possess.
You mean like a Londoner retiring in the countryside? I really don't see the difference. Local is such a crazy concept, I mean, I totally get what you're getting at but you are using the wrong tools to arrive at the wrong conclusion.
A middle-class Brit who buys a home in Spain to retire in just got sold a property that was worth peanuts on the market not that long ago for a very large amount of money in the Spanish economy. Whoever sold it to them would have never sold it for the same amount of money to another person from the same location because we've embraced 'the market'. What you fail to touch on is that this Briton is importing not only their wealth, but also a lot of extra expenditure all of which benefits the local economy. The real burden is when they start leaning on the health care system, which wasn't made to cater to a bunch of aging foreigners and that will quickly turn the so-far net positive into a net negative, financially and service wise for everybody else.
Emigrating later in life to another - poorer - country is a burden on that poorer country that the immigrants did not pay into earlier in life. If you emigrate: do it when you're young enough to contribute to the system that you will rely on to support you when you're older. Otherwise you are just preying on the denizens of weaker economies (ok, they got the better deal with the weather). The housing market could be fixed, the economic disparity and subsequent service shortages can not, that money got left behind in the UK.
It's not taboo, it's lowest common denominator demagoguery which overlooks that this is a mechanism to gain educated talent to become citizens even if those people do happen to be brown.
Recently a Haitian-American specialist solved in issue for me that several white doctors I'd seen had been unable to help. It's weird that I should have to cite an example of someone foreign-born being valuable to have here but this is 2025.
Most students are coming from countries with significantly worse demographic trends. The population inversion is already here but it is being felt by schools first.
In 10 years it will be for new employees, in 40 years it will be shortages in medical care.
This is kind of misleading. There were 16 nonprofit college and university closures in 2024 [1]
I also have reservations about making predictions of what will happen in 10 years, much less 40. There are challenges relating to demographic change but it's not predetermined as you present it.
Every time someone makes a confident prediction about the future 10 or more years out all I can think of is the Population Bomb book [2]
1. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/business/financial-healt...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
Population is an extremely complex, dynamic system, and I don't think we have any way of actually predicting it -- all we can do is look at trend lines and make projections.
(caveat - not a social scientist; just my current opinion; etc.)
Population Bomb's core claim was about the instantaneous rate of reproduction. This is a complex stochastic process. It could drop to 0 overnight if people decide no more babies.
But population decline is easier to model mid term because you don't need to make almost any assumptions. The next 18 years of university intake are all already born and there ain't a lot of them. The only way for them is down.
Clearly, what's beyond that is hard to forecast, but even then making a pretty good forecast for the next 25 years only depends on forecasting births in the next 7 years.
Maybe we'll have a billion humans living in orbit in a century. Unsure if they'll be willing to pay Earth Tax though.
At small scales you can have them give up their culture and assimilate but at replacement scales you just turn your country into a third world country. That's completely unacceptable.
Whoops!
[0]: https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics
Medical care shortages are mostly a function that hospitals don't want to pay nurses market rate and then treat them poorly.
The exception is doctors. The shortage there is completely driven by their guild (AMA) successfully lobbying for a restriction on the number of medical schools.
It's not just this. It's also that the career is starting to suck.
Over half the doctors I know who I met while they were in medical school/residency are now out of the practice. They counted down the days until they had their student debt paid off and bounced to non-patient care roles outside the medical system.
The entire profession has been captured by the administrative and managerial class. Doctors have had most of their agency stripped from them, and it's an exhausting career choice for someone who generally has a ton of options at their disposal.
I expect the trend to get even worse as more and more pressure gets applied to the medical system both due to demographics and the endless march of making everything corporate.
US healthcare is so expensive because basically every single part of it costs more than it "should", by quite a bit. Including, yes, doctors.
If the doctors are causing like 1% of the issue, it’s not likely to be worth the time and energy to rectify vs if you can point to it being like 50% of the issue.
I’m pulling those numbers out of my ass so don’t feel like I’m trying to hold you to the literal values but I’d need to see _some_ data to even consider supporting changes to the AMA and laws surrounding them
In software you can be a nobody off the street, straight out of prison, if someone pays you money to write software then that is that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting#Injuries_or_deaths_du...
In the software world we also take on zero fucking liability for just building software on the street or is your circle full of people who commonly carry Software Malpractice Insurance?
FYI, the men with guns come for software engineers as well if the rich want it. Look up Sergey Aleynikov
AMA is the biggest gatekeeper in getting there.
Look you’re obviously against the AMA, and there’s arguments against their guild and its practices that I’m amenable to, but trying to pin the financial problems with our healthcare system on them is ludicrous given how many other large problems are in the system. Insurance middlemen are undoubtedly a bigger cost
NPs are starting to get around this by getting independent or mostly independent practices in many states. The Doctors can still kick PAs in the teeth because they are usually under the medical board, but they can't do nearly as much to get their greedy claws on NPs because they are governed by a separate nursing board that nurses have more control of.
It's interesting to see that but then also see boasts of "record freshman class sizes" at major public universities every single year (eg my Alma Mater, Wisconsin).
Is this a consolidation that is happening?
It is unclear to me why anyone in the comments here is under another impression. These were newsworthy events.
They weren't elected?
Anyone who responds "But isn't it a good thing that there are more opportunities for American students?" is missing the forest for the trees. Trump is not trying to open up more opportunities for education; he's trying to destroy education.
- general anti-immigrant attitudes, policies, and policing (ICE)
- deportations of students exercising free speech rights (to criticize Israel)
- forcing colleges to change policies (again, to protect Israel from criticism by students and student groups)
Good grief, how dare they humanise international students and emphasise with suffering!
>The phrase "without much evidence" is the reporter's judgment, not a neutral presentation of fact.
No, it is a neutral presentation of fact. The Trump administration hasn't presented any evidence. That is a fact.
Universities and research are already struggling because of poor leadership and lack of investment, not because of international students. In the 2023-2024 academic year, international student numbers only comprised ~6% of the total U.S. enrollments.
At Stanford, 36% of graduate students are international students (2024-2025 AY). While there are very good reasons for this, I think it's hard to argue that international students are not displacing US students, at least in grad school. For undergraduates, the number is 9% (2023-2024 AY). Stanford has tremendous financial resources and a main campus that is more than 12 square miles in size. They could grow the size of their student body if they wanted to.
Well, that was the case up until this year.
The real barrier for many Americans is the cost of tuition, not competition with international students. That is where government and universities need to step up with better funding and support. Also, many international students stay in the U.S. after graduating, contributing to the economy and research. The problem is underfunding and poor policy decisions at the national level, not the presence of international students.
We need these Unis to cut costs and administrators. Propping up waste through courting rich foreigners is not a long-term solution.
The loans not being dischargable in bankruptcy does not help, but it was Republicans who were against those reforms.
Is that you Donnie?
You could attend a university for about $10k per year in 1990. You are suggesting college now costs $210,000 per year. Thats with a 2,000 percent increase.
EDIT: Corrected so I don't look stupid.
Quick web search:
University of Georgia - enrollment up 3%
Ohio State - enrollment up 2.3%, highest in history
University of Alabama - enrollment exceeds 40,000 for first time in history
University of Michigan - couldn’t find enrollment, but it reported a record number of applications
The reason I characterize it this way is college tuition has skyrocketed. The same thing happens in private schools—wealthy grandparents are common enough that children without wealthy grandparents are much less likely to be able to go to private school.
But it's just how prices work. If you're selling widgets for $5 each, and a new batch of customers come along who are willing to pay $10 for a widget, guess what your per-widget price is now. If you can't sell them all for $10, you might put the rest on sale for $5, but only after you've served all the $10 customers.
The universities are still taking some domestic and/or scholarship students too, but they're naturally giving preference to the full-paying ones.
Could there be other factors driving up tuition? Maybe, but student loans have been around for a long time, and I don't know that they've gotten a lot easier to get. Maybe the recent talk about student loan forgiveness has made some people more casual about taking on debt, assuming it will be forgiven, but that's questionable. The growth in international student enrollment is the one big obvious change.
If you look at the data here [1] you can see there is a wide range of tuition costs for the top 100 universities in the USA, going as low as 6000 usd with the average in-state cost at 17,000 usd.
The most prestigious ones are more expensive. Why is that? A very significant part is the network effect people are buying, they are hoping to either get to know well off or connected colleagues, finish a thesis under a prestigious professor or just simply to have a degree from the fancy university. This is all in an attempt to get ahead. This effect is there regardless of any international students.
[1]: https://www.collegetuitioncompare.com/best-schools/us-top-10...
Adding capacity isn't cheap. That gets passed on to the "customers". Which also raises the price for Americans.
>The money that comes in from foreign students can pay for additional capacity.
No, the cost gets spread out among all the customers. There are no mechanisms where discriminatory pricing kicks in, and only the foreign students pay for the additional capacity.
Uh, state universities often have a mechanism for that, its called “out of state tuition”.
There is exactly such a mechanism. The foreign students pay more!
I don't have the exact figures to crunch the numbers (and I doubt you do either), but it's pretty implausible to suggest that foreign students are somehow a loss maker for US universities. If foreign students were a net loss, then universities wouldn’t be so keen to admit them. And if they're profitable then they pay for their seats.
The US university system is an incredible national asset. There are incalculable benefits to having the world's best universities attracting the best students from all over the world. That some Americans have managed to convince themselves that this is a bad thing is enough to turn my brain inside out.
Yep.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/26/g-s1-35654/trump-internationa...
To add to the rest of the comments, accepting and enrolling international students in our university system confers enormous benefits to this country. We drain the best and brightest from the rest of the world to come here, participate in our economy, start businesses, make research breakthroughs, start a life here, and teach future generations.
This is unambiguously good. It does not come at a cost to Americans, but is an inarguable boon which serves as further fuel for our continued global economic dominance. Willingly sacrificing this advantage is so profoundly stupid and self-destructive it beggars belief.
Until they go back home, maybe taking American IP with them out the door. Educating adversarial countries is profoundly stupid.
Many international students want to stay in the US after graduation. Getting the visa to allow it is the hard part, they're forced to go back. The "profoundly stupid" part is putting so much effort into giving someone a world-class education and then demanding that they don't use it for the betterment of our country's economy.
If your concern is educating people here and not doing absolutely everything possible to make them feel welcome and invited in order to convince them to stay here, I fully agree with you. Something tells me that is not your position.
Are you sure? China is doing the exact opposite and their country is developing explosively.
If you have evidence that international students (often grad school and higher) are actually taking spots away from natives then please provide evidence.
Okay: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/lowest-accepta...
This is only good news if you want to see the decline of the United States.
It’s not a simple situation when scarcity is involved, and it ultimately doesn’t matter what nationality you consider long-term immigrants to possess.
A middle-class Brit who buys a home in Spain to retire in just got sold a property that was worth peanuts on the market not that long ago for a very large amount of money in the Spanish economy. Whoever sold it to them would have never sold it for the same amount of money to another person from the same location because we've embraced 'the market'. What you fail to touch on is that this Briton is importing not only their wealth, but also a lot of extra expenditure all of which benefits the local economy. The real burden is when they start leaning on the health care system, which wasn't made to cater to a bunch of aging foreigners and that will quickly turn the so-far net positive into a net negative, financially and service wise for everybody else.
Emigrating later in life to another - poorer - country is a burden on that poorer country that the immigrants did not pay into earlier in life. If you emigrate: do it when you're young enough to contribute to the system that you will rely on to support you when you're older. Otherwise you are just preying on the denizens of weaker economies (ok, they got the better deal with the weather). The housing market could be fixed, the economic disparity and subsequent service shortages can not, that money got left behind in the UK.
This shift has consequences for funding of schools that have not been completely simulated out yet. Prepare for unforeseen consequences.
Recently a Haitian-American specialist solved in issue for me that several white doctors I'd seen had been unable to help. It's weird that I should have to cite an example of someone foreign-born being valuable to have here but this is 2025.