Money? Yes.

Talent and connections? Not necessarily.

Top PhD students are still coming to America.

It’s the money-grabbing 12-month masters programs that are the problem.

Come buy a F-1 student visa for $200k! It’s the Trump silver card.

Fixed that for you. Wealth distribution is far from equitable and immigration by and large benefits the wealthy. They financially benefit from the cheap labor and are mostly immune from the downsides.

The US did great for hundreds of years with the limited immigration we had from primarily European countries. The world we live in today was built with that approach. Remains to be seen if importing from recently modernized / 3rd world countries provides any long term benefit for median Americans. We’d be much better off installing billionaires who wish to invest in the people because they feel an attachment to the people (noblesse oblige).

I can’t really see a good argument for foreigners outside of the Meiji government approach (learn from them to invest in our own) if you care about your people.

The number of graduate students being allowed in hasn't changed significantly, and undergraduate university students are also continuing to be brought in at rates similar to pre-pandemic times.

Looming 'demographic cliff': Fewer college students and fewer graduate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42634596 - January 2025

EDIT: further reading here: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/05/28/demand-f...

This is a classic case of shooing yourself in the foot only because of a fear of the foreigner.

Even if a percentage of them are foreign names with American citizenship, its still a huge portion of foreigners

Its like this at all universities.

For example, one can run this through chatGPT and ask what percentage of names are traditionally Western:

https://cs.nyu.edu/dynamic/people/phd_students/

If you're prepared to pay the same fees as foreign students and get the same grades, they might be happy to have you, but more likely it'll just mean more colleges have to close - foreign students never really took places from domestic students, they subsidised them.

We are going through a similar issue in the UK where a lot of University finances have been setup to rely on being able to attract foreign - mostly Chinese and Middle Eastern - students who pay 2x-4x more than domestic students. Now those students are being pushed away or are turning away, those institutions are questioning their own viability, and are at risk of bankruptcy.

At Ivy League or Oxbridge levels, this might be an acute issue: the running costs are insane, and despite having large endowment pools of cash, those pools aren't deployable to address the problem. Donations to such funds are often earmarked to support certain seats, tenures, scholarships and so on, and can't be used for general spending and teaching costs.

For the poorer schools without endowments (think JuCos), they might not have relied much on foreign student money anyway, so might weather it better. You are just as likely to get to junior college tomorrow as you were yesterday.

A middle schooler's aspirations of MIT, Stanford, Yale, Berkley and so on might now look more likely on paper, but in truth, those colleges might not be there or not able to offer as many courses by the time they're ready to attend.

I wouldn't be totally surprised to see a couple of Ivy League and some lower tier colleges go under in the next 5 years, and for about half the Russell Group in the UK to face a similar fate.

Housing costs are by far the largest line item expense for a student. Actual tuition/books is pretty affordable [1]

[1] https://admit.washington.edu/costs/coa/