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Universities forced to face addiction to foreign students’ money
- neonate 7y agohttps://archive.md/cCnqz https://archive.md/cCnqz
- Leary 7y agoIt's not like they are refunding the tuition for this semester. Hopefully things will get better in the fall and the universities can reopen.
- hhs 7y agoThere are student associations that are asking for at least partial refunds. Here are recent examples in Baltimore [0] and Chicago [1]: [0]: https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-johns-hopkins-sga-tuition-refund-20200405-xze7s7tkyzbg5azrmpg7j35r5m-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-johns-hopkins... [1]: https://chicago.suntimes.com/coronavirus/2020/4/3/21207613/uchicago-tuition-strike-university-coronavirus-covid-19-unemployment-college https://chicago.suntimes.com/coronavirus/2020/4/3/21207613/u...
- the_svd_doctor 7y agoSame at my university, they are asking. The administration said, basically, “no way”.
- diebeforei485 7y agoWhy should tuition be refunded anyway? People are still getting credits and can graduate. Housing and meal plans should be refunded for the unused portion of the semester, yes.
- hazz99 7y agoEducation is now online and they cannot access any university resources. Why should they pay the same price for a quarter of the value?
- gedy 7y agoSo the value is not really about "education"?
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoIt's the opposite surely. Suppose you pay £8000 for a course of lectures, with materials and access to laboratories. Then the provider fire the lecturer, close the laboratories, ... surely you see there's an educational deficit then. It may be true you can pass an exam from the course texts and online materials that remain available, but the educational benefit would be exceedingly diminished.
- hazz99 7y agoI definitely don't get the same learning outcomes without being in a classroom. Everything is harder. It's harder to ask questions and have in depth discussions. I struggle to pay attention. Lectures are less engaging. None of the campus facilities are available. A large % of my course fees go toward maintaining labs, student groups and sports. I can't touch any of those.
- ggm 7y ago$AU 18b of revenue. The goal was significantly smaller when things started. What this has done to tertiary education in Australia is a very mixed bag. I love that we teach people. I hate what it has done to the system overall. Also, NZ and other regional players are exasperated with how Australia marketed. We didn't make things easy for any other players and now its all crashing down, there are mutters of "good"
- JDulin 7y ago> I love that we teach people. > I hate what it has done to the system overall. There are plenty of fine universities the scions of CCP members can attend in China that don't result in the long-term institutional destruction of your nation's educational system. "I love that we teach people" has all the meaninglessness of most feelings of charity, except the price you pay is losing a healthy, stable, focused university system for actual Australians.
- ggm 7y agoOh don't be tiresome. They're from India, Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, all over. We used to have a strategic engagement called the Columbo plan where we taught them on the condition they returned home to do service for their state. I liked that model. Not everything is about china and the CCP. The problem is the venality of the university system now. It's a business.
- JDulin 7y agoOk. Replace the CCP and China in my comment with the other countries you mentioned. You get the exact same mechanism of degradation of your universities, you're just still trying to feel better about it by pointing out that your charity is towards other, poorer, less authoritarian countries than China. The thing policymakers do not understand about globalism is that it takes advantage of existing institutions, necrotizing them in the process, by infecting them with incentives they were never designed to handle. Where once you had a closed system that was working well, you now have a system exposed to graft, grift, and entropy from agents without accountability for how they take advantage of it. So, these agents can find ways to leverage an institutions' own interests against the interests of the people it was originally designed to serve. Much the same way European imperialists could exploit the internal fissures of colonized peoples. Sand in the gears of a clock. This is what happened to manufacturing in the United States. Once the American governance class became culturally and financially loyal to Wall Street, there was nothing stopping developing nations & capital from convincing them to move the entire American industrial base abroad in pursuit of higher returns, no matter the irreversible social damage it caused at home. The Charity Consolation Prize is exactly what those businessmen and policymakers pat themselves on the back with too when they look at the destruction wrought on the American middle class ("Look at home many Indian people we've lifted out of poverty!"). Which would be great! If they were the leaders of India! So you are right that it's driven by greed now, but it's not just "something that happens." The university system in the U.S. and Australia did not just wake up one day and decide to become addicted to Chinese money. Someone gave them a needle full of the stuff to try. It's an exploit in the system that can be closed. It's a choice.
- pjc50 7y agoAlternatively, "global shutdown destroys export industry". There is a debate as to whether education should be for profit at all versus purely state funded, but if it is private then normally an industry bringing in overseas money and customers would be celebrated.
- nitrogen 7y agoYou really have to consider follow-on effects. It's like outsourcing all your manufacturing -- eventually you'll need something local and won't be able to get it, and everyone local who could otherwise have helped will resent you for selling out your industry.
- pjc50 7y agoIsn't this the reverse? China has outsourced higher education to the West. What follow on effects are you referring to? Besides, students are typically non-local in any university town.
- nraynaud 7y agothey are a 1B people country, from their point of view, foreign education is a fringe anecdote, no country in the world would even be able to house a significant share of their students.
- threw24576443 7y agoObligatory clip from Yes Minister https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WW7mhtp5a5E https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WW7mhtp5a5E
- lordnacho 7y agoBailey College sounds a lot like Balliol College. I guess this was from the era where you didn't use actual names, though the universities themselves were named correctly IIRC (Hacker went to the LSE). The show also had imaginary countries that sounded like they belonged in certain regions. The comments about having classrooms is because the Oxford and Cambridge colleges tend not to teach people in groups the size you might be used to at high school. You'd have tutorials with one or two students and a Prof in their office, and if your Prof was nice they'd even give you some booze while sitting like the characters are doing there. There are lectures as well with hundreds of students in huge halls. Depends a lot of what you're studying but I did a mix of engineering and social science, so had a sniff of both.
- peteretep 7y ago> though the universities themselves were named correctly Both of them! [0] 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOvEwtDycs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOvEwtDycs
- balola 7y agoIf it can subsidize native students, it's not a bad thing, what's needed is an enviroment in which cheating and political manipulation can be freely called out.
- onetimemanytime 7y agoThey need to start fresh, with no sacred cow when it comes to expenses. Universities have become so bloated is not even funny.
- smt88 7y agoI had the same attitude as you, but many of the wealthy, Chinese-raised students at my local (prestigious, private) university can't speak basic English. The school then has to choose to either fail the student or ignore their cheating. With a $250k incentive to choose the former, that's what they choose.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 7y agoHas this been documented anywhere, by the way? You'd think that there would be more reporting around this topic.
- neumann 7y agoI work at a University in Australia and have been on both sides of academic and professional. This unravelling was on the horizon for everybody, maybe not so soon, but definitely in the viewport. In an effort to drive up income streams there has been a slow erosion of Australian education (more at some universities than others) to cater for the international (Chinese and Indian predominantly) market. There are all sort of perverse incentives built in to erode educational benefits, hand hold students, make university 'fun', something that used to be part of the student body's remit, but having crushed that movement it is now where a lot of money is being spent at many universities. Not on academics, not on labs, but on comfort, edtech, busy work and asinine initiatives underpinned by endless erroneous reporting by consultants to make execs feel like they are 'doing good'. I know - it is hard not to sound bitter, but it is a tragedy of short sightedness. The recruitment of students is predatory and eventually the saturation of subpar graduates from these university degrees would have eventually resulted in the fading of both cultural and brand name prestige of sending your kids to Australia for study. This is also tied to cheap international student labour, housing that pockets the inner cities that nobody who isn't a trapped rich international would live in and a segregation of the university student community that is unhelpful.
- wickerman 7y agoIn Dublin, where the housing crisis is supported by an overabundance of "student accommodation" and airbnb rentals, the housing crisis disappeared overnight because of this virus. A friend of mine said she found a small apartment for two in Dublin 5 for 800 euro a month. Unbelievable.
- s_dev 7y ago>the housing crisis disappeared overnight because of this virus Thats a bit disingenous and hyperbolic. It is true that more apartments are available (00's) due to Corona but the housing crisis is far from over.
- mannykannot 7y agoIt may be mistaken and exaggerated, but did you really intend to write that wickerman is being disingenuous?
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 7y agoAt least in the US, rich foreign students shelling out big sums for US universities is one of the few legitimate paths towards immigration. You're paying 150-250k worth of access to an F1, CPT, OPT, a more streamlined path into the H-1B world, followed by permanent residency. You get to work for a US employer for a few years without having to bother with the lottery, while also applying to an H-1B at the same time. I believe this is most viable in the STEM degrees. My hunch is that getting hired into the US as an H-1B from abroad is more difficult since you don't know how interviewing in the US works, you can't easily fly out to dozens of interviews to set up a competitive bidding process, etc. For others it's a way to build status back in the home country by having attended a US university, and then go back. For others it's just a way to hang out in the country, while paying someone else to do all of the exam-taking for them. The wealthy Chinese-dense "626 area" in SoCal comes to mind as one of the big offenders in this underworld. They don't even show up to class, someone else does. There's no incentive for universities to police this, why bite the hand that feeds? The school gets a few hundred k in revenue, the wealthy student gets to live in the US for a few years, have fun. It's a win win, even though it corrupts the point of an F1 visa. Unlike H-1Bs, I don't think they're limited, so at least it's not a zero-sum game where some other "more deserving" students are screwed out of a place. Just like decoupling health care from employment is a good idea, decoupling for-profit education from immigration seems like a good call as well. Unless we're on board with immigration being pay-to-play, vs using other markers besides family net worth in order to gate keep.
- ThomPete 7y agoIts actually part of the problem. They make it harder for US students to get a proper education. Universities are acting like the housing market in big cities. Only the elite from the test world can afford going there and then they often go back contributing trump the US. I hope this will stop that practice. We should want foreign students but not based on the current criteria and structure.
- thawaway1837 7y agoRights so the Chinese pay hundreds of thousands of do,Lara so they can get F1 jobs (restricted largely to on campus or has to be study related, so it doesn’t pay), OPT jobs (capped at 1 year) or H1B jobs (needs to be renewed every year, at least by the Chinese who rarely get more than a 1 year extension), so they can get permanent residency after 10-15 years of being on an H1 based on current figures. Right, that makes complete sense.
- Causality1 7y agoI would like a detailed analysis to solidify my opinion. On one hand, some argue that accepting foreign students means there are fewer slots for native ones. On the other hand, some argue the higher tuition paid by foreign students allows universities to subsidize the cost of tuition for natives. The first group responds that foreign students only create increased demand and thus increase the cost of tuition and that even if universities were able to pass savings on for native students they choose not to do so. I want numbers on these arguments.
- DiogenesKynikos 7y agoWhat about "addiction" to foreign students' talent? STEM research in the US benefits hugely from its ability to siphon off the top students from all over the world. In China, for example, the best students from top-tier universities tend to go abroad for their graduate studies. American labs get a steady supply of the top international grad students. Many of them remain in the US afterwards, which boosts related industries in the US.
- bluenose69 7y agoYes, this has long been true for postgraduate students, who are very valued members of most STEM departments. The worry relates to undergraduate students.
- aschatten 7y agoNot just foreign. In the US even many university prefed out of state students, but will never admit to it.
- non-entity 7y agoMy opinion on university education has flip flopped overtime with me leading toward it being a massive scam at the moment, but this time for reasons like what you mention. Case in point: I found the perfect program for me: online CS bachelors, from a respected state school, very affordable. However, I cant even be considered a resident of the state I live and work in for several years and would be forced to pay out of state tuition, making it prohibitively expensive unless I want to be paying down loans the rest of my career.
- thawaway1837 7y agoSo you will be paying what foreign students always do, without access to cheap loans, or scholarships, the majority of which are restricted to citizens. And they don’t even have a guarantee that they will be allowed to work afterwards even if there is a company who wants to give them a job.
- non-entity 7y agoIf that's true than I feel sorry for them because that's a shitty deal. On the other hand, if this is just wealthy people with large cash reserves throwing them out in a chance obtain citenzship, then congratulations they have the extreme privilege of being born into the right family, which many of their countrymen didnt have.
- Loughla 7y agoThat's weird, most schools offer one flat online cost, regardless of residency. That schools is woefully out of touch. Who is it?
- non-entity 7y ago
- travisoneill1 7y agoWould be a real tragedy if they had to cut back on administration to make up for the lost revenue.
- thawaway1837 7y agoIm sure that’s exactly what will happen. /s
- dirtyid 7y agoDiploma mill tourism is one of those phenomenons I really want to see all the externalities accounted for. My only significant issue is disrupting local housing-prices but student VISAs is one vehicle among many. Otherwise I don't really see the difference of gambling on a Chinese fuerdai vs trust fund legacy vs athletic scholarship. They're just different avenues of to building non-academic institutional prestige - the kind that's... important. Tuition aside, a bunch of rich kids that spends big into the economy is also a perk. They're perennial tourists that also occasionally shell out for an exotic car or three. I've known a few of these types, and they're kind of a mix bag. Some are just here to coast. Some are middling. Some are very intelligent, the kind of assets western educational institutions are designed to brain drain. The latter point gets overlooked, enticing/stealing and retaining talent is a huge western soft power advantage. After separating the wheat from chaff higher up the academic chain, there's a disproportionate of foreign students in PhD and labs [1]. Without going into specific criticism of western secondary school education, the broad point is most countries just don't produce enough talent to fill demand. Also credentialism and educational inflation means many masters programs bend over backwards not to fail anyone. At least among my cohort who spans many types of masters and professional degrees, you get proportionally more unqualified locals getting pushed out of the program with just passing grades as foreign students who bought their way through. There seems to be pervasive pressure to hold graduation metric up because most people recognize, outside of some fields, what you learn is rarely applicable to what you do. And even fields where theres overlap, you have too much unqualified people getting the pass. Regardless, my point is, if we need to acquire talent, hedging against rich international students isn't the worst bet. The odds are overwhelmingly in the house favour. They pay you. Some of them are slackers, but many also received the best education from their home countries but can't make it to the top 1% cut off to enter extremely competitive and prestigious local institutions. Foreign students wanting to pour guaranteed money and potential talent into our society is something to be optimized for. [1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-599-x/2016011/c-g/c-g02-eng.gif https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-599-x/2016011/c-g/c-g...
- nvarsj 7y agoThis is a problem in the UK too. The independent school (aka private school) sector has seen fees double or triple over the last 10-20 years. This is largely driven by rich foreign students, primarily Chinese, sending their kids to these schools. I don't particularly regret these bastions of class division destroying their reputation for money, but there are a lot of knock on effects. Independent schools used to be one of the few paths for middle class mobility - scrounge enough to send your kids there, and they are basically guaranteed entry into the elite of British society. But these days the tuition is prohibitively expensive and prices out almost everyone. This just exacerbates the class divide even more in the UK. The main issue though is that independent schools in the UK have non-profit status - so pay NO tax on the fees they charge. With the rising fees locking out most people from access to them, there is very little societal benefit to these schools. But as a taxpayer, I have to subsidize education for the very rich or rich foreign nationals. It's ridiculous.
- lucozade 7y ago> I have to subsidize education for the very rich or rich foreign nationals Not a penny of your tax goes to subsidising their education. The charitable status of private schools means that the money used for their education isn't taxed twice. I agree that private schooling tends to exacerbate divisions. The majority of state school provision in the UK is atrocious. I have more concern that very little is being done about the second rate schooling we have than I do about the, relatively small, amount of first rate schooling in the private and state sectors.
- nvarsj 7y ago> The majority of state school provision in the UK is atrocious. I don't think this is really true anymore. I agree state schools were truly awful in the 80s/90s (my partner who went to state school didn't even learn times tables). Quality of state school has improved tremendously over the last 20 years, and I'd say it's very good these days. Especially as middle class families are priced out of independent schools. In fact I'd even say it may be better for your kids to go to the local state school nowadays, otherwise you are isolating them from their local community. > Not a penny of your tax goes to subsidising their education. I, of course, totally disagree :). I toured many London independent schools last year for secondary, and you just need to take a look at the amazing school grounds to see the benefits of charitable status. [1] These are for-profit institutions with huge bursaries that avoid paying almost all taxes. Any tax exemption is equivalent to a subsidy that I am funding as a taxpayer. 1. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charities-detailed-guidance-notes/annex-i-tax-exemptions-for-charities https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charities-detaile...
- qubex 7y agoThe more I read about how universities worldwide are becoming profit-driven enterprises focussed on providing enjoyable experiences to their ‘clients’, the more thankful I become for my mirthless days at LSE.
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- red_admiral 7y agoGood article, but I want to clarify a point since it could leave the impression that it's universities themselves driving this growth race. In the UK at least, we used to have a model where universities were funded by the government (through tax, of course) but the government also set hard limits on how many students you could enrol, with penalties for going over. The current model which Tony Blair in effect started and David Cameron completed removed this cap, and so opened the way for the current growth race. Whether a university can survive under the new model, or even be better off than before without increasing student numbers depends on many things including the amount and kind of reasearch income, the proportion of international students they have and whether they're city-centre or campus-based. I would say most UK universities were faced with a choice between masively increasing student numbers or massively cutting expenditure to survive - lots of them seem to be doing a combination of both, which is one reason we've seen so many staff strikes this year. At least in several decent (Russell Group) universities that I know a bit about personally, it was very much a case of we have to grow by x% a year just to carry on paying our staff and bills. At least in the UK, I make a case that it's not just greedy unis and fat cat vice-chancellors driving this problem. To give some numbers - the fees for home undergraduates are capped at £9250 a year and in a science or engineering degree with high equipment costs, it's hard to break even on these fees. International students are where the money really comes from, a one-year MSc degree can set you back £25k-£30k in fees alone although that usually includes doing a supervised project over the summer as well as attending an academic year's worth of teaching. Or at least, it'll include whatever supervision you can get this summer.
- amiga_500 7y agoHow did we used to do this in the 1970s where the state paid for it all? We now live in a world where you don't need a secretary, because you can type up documents yourself, you can instantly send written communication via email. You can publish agendas, and other campus wide information instantly on a website. You can automate. You can distribute notes to your students for free instead of endless photocopies. Why given these gifts bestowed upon us by the tech gods, are we so hopelessly inefficient in the West? What is the actual point in doing more research, when we have all this step jump in technology, and we can't seem to do anything any more?
- xiaolingxiao 7y agoYup. While in college, a friend of mine who worked in one of the departments said it's well known that if the department needs more money, then "just admit more Chinese grad students." The foreign students pay more, and receive poorer service in both from the school, and often from the professors. This is of course by no means unique as the article says, Brown University almost went bankrupt in the 90s, so there was a program to target wealthy European families and admit their children to the school, in exchange for large donations and full tuition. Many of these schools talk a big game about valuing education, but there is a reason many of them are older than the most storied for profit companies, and the fact that Universities are private and non-profit protect them from being audited.
- KoftaBob 7y agoWhy stop there? They should be forced to face their addiction to easily accessible government backed student loans. It’s essentially a blank check that the gov has handed universities, and the gov is the one left to collect the repayment. And then we wonder why college is so expensive? The current system gives them every incentive to charge whatever they want.
- aurizon 7y agoThe quality of life of a (cash) cow declines after it is no longer milkable - they usually end up in some sort of stew - which seems to be looming.
- alexpotato 7y agoSomething similar happened back in the late 1960's. Eisenhower had pumped tons of funding into universities to help us catch up to the Soviets after Sputnik. This was primarily for what is now called STEM but benefited each university as whole. Fast forward to the late-1960's and the costs of the Vietnam War plus social programs under Johnson led to huge cuts in funding to universities. To make up the shortfall, admissions rates at many schools, including the Ivy League, went north of 50%. Coupled with the fact that being in college was an exemption from the draft meant that total enrollment skyrocketed. This whole situation was made to clear to me when I was in high school and attended a UPenn information session. The rep from UPenn asked "are there any UPenn alumni in the room?" and numerous parents who graduated from the late 1960s to the early 1970s stood up. I remember thinking "Wow! Admissions rates at UPenn now are below 10% so these parents must have really been sharp!". Finding out about the funding cuts and admissions rates changing drove home that an institution's reputation can change dramatically over the years; sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worst. It also highlighted how outside incentives can dramatically change the internal processes of a large school/company etc.
- Loughla 7y agoState and federal funding can be tied to increases in enrollment, 100%. My current institution was founded on the principal that 33% of funding came from the feds, the state, and tuition. Now, it is 5% federal (excluding PELL grants), 11% state, and the remaining amount is tuition and PELL grants. Our incentive is to get as many students as we can, otherwise we close the doors. If you want higher education to stop its sleazy processes, we need to fund it appropriately via tax dollars. It's a lot like people who want abstinence education, in my opinion. You can want people to do the right thing all you want, but at the end of the day, people are going to bang, so you need to set them up with the birth control they need. You can want institutions of higher education to act altruistically all you want, while cutting funding, but at the end of the day, they're going to do what they have to in order to keep the doors open.
- jimbob45 7y agoSpin off college sports, cap foreign student numbers, cap acceptance of student loans, and kill off Admin staff. Everyone knows how to solve the college problem. It’s just that colleges have no incentive to do so until they’re forced somehow.
- Robotbeat 7y agoWhy cap foreign students (or acceptance of student loans), though? Foreign students are not a bad thing. There’s not a limit in the number of professors. In fact, we’re graduating way more graduate students than there are slots of tenured teaching positions. The problem isn’t too many foreign or domestic students or not enough people qualified to be professors, it’s administrations ran by greedy MBA types.
- jimbob45 7y agoForeign students because too many of them perverts the motivations of universities (and we have more than enough universities to go around for all prospective foreign students. Financial aid because unchecked student loans allow universities to charge as much as they want for tuition. Student loans being the most predatory type of loan (being non-dischargeable)
- Robotbeat 7y agoSounds like the solution for #2 is to make student loans dischargable and #1 to eliminate profit-seeking from university motivations. Capping foreign students sounds like a bandaid solution that wouldn't address the core problems and would make other things much worse (decline of rural communities, quality of American education system, America's influence, standing, and soft-power, plus reducing highly skilled immigration rate).
- jstewartmobile 7y agoGood. For every elite university performing actual "brain drain," there are a dozen others importing a fifth-column of mediocrities for cash and prizes. Now corporate espionage is off the charts, and our elite are too short-term and rootless to care about the long-term consequences.
- arbuge 7y agoOf note: shopping malls in the US have a similar dependence on foreign tourists' money. It's why you see all those currency exchange bureaus in each major mall.
- Robotbeat 7y agoWhy is this portrayed as an “addiction”? This is one of America's important exports, and it is also really good for rural areas (usually would otherwise be in decline) with a college. What we need is to strengthen this by granting green cards to those who get advanced degrees in key fields. Yeah, overspending is a big problem (cut Administrative overhead and highly paid deans, etc!), but foreign students are a sign of a healthy and competitive higher education system.
- jccalhoun 7y agoI was in grad school in the midwest of the USA when the 2008 recession happened. States cut funding to colleges so the colleges had to look somewhere for money. The next year I noticed a lot more students from Asia. Even when the economy was good, most states didn't increase funding significantly.
- twomoretime 7y agoThis is quickly spreading into the corporate sector. I recruit occasionally and even at top tier schools, 90%+ of our applicants and career fair participants are foreigners. I've counted the resumes. I don't have anything against immigration per se, and I don't want to be accused of xenophobia or any such nonsense, but this is not ok. We are catering to international populations while essentially leaving our countrymen behind. It isn't just some blind nationalism that fuels my concern; if you don't fix your domestic problems, soon foreigners won't have any more incentive to immigrate...plus, in addition to the pitiful devaluation of the degree, there's already a glut of grads in almost every sector, including STEM. Something has to change. We will also see wages rise as the employee pool shrinks and locals are less likely to work for lower wages because they're not escaping third world poverty. It's high time to limit foreign students attendance. And maybe after that we can raise standards to recover what little prestige our schools had because between this international cash cow and diversity initiatives I can easily explain why so many people are graduating college today with minimal competence. Lowering standards makes us all worse off in the long run, even if your metric of "national college graduation rate" improves.
- geebee 7y agoElite US students scheme to get into top law, MBA, and medical school programs, but they don't show nearly as much enthusiasm for graduate engineering programs. This is probably rational market behavior, the result of opening engineering up to international competition while sheltering the professions from it. As policy, the US government gives the bar and AMA tremendous power to exclude foreign degree holders and greatly limit the number of foreign nationals at US med and law schools. At the same time, the US government created a visa program to bring in hundreds of thousands of competitors in STEM fields, and created special exemptions to the lottery that encouraged US graduate programs to fill their classes with students from overseas. People can agree or disagree that this is good policy, but it seems pretty clear to me that the US interfered with the markets and created policies that encourage people who would like to live in the US but don't have that right to study engineering, and it encouraged people who already have that right to do something else, like law, medicine, or other protected fields. Even if you agree this was bad policy overall, there's a tremendous amount of room to disagree about how to solve it. Restrictionists might say that we should restrict all professions equally. Libertarians might say the problem isn't that engineering is wide open, it's that law and medicine and everything else aren't open enough.