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> The students from India and China were there on various scholarships, indirectly paid for by Joe and Mary. Bummer. Ripoff. Wait, are you saying someone like

> The students from India and China were there on various scholarships, indirectly paid for by Joe and Mary. Bummer. Ripoff. Wait, are you saying someone like me from the third world can get a scholarship in the US from the US government? Wish I had known that a few years ago. The people I know who studied in the US either did so out of pocket or via scholarships granted here in my country by local bodies.

graycat 14y ago
Look, in a US college or university, essentially no student ever pays for the full cost. One-third is about the most a student pays. Instead the institution gets money from taxes, research grants, gifts, the endowment, and a few others. Essentially all the money coming in is from US citizens or US taxes from US citizens. So, the US is paying for those institutions. If a student from outside the US gets accepted, arrives, and does well, then typically they can get a scholarship. So, who's paying for their education? Not the student, or their family. Instead their education is being paid for by US citizens or US taxes. Even if the foreign student doesn't get a scholarship, likely two-thirds or more of their education is being paid for by US citizens, not the student. When I was in one graduate school, a Midwest state university, somehow there were a lot of students from India there. That university was expensive for students from that state and much more expensive for any students from other states. A year there could cost as much as a new US car. Today that would be ballpark $40,000. How is a family in India going to come up with $40,000 to send their child to a US university for one year? Given the currency exchange rates at the time between India and the US, tough for me to believe that people in India were paying for those students from India at out of state rates at that university. I believe I know where the money was coming from, some special program of the US State Department. So, it was US taxpayers, struggling to get their own children through college, paying for the college educations of students from India. Why? Because somehow some people at the US State Department believed that somehow it was good for their effort to 'organize the world' to take money from US citizens and use it to educate students in a distant, poor country. At another university, I had a graduate scholarship for my Ph.D. The students were good but were nearly all US citizens and not very many of them. At one point a prof confided in me that the department had a lot of tuition scholarships going to waste: US citizens who were good students didn't want to come, and the department didn't like the quality of the applications from foreign students. But, whether the student was US or foreign, the cost, no doubt very expensive for the professors, buildings, supplies, overhead, was being paid for by US citizens. Let me be even more clear: The list of the world's top few dozen research universities is dominated by the US, e.g., Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Brown, Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, ..., University of Chicago, ..., Berkeley, Stanford, and Cal Tech. Now, they are 'research universities' which means that heavily what they do is research. The research is mostly paid for by research grants, and those are heavily from the US NSF and NIH. The grants are very competitive. It is standard for a university to take, as I recall, about 60% of the grant money for 'overhead'. Hint, hint, that's how the English department gets funded, along with the student center, the string quartet series, the limo for the president, the concert hall, the lawn care, the bronze statues of earlier presidents, the fountains, etc. And that 60% number tends to come up again -- about 60% of the budget of the university can come from such research grants. YMMV, but look up details in the annual reports of the top research universities. So, it's clear: Those research universities, right down to the grass mowing, are being paid for heavily by the US Federal Government from tax money from US citizens. Any student, US or foreign, however much they are paying, is getting most of their education paid for by US tax payers. Then a question for US taxpayers is, why should they, struggling to get their own children through college, be paying for the educations of students in distant countries? If you went to a well known US college or university, no matter how much you paid (maybe there are some exceptions for students from some Mideast oil kingdoms), most of your education was paid for by US citizens, via gifts or taxes.
- tomkarlo 14y ago
  You're guessing that these students are somehow federally subsidized, but if you're going to make that assumption, you need to actually substantiate it before composing an elaborate fiction of government malfeasance to explain it. For many US colleges, foreign students are a profit center, because they pay "full fare." Which is why a lot of schools purposely recruit overseas students to help subsidize US students: http://www.npr.org/2011/03/16/134585499/U-S-Schools-Hire-Companies-To-Court-Foreign-Students http://www.npr.org/2011/03/16/134585499/U-S-Schools-Hire-Com... http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-11-13/foreign-students-boost-usa-economy/51188560/1 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-11-... There are over a billion people in India. The fact that some tiny percentage of them can afford to go to school in the US should be entirely unsurprising, regardless of how low their median income is. Don't just assume that "Indians must be poor, because their country is poor."
  - graycat 14y ago
    "You're guessing that these students are somehow federally subsidized, but if you're going to make that assumption, you need to actually substantiate it before composing an elaborate fiction of government malfeasance to explain it." Essentially every student in a well known US college or university is "heavily subsidized" in that they pay roughly only 1/3rd of the real cost with the rest from US citizens via gifts or taxes. Even paying full tuition of $50,000 a year or some such is not the full cost. This situation has held true in essentially all US colleges and universities for at least 50 years. Read what I wrote: The US NSF wanted to flood US labor markets with STEM majors, and one way they did that was to write into university research grants that students must be supported. Since there were so few US citizens that were good students and wanted to do graduate work in STEM fields, the universities got a huge fraction, roughly half, from India and Taiwan. So, a lot of TAs were good with Chinese but not English. And, whatever those students paid, still they had their educations paid for almost entirely by US citizens via gifts or taxes. A few students of wealthy families are a very different matter. This is difficult material to understand?
    - tomkarlo 14y ago

graycat 14y ago

Look, in a US college or university, essentially no student ever pays for the full cost. One-third is about the most a student pays. Instead the institution gets money from taxes, research grants, gifts, the endowment, and a few others. Essentially all the money coming in is from US citizens or US taxes from US citizens. So, the US is paying for those institutions. If a student from outside the US gets accepted, arrives, and does well, then typically they can get a scholarship. So, who's paying for their education? Not the student, or their family. Instead their education is being paid for by US citizens or US taxes. Even if the foreign student doesn't get a scholarship, likely two-thirds or more of their education is being paid for by US citizens, not the student. When I was in one graduate school, a Midwest state university, somehow there were a lot of students from India there. That university was expensive for students from that state and much more expensive for any students from other states. A year there could cost as much as a new US car. Today that would be ballpark $40,000. How is a family in India going to come up with $40,000 to send their child to a US university for one year? Given the currency exchange rates at the time between India and the US, tough for me to believe that people in India were paying for those students from India at out of state rates at that university. I believe I know where the money was coming from, some special program of the US State Department. So, it was US taxpayers, struggling to get their own children through college, paying for the college educations of students from India. Why? Because somehow some people at the US State Department believed that somehow it was good for their effort to 'organize the world' to take money from US citizens and use it to educate students in a distant, poor country. At another university, I had a graduate scholarship for my Ph.D. The students were good but were nearly all US citizens and not very many of them. At one point a prof confided in me that the department had a lot of tuition scholarships going to waste: US citizens who were good students didn't want to come, and the department didn't like the quality of the applications from foreign students. But, whether the student was US or foreign, the cost, no doubt very expensive for the professors, buildings, supplies, overhead, was being paid for by US citizens. Let me be even more clear: The list of the world's top few dozen research universities is dominated by the US, e.g., Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Brown, Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, ..., University of Chicago, ..., Berkeley, Stanford, and Cal Tech. Now, they are 'research universities' which means that heavily what they do is research. The research is mostly paid for by research grants, and those are heavily from the US NSF and NIH. The grants are very competitive. It is standard for a university to take, as I recall, about 60% of the grant money for 'overhead'. Hint, hint, that's how the English department gets funded, along with the student center, the string quartet series, the limo for the president, the concert hall, the lawn care, the bronze statues of earlier presidents, the fountains, etc. And that 60% number tends to come up again -- about 60% of the budget of the university can come from such research grants. YMMV, but look up details in the annual reports of the top research universities. So, it's clear: Those research universities, right down to the grass mowing, are being paid for heavily by the US Federal Government from tax money from US citizens. Any student, US or foreign, however much they are paying, is getting most of their education paid for by US tax payers. Then a question for US taxpayers is, why should they, struggling to get their own children through college, be paying for the educations of students in distant countries? If you went to a well known US college or university, no matter how much you paid (maybe there are some exceptions for students from some Mideast oil kingdoms), most of your education was paid for by US citizens, via gifts or taxes.

tomkarlo 14y ago
You're guessing that these students are somehow federally subsidized, but if you're going to make that assumption, you need to actually substantiate it before composing an elaborate fiction of government malfeasance to explain it. For many US colleges, foreign students are a profit center, because they pay "full fare." Which is why a lot of schools purposely recruit overseas students to help subsidize US students: http://www.npr.org/2011/03/16/134585499/U-S-Schools-Hire-Companies-To-Court-Foreign-Students http://www.npr.org/2011/03/16/134585499/U-S-Schools-Hire-Com... http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-11-13/foreign-students-boost-usa-economy/51188560/1 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/education/story/2011-11-... There are over a billion people in India. The fact that some tiny percentage of them can afford to go to school in the US should be entirely unsurprising, regardless of how low their median income is. Don't just assume that "Indians must be poor, because their country is poor."
- graycat 14y ago
  "You're guessing that these students are somehow federally subsidized, but if you're going to make that assumption, you need to actually substantiate it before composing an elaborate fiction of government malfeasance to explain it." Essentially every student in a well known US college or university is "heavily subsidized" in that they pay roughly only 1/3rd of the real cost with the rest from US citizens via gifts or taxes. Even paying full tuition of $50,000 a year or some such is not the full cost. This situation has held true in essentially all US colleges and universities for at least 50 years. Read what I wrote: The US NSF wanted to flood US labor markets with STEM majors, and one way they did that was to write into university research grants that students must be supported. Since there were so few US citizens that were good students and wanted to do graduate work in STEM fields, the universities got a huge fraction, roughly half, from India and Taiwan. So, a lot of TAs were good with Chinese but not English. And, whatever those students paid, still they had their educations paid for almost entirely by US citizens via gifts or taxes. A few students of wealthy families are a very different matter. This is difficult material to understand?
  - tomkarlo 14y ago