"You're caught up in your story:" I just know what the heck I'm talking about. As I wrote in this thread over and over, it's US citizens, via gifts or taxes,

"You're caught up in your story:" I just know what the heck I'm talking about. As I wrote in this thread over and over, it's US citizens, via gifts or taxes, e.g., taxes from Joe and Mary, that is paying for most of any education in a well known US college or university. So, in particular, there's no way a foreigner is paying his/her way; the foreigner is getting an education mostly paid for by US citizens. For the graduate student who gets a stipend for work grading papers or working in a lab for a prof, that's mostly just make work. I've done it as a grad student, and I've hired it as a prof. I will say that when I was teaching calculus at a Big Ten school as a grad student I was earning my keep. The NSF wrote into its grant contracts that students must be supported as a way to get more STEM grad students, not because the NSF wanted those students to contribute to 'research' but because the NSF economists did a calculation to see how to increase STEM graduate degree labor in the US labor market. So, sure stockholders of United Technologies, GE, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, etc. like the idea of the NSF generating more STEM Master's degrees, but Joe and Mary can see that their tax money is not getting their children through college but is getting foreign students through grad school to compete with their children should they manage to get through grad school. So Joe and Mary have a right to feel ripped off. "Not a handout (in part) to foreigners." No, that basically is what is going on, and because the NSF insists so, and so insists because the NSF wants, as I explained, to participate in 'US national manpower management', i.e., flood the US with cheap labor, in STEM fields and not just research. Mostly it is just not in the economic interest of any country to be giving away high end education to foreigners.