Nearly 20 Percent Fewer International Students Traveled to the U.s. in August

Also, no source for claim.

Gifted, driven kids, the kind who will leave their family and everything they've known, to cross an ocean to study in your country, are a scarce resource.

I'm not saying you shouldn't prioritize locals, but if you want competitive, world-class educational system, you should be open to foreign students and faculty helping to keep your system competitive. It's the same worldwide, whether it's in Singapore's NUS, or Oxford, or Saudi Arabia's KAUST.

But, what do I even know?

Most Americans are not.

If we want to have top-tier universities, and produce graduates capable of innovating and taking big risk, we need to have universities who are strong in STEM.

If we want to have universities who are strong in STEM, we need to fill up those seats because otherwise without students, there are no classes.

IDGAF where they come from, to be honest.

I can say, that 99% of those students are much less obese than the average US citizen

They probably are, and that won't stop anytime soon. The question is how much talent is being lost now.

And if you mean them getting spots in the more prestigious institutions, well, it's not clear whether that will even happen (the few thousand international students admitted to the top universities are not the ones that are likely to decline their acceptance letters), but even if it did, well, those universities are simply not as prestigious anymore.

Attracting the best talent from anywhere in the world is a huge part of what created their prestige, and that's even before we get to how they're losing funding, and professors and researchers to other countries.

Or a visit to California railroad museum documenting Japanese immigrants building railroads?

If I’ve learned another it’s that prices never go down

Which is a completely unrelated effort from the free money you're getting from abroad.

Unless governments institute policies that require them to "tighten their belts" they won't tighten their belts by cutting their own pay. They'll tighten belts by cutting out the least paying students, and scholarships, instead.

If this does push governments to get universities to tighten their belts, then why not have governments make them do that anyways without losing a massive chunk of export earnings, and a form of export earnings which has demonstrated positive effects many times greater than the dollars they bring in.

Bigger organizations require more overhead and those costs don't grow linearly. I'm not saying that I think all those administrators are necessary or they all make things more efficient, but at the same time many of them are in place precisely because they are running an office that does make things more efficient. You get rid of one administrator and you may end up increasing the workload on everyone else by 20%, which seems like a win on paper because you lose their budget while not giving anyone else a raise. But getting rid of them made the whole organization less efficient.

e.g. My university's IT office has a huge budget and a bunch of administrators. It makes my life as a professor easier, and it gives students a better experience. It's very easy to say that the entire IT office should be eliminated to "tighten their belts and reduce administrative bloat". Which may be true, but at the same time it exists for a reason, and getting rid of it doesn't teleport us back to the 70s when campuses didn't need an IT office.

> It’s not as if American society hadn’t collectively called for this for decades while tuition has risen astronomically.

American society has called for better education, more teaching styles, more research, more technology, more subjects and classes, more majors, delivered to more students every year. There's no way we are going back, it's just not happening, the expectations are too high at this point. We can either decide maintaining these kinds of institutions are worth it, or trade off for worse outcomes and just give up on being serious about research. Seems like that's actually what this administration wants to do, but the public decidedly does not. However the public wants to have their cake (world class research institutions) and eat it too (low tuition affordable by the general public) and that's just not going to happen.

When I was grad student rent was indeed 50% of my stipend. Tuition was covered as part of research grants. Only way to reduce expenses was to get roommates.

Having said that, mortgage is also 50% of our household income now. American dream is expensive...