>This policy change affects hundreds of thousands students and must generate a massive loss in economic terms.

It certainly does. But it's worth keeping in mind that you only have to drive about an hour north or west of either campus for "MIT/Hardvard, Boston area landlords and businesses lose out on billions of dollars from foreign students" to flip from bad news to good news.

Look at the politics of this and where ICEs actions stand on the spectrum of immigration, foreign relations and COVID (and probably a couple other issues that I'm not thinking of) and it all makes sense.

The administration will win brownie points among those people who already support it with this policy from the get go. This policy also pits the landlords and business owners in the college towns (who have a big interest in the school's opening, but don't have any love for the administration) against the colleges.

>Look at the politics of this and where ICEs actions stand on the spectrum of immigration, foreign relations and COVID (and probably a couple other issues that I'm not thinking of) and it all makes sense.

The COVID angle seems to me to be a total fig-leaf for other aims, seeing as the administration didn't do much for public health wrt covid - no strictly enforced lockdowns, no leadership on calling out states opening up too early, and not showing the president wearing a face covering. Also lets be real, the average international student is far less likely to transmit the virus than your average face-covering conspiracy-theorist American. (Especially those from China or SK - places where there are already cultural norms formed around limiting spread of infectious diseases)

Let's call a spade a spade. This is an attempt to enforce extralegal policy limiting immigration to the US via reducing the number of people on student visas.

The administration's policy on COVID is that it wants everything open and open yesterday, virus be damned. This new ICE policy that punishes universities for not doing so and tailors the punishment to mostly exempt the areas that vote for him. The schools attracting foreigners tend to be in left leaning college towns or in left leaning cities. The smaller state universities and community colleges that are in redder voting areas aren't nearly as dependent on foreign labor because they don't have as big grad student programs.

You're right about where this falls on immigration.

That'd be some interesting data to show backing up your claims this affects only the more left leaning campuses.

FWIW, Stephen Miller, an immigration advisor, has, in the past suggested limiting issuing student visas to "hurt universities whose faculty and students had been critical of Trump" [0]. With this in mind, this motivation becomes more clear and this wouldn't be the first policy from this administration that does collateral damage to their base.

0 - https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/409436-trump-con...

It's like the tax policy change a few years ago to reduce the mortgage interest deduction. This had a much bigger effect on expensive cities and suburbs which are more in Democratic-voting states (CA, NY, CT, NJ, MA, WA, MD, etc). The Republican party lost a few Representatives in those states but it was worth it to them to get the tax bill passed and stick it to the libs.

Look at any county by county map showing who voted for who in a presidential election in the last 20yr. The cities lean left. Where are the universities with graduate programs big enough to attract substantial foreign interest located? Mostly cities. So who gets hurt by this policy the most? Places (and people) who lean left.

This is ignoring the many state schools in those states which attract tens of thousands of international students each year

True, it's a messy policy (like any other broad brush federal policy) and he's throwing a lot of his own supporters under the bus.

Looking at the map of results from the 2016 election in Indiana (where I went to college), the state was solidly pro-Trump but you can easily spot the blue counties where IU Bloomington (Monroe) and Notre Dame (St Joseph) are located. The only other counties where Hillary won are Marion (Indianapolis) and Lake (basically a suburb of Chicago). Tippecanoe county (Purdue Univ) is pink and went for Trump with 49%.

This indicates that even in a "red state", the university towns with lots of international students are already voting left and hurting them with this policy probably wouldn't affect the outcome of the next election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...

> This is an attempt to enforce extralegal policy limiting immigration to the US via reducing the number of people on student visas.

I suspect this a "heads I win/tails you lose" situation. If schools don't reopen to in-person classes, thousands of foreign kids get kicked out. If schools do open, then hey, the COVID thing can't be that bad since things are back to normal

Obviously landlords and businesses will lose out because of the decision to go fully online. They might anyway, since there wouldn't be any requirement I'm aware of that the student visa holders would have to stay near a school they were merely logging into. They could spend their semesters anywhere in the country in theory.

But surely even if the foreign students are forced to leave the US they'll stay enrolled in (and paying for) the classes. Isn't the education the point?

> But surely even if the foreign students are forced to leave the US they'll stay enrolled in (and paying for) the classes. Isn't the education the point?

Given that returning to, say, Beijing would mean your 3 PM Friday class at Harvard happens at 3:00 am Saturday, local (this isn't Coursera – most of these classes will be conducted online with real-time instruction, as they were for the remainder of last semester), I'd expect a lot of students would seek to transfer elsewhere.

Can you elaborate more?

This measure restricts immigration, a declared goal of Trumps sdministration. And it basically tries to force Universities to open for the fall semester. Again something the administration wants.

It only works, so, if t holds up in court. There, Trumps administration doesn't have the best track record.

Not that.

I mean, the commenter argued that this whole thing is better for the business even nearby the campus. How could that be? As far as I can see, this actually destroys the business nearby the campus.

No, they noted that the news of Boston area landlords and businesses losing billions due to these restrictions will probably be met with general applause less than an hour or two outside the city, thus bad news becomes good news, the urban / rural-ish divide.

Immigration restrictions in general would probably be applauded, but immigration restrictions that only directly affect colleges and cities? Slam dunk for Trump among his base.

Ah, that. Agree, less students means less business. Assuming foreign students permanently live near campus, it would even hurt more during Covid-related closures.

EDIT: I read OP that this policy ams to force campuses to open for fall. That would mean more students on site. Even without international ones, that is more than now.

Its a pretty blue state - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_Massachusetts

There have been very few Trump signs here in Hampden county, an hour and a half west and one of the most Republican areas of the state. Mask compliance is nearly universal as well. New Hampshire is its own thing, of course.

The institutions are there primarily to educate our workforce. There are thousands of locally deserving students who don’t have opportunity, either went to wrong schools or don’t know how to navigate the system that’s geared toward connections or wealth.

These institutions could fill their student bodies with thousands upon thousands of our own students who get overlooked.

On the other hand they’ve grown used to foreign money filling their coffers.

The institutions are not primary there to educate our workforce; they exist to fill a variety of roles including policy development roles, collaborative research roles, and basic research roles that are essential to our nation's economic development. Please explain to me how we are going to fill legions of academic research roles normally held by foreign students and foreign graduates when no one can get a visa or after we boot foreigners out of the country as students and they no longer want to return. You honestly think undereducated Americans are going to rise up and fill those roles? Oh and guess where the well trained and intelligent foreigners who we kick out are going to bring their skills to: our competitors. Over 90% of my lab was foreigners and huge numbers of research lab positions are filled by foreigners. The policy is basically a self inflicted gunshot wound administered purely to get Trump reelected with absolutely no regard for the impact on the country long term.

By better educating our own kids. We have tons of kids in “inner cities” and “rural areas” who are underserved. We could do better for them. We’re to damned lazy to give a shit so we trade them for overseas shinies with money.

This is reductionist. The academic jobs OminousWeapons is talking about are not likely to be filled by domestic workers because they're severely underpaid.

NIH annual stipends are ~$25k for graduate students and $52-65k for postdocs [1]. There is a massive opportunity cost associated with these positions, _particularly_ for people coming from less affluent backgrounds. It's really hard to accept a 50-70% pay cut (assuming you could otherwise take a tech role) if you have an unprecedented opportunity to contribute to your and your family's financial stability.

[1] https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-20-0...

Markets work. Cutting off the vast supply of minimum wage international workers will incentivize Universities to treat and pay their junior researchers better.

As the parent insinuated, stipends are set by the NIH and congress, not the university. They are largely paid out with grant funding from the government. If an entity wanted to pay a researcher more, it can't come from federal funds which is how most labs (outside of big ones that have industry collaboration) primarily fund themselves. So while markets work, this isn't a competitive market, it is a regulated one where a ceiling is being set.

https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/salary-cap-stipen...

Improving education for underserved populations does not necessitate removing competition from PhD programs and post docs, or really even from colleges. Many of the people you are talking about don't even finish high school. It would take at least a decade of concerted effort to improve education in underserved communities to the point where denizens could legitimately be successful in advanced degree programs en masse. Also notice that this announcement did not come on the heels of any such announcement of an investment in education, and that none has been planned. I would be completely behind any effort to fix education here and I agree with you that one is needed, but this policy doesn't address the problem of poor education in underserved communities, it simply creates a new brain drain problem.

Foreign students and better educated domestic students aren't mutually exclusive. In fact, things work better when we have both. Even in the small and non-elite college I went to, there were foreign-born professors. My one math professor came from China and was very willing to run special courses for the senior undergrad math majors. So a foreign student came here for his doctorate, graduated, and went on to educate Americans. Win win.

I got into an Ivy on merit. White male, not legacy, not an athlete, not rich. Just good grades, good SAT score, and luck. I promise you the _vast_ majority of students I met who didn’t deserve to be at my school (academically speaking) were domestic legacies or athletes.

Can’t imagine my undergrad, first job out, or grad school without the many international students I made friends and worked with. Part of educating a successful workforce is teaching us how to work and collaborate with people from other backgrounds. Hard to do that if everyone’s from Newton or Westchester

I agree. We have tons of kids in the San Joaquin Valley , Montana plains, Eastern Washington, inner LA, etc who should have a chance... but they don’t bring the same money.

It's complicated. The kids whose parents pay for full tuition (or for a new building) subsidize the cost of attendance for the rest of us. I definitely couldn't have afforded to go without my financial aid package.

And that's supposedly part of the value proposition of elite schools - mix wealthy and connected students with bright students with ideas.

There's plenty of international students on financial aid too, I think it's doing them a disservice to say they're only being admitted for the revenue. Maybe at larger public institutions with tens of thousands of students, but I don't think that's generally the case at the smaller elite schools we're talking about

The admission lawsuit against Harvard revealed that they do have quotas for U.S. states to ensure that every state is represented in each admitted class. The university even lowers SAT/ACT and GPA requirements to ensure students from these less populous (Montana, Iowa, Dakotas,Idaho etc) and sometimes lower quality school systems (Mississippi) can get into the school and have a chance against applicants from California, Texas, New York etc.

Well, except aren't foreign students essentially subsidizing local students? Since they receive substantially less financial aid and often pay the full price of tuition. [1]

So when all of that money goes away, tuition rises and local students get less financial aid. Or said universities and colleges downsize, reducing the number of professors and students attending which means fewer local students get to go to college.

This seems like a 'cut your nose to spite your face' sort of reaction fueled entirely by xenophobia rather than any sort of rational basis.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/foreign-students-pay-up-to-t...

MIT and Harvard. They have billions in endowments.

I’d prefer a kid from the Bronx or san joaquin valley or butte Montana get a scholarship than someone who could choose any school they want (intl students going to these places are not poor).

Okay, and? What about the smaller universities that rely on foreign tuition? This is a policy that goes beyond affecting MIT and Harvard. You're right these international students are not poor and that's the point, they subsidize the poorer students. University admissions are not a zero sum game.

Well, if it’s for the money then they can do it remotely charge them a bunch for their Ivy League diploma while reserving the local spots for our own student body.

Except if international students are in the US, then they're contributing to the US economy and not their home economy. They're buying goods in the US, paying taxes in the US and perhaps most importantly, they're exporting US culture back into their home country if they go back or resulting in positive brain drain to the US if they stay.

Do you not realize how bad of an idea it is to just completely cut all of that off? For benefits that aren't even tangible because universities grow to fit the number of students attending?

Again, it's not based in any sort of rational basis. It's xenophobia.

Locophilia.

The data doesn't back up your claims. The only Americans who are "losing" jobs to foreigners are males who didn't graduate high school. In every other category, it can be shown that immigrants only add to the workforce, they don't replace it.

So only the most vulnerable in our society...

Women as well as there isn’t enough demand to pull them in either by choice or by policy.

Even Bernie used to say this (before he went national).

I imagine international students are a major source of revenue for most schools, and help subsidize the ever-increasing tuition and fees for domestic students.

FYI, international students have to pay often significantly more as turion fee alone.

Smart local students go to in state public schools to avoid crippling debt.

This policy does not prevent students from attending the universities. It prevents them from living in the US. Since it is July, there is no way that universities would fill slots left open by international students who withdraw their attendance at this point. This policy cannot produce an outcome of enabling more Americans to attend top universities.