You're assuming that there weren't enough spots for Americans and that they were getting denied due to foreigners. That's not true. For Americans who want a college education and don't get one is mostly because of the cost of education, which foreign students subsidize.

This is a classic case of shooing yourself in the foot only because of a fear of the foreigner.

Maybe too many were threatening to and intimidating Jewish students over the past 2 years?

This is a completely made up problem, there is no systematic persecution of Jews anywhere in us universities.

> This is a classic case of shooing yourself in the foot only because of a fear of the foreigner.

You having only one foot is fine, if the foreigner has zero feet and cannot even stand.

Example: smart young people are unable to innovate in India.

I thought colleges only had a limited number of slots to accept students each year. Seems like US citizens would be competing with foreign students in that case.

For most colleges the number of available slots is not constrained by some absolute limit but is instead constrained by their income available to pay for all the people and resources needed to educate these students.

Further, the most competitive universities artificially constrain acceptance rates because low acceptance rates make them more desirable.

Imagine we passed a federal law banning the children of parents who make more than $150,000 annually from attending college. Would this just mean that colleges take their same planned slots and give them to lower earning students? No. It'd be massively disruptive and change the available slots.

The flow of smart and talented people to the United States has historically been incredibly beneficial for the latter.

EDIT: further reading here: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2025/05/28/demand-f...

Multigenerational American citizens literally invented almost all of modern technology.

From the wright brothers to henry ford to bell labs to darpanet to the transistor.

Id challenge you to find any other country with that legacy of ingenuity and smarts and talent.

America put a man on the moon before the Hart-Cellar act even allowed non Europeans to immigrate.

Absolutely correct and HN is going to punish you for that

Got flagged almost instantly. lol

If you have resources and energy, anything is possible if you have a system to exploit them. The downside is of course draining the resources and destroying the ecology which also happened. There is nothing special in American blood vs anywhere else.

England. Scotland. Germany.

Part of Western heritage.

America was built on immigrants from Europe indeed founded it upon it.

Non Europeans weren't allowed to immigrate (en masse) to America until 1970 Hart Cellar act.

Not saying that's right or wrong it's just a fact.

America is cultural and genetic sibling to Europe.

TLDR: No, probably not.

If you're prepared to pay the same fees as foreign students and get the same grades, they might be happy to have you, but more likely it'll just mean more colleges have to close - foreign students never really took places from domestic students, they subsidised them.

We are going through a similar issue in the UK where a lot of University finances have been setup to rely on being able to attract foreign - mostly Chinese and Middle Eastern - students who pay 2x-4x more than domestic students. Now those students are being pushed away or are turning away, those institutions are questioning their own viability, and are at risk of bankruptcy.

At Ivy League or Oxbridge levels, this might be an acute issue: the running costs are insane, and despite having large endowment pools of cash, those pools aren't deployable to address the problem. Donations to such funds are often earmarked to support certain seats, tenures, scholarships and so on, and can't be used for general spending and teaching costs.

For the poorer schools without endowments (think JuCos), they might not have relied much on foreign student money anyway, so might weather it better. You are just as likely to get to junior college tomorrow as you were yesterday.

A middle schooler's aspirations of MIT, Stanford, Yale, Berkley and so on might now look more likely on paper, but in truth, those colleges might not be there or not able to offer as many courses by the time they're ready to attend.

I wouldn't be totally surprised to see a couple of Ivy League and some lower tier colleges go under in the next 5 years, and for about half the Russell Group in the UK to face a similar fate.

Yeah I look at STEM departments and like 1 in 4 names are American/European origin.

Even if a percentage of them are foreign names with American citizenship, its still a huge portion of foreigners

Its like this at all universities.

For example, one can run this through chatGPT and ask what percentage of names are traditionally Western:

https://cs.nyu.edu/dynamic/people/phd_students/

Just show your whole ass, little racist hackernews.

lol it's "racist" to present information on foreign vs US students now??

Yes, trying to parse out whether a name "is American" is the most racist thing, a giant red flag.

Theres a coorelation I hate to tell you

No its pragmatic!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45408096

Not sure about the economics of it in the US, but in many countries international students subsidise domestic students, because they pay full fees whereas domestic students generally do not. Back during the financial crisis lowered enrolment of international students was a factor in Irish universities having to discontinue courses, say; they just weren't economically possible without that subsidy.