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Foreign Students Have Begun To Shun the United States (axios.com)
In a potential threat to future U.S. innovation, new international enrollment at U.S. colleges is down for the first time in more than a decade, according to a new report. From the report: It is the first hard sign that the Trump administration's rhetoric may be frightening away some of the world's best and brightest who traditionally have been drawn to settle and work in the U.S. Why it matters: "The Chinese whiz kid, if he can find a way to America, he'll come here. If you're good, you can make a lot of money," Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce, tells Axios. "That whole set of incentives has always been tied to the immigrant stream, and we're severing that connection." By the numbers: The findings are from the Institute of International Education's annual Open Doors report and its smaller joint "snapshot" report on international enrollment. It found that new international student enrollment dropped by 3.3% for the 2016-2017 academic year, and by a far higher 6.9% in the Fall 2017 semester.
To us over here, going to the US now is like going to Germany in 1937 or something.
- I don't want to end up in a concentration camp ("black site") when flying over.
- Nor do I want to be anally fisted at touchdown. (The 9/11 terrorists did not land, now did they?)
- Or live among hyperselfish pschopaths. (I am basing this statement on research.)
- Or risk dying because I do not have $500,000 for a pill or simple operation.
- Or pay $500,000 to get an education that is free in my country.
Yes those are hyperboles. ... Sometimes. :P
I don't think there is any political system in the world that allows the 'best and the brightest' to rise to the top and run things in a way that benefits from their superior way of viewing the world. They are ultimately doomed to failure, too many corrupt toes to step on.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
And as we close the door ever tighter against the rest of the world, they'll discover that they don't really need us, anyhow. They'll walk right past us and wonder how it ever was that people used to risk their lives to come here.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
The alternative to globalism is protectionism. Protectionism has been tried many times, and it doesn't work. If anything, it's even less likely to work these days, now that we have the internet and global supply routes.
The way to deal with globalisation isn't to close our borders, it's to deal with the specific issues.
Education is too expensive, but would be even more expensive if it wasn't for foreign students. The fix is not to turn away that source of revenue that is subsidising local students, it's to deal with the high cost directly. In a lot of European countries university is free for citizens, and costs the government a fraction as much while still being world class institutions.
Jobs are going overseas. That's unfortunate, but if they didn't they would only be automated away anyhow. If not today, then tomorrow. We should help people adapt, to get new high end manufacturing jobs or move into services. Again, Germany has done that, Japan has done that.
The real solutions are hard, and blaming immigrants and globalisation is easy. That's the problem.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Since Trump's election I intentionally avoid al business (or holiday) travel to the US. At least we Europeans got to vote with our wallet. No need to support corrupt politicians, and their hateful followers. Many other pretty places in the world to visit and make friends.
Beyond Trump, maybe it's the general mood of Trump-haters and angry activists of all kinds versus Trump supporters and angry defenders of all kinds.
Why come to a country where everyone is angry all the time?
Why come to a country where no one can ever be happy?
Why come to a country where all the stories are about catastrophic environmental destruction?
Who wants to come here to be told they're a victim every day based on something that happened before they were born in their own country?
Why come to a country where succeeding financially is considered evil?
Why would a young person join a group that only talks about historic grievances and never about future opportunities?
Why come to a country where the leaders and entertainers and celebrities all seem to be among the worst examples of humanity?
Why not go to a country with good people and a good social atmosphere instead?
This view is deeply flawed.
Take Google as an example. You take it for granted that the Google HQ is in the USA, and hires Americans, but what if Sergey Brin was never welcome into the US or Standford, and instead he ended up going to a university in Russia or China or the UK or whatever, and creating his company there? What if Larry Page came to that same university in Russia (or whatever) because it was known as one of the best and most foreigner-friendly university in the world? Had that happened, the Google HQ would have now been in Russia, not California.
This may look absurd to you, but it can easily happen in a generation or two: the best students in the world are not welcome in Stanford, so they start choosing an almost-as good university in some other country, which gets better as more of the world's best students choose it. These students start to create companies in that country (if it welcomes them as immigrants), and suddenly it's no longer a "default" that every successful company needs to be in America. The American employees, which until now had an easy life when the world's best companies all flocked to America to employ them, will now need to start looking for jobs in other countries where these new companies are located.
Much of America's success in the last 100 years is due to its lax immigration policies, which meant that the best scientists in the world came to work in it and create new companies in it. I live in Israel and remember this happening in the 1980s: All the best scientists I knew were studying in the US, working in the US, or just visiting there. All their knowledge funneled into American universities and companies, and created jobs in America, not in Israel. I don't see how in any sense of the word, America suffered from this situation.
If our education system ran off of immigrant dollars, that was never sustainable or good, and we should celebrate its departure.
I suspect that any celebration of the departure of your education system will ultimately turn out to be a very short-lived one once the consequences of not having one start to hit home.
We tried globalism. It meant that everyone else was more important than we were
This is the most delusional description of US foreign policy that I've ever read in my life.
Actually, we got to where we are by importing the best and brightest worldwide. Einstein ring a bell? How about Fermi? Oppenheimer? Tesla?
When you start hating foreigners, it doesn't take long to start discounting their research. Not that I'm comparing the degree, but you are aware that the Nazis didn't like 'Jewish' science, right? More recently, there have been lots of Muslim fundie groups in the Middle East that have decided Western knowledge is bad.
Within the borders of the United States, you have Trump calling facts 'fake' if he doesn't like the source (which is usually divided along political lines that align fairly well with cultural and geographical regions), and a large percentage of the population is going along with it.
I don't think you're giving enough credit to how serious the issue can get, and how easily.
As a science student in a large, public, US university, I see very little "SJW stupidity" as you put it. Most of the students and profs are pretty apolitical on a day-to-day basis.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with the exploding cost of education, it must be all Trump's fault.
Whataboutism! I work for a UK University and we're seeing a rise in international students + our education costs are also skyrocketing. I don't know anyone who wants to travel to the states at the moment precisely because you elected a bigoted troll who's making a luaghing stock of your country.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
The alt-right smear campaign against higher education and exorbitant tuition fees are likely both factors, but I think that the recent surge in anti-immigration rhetoric plays a major role. A large fraction (as in, vast majority) of international students are graduate students. Many of them are master's students, who do pay a huge tuition rate to study in the US, and then a good chunk of them go back home. These students are basically just a revenue stream used to subsidize the tuition of domestic students. A 7% decrease here can easily be offset by hiring slightly fewer faculty/lecturers going forward and raising tuition on domestic students by maybe 2-3%.
But the students who matter most from an economic competitiveness perspective are the PhD students. PhD students don't pay tuition--they get paid. PhD students aren't going to be scared by viral videos--they have already spent years on campuses and know full well that the alt-right boogeyman's depiction of campus life has little semblance of reality. Yet enrollment among this crowd is way down. Moreover, in the past year, I have personally helped three exceptional PhD students from my institution find advisors in Canada and Germany so that they could complete their studies outside of the US. Their reasons for wanting to move had nothing to do with tuition or viral videos; they had to do with feeling welcome/safe, having their family be able to visit, etc. These people will create jobs and help drive economic growth somewhere; just not here.
Campus protest videos can be seen on Chinese video sharing sites and social media. There are Chinese language discussion threads about the state of the American college campus. The sentiment is overwhelmingly negative.
The Chinese sentiment on Trump is general ambivalence, coupled with the usual chatter about how American democracy is really an aristocracy.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
I think his point is that the UK, which is second only to the US in terms of its higher education system, also faces the same increase in costs, while not experiencing a downturn in foreign students. In other words, they are a counterexample to the argument that it's all about cost.
And none of this dual citizen shit. If you become a US citizen, you have to renounce any existing citizenships.
Some countries do not permit you to do so, for example Morocco. And then there are the countries who penalize their (former) Citizens by charging them "expatriation" tax on everything they own if they wish to renounce their citizenship. Well, there is only one that does so. Oh shoot! It's the U.S.!
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Wernher von Braun... John von Neumann... Edward Teller...
Those are just the kind of names known to the general populace; it doesn't even begin to list the kind of people who are pre-eminent in their field but not known to the general public.
We're a big country, but still only 4% of the world's population lives here. US preeminence in science and technology, along with the military and economic benefits that brings, is unnatural and temporary. It was jump-started by the Nazis -- when I was at MIT in the 1970s many of the most prominent professors were scholar-refugees from WW2 -- but for the rest of the 20th century the influx of brilliant minds became a self-perpetuating process, to the immense benefit of native-born scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs.
Few of us are old enough to remember a time when American wasn't the unchallenged world leader in science, technology, and business; Many of us regard this as a kind of American birthright. But it's not. Yes, there may be cultural reasons for American innovation punching above our very considerable population weight, but we can't overcome sheer numbers.
Current economic projections see the US overtaking China as the world's largest manufacturing nation in several years, based on US technological leadership. But that's something we can't take for granted, not without a steady influx of the best young minds in the world.
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