Foreign students pay nothing?

Foreign students pay nothing?

President Trump said that students from foreign countries are paying nothing for attending college at Harvard and other U.S. institutions. Huh? That’s news to me and news to every school in the US. Quite the contrary, foreign students are the cash cow at our universities. They pay full tuition and are not eligible to receive US federal aid. Yet Trump tweeted “Why isn’t Harvard saying that almost 31% of their students are from FOREIGN LANDS, and yet those countries, some not at all friendly to the United States, pay NOTHING toward their student’s education, nor do they ever intend to.” Then who pays? Certainly Harvard is not gifting 7,000 international students free tuition.

Of course, this comes amid the fight between the Trump administration and Harvard. Trump wants to revoke the university’s ability to enroll foreign students as part of his campaign to bend the university to his demands. Despite what Trump says, the foreigners are a major source of revenue for the university. The Boston area receives about $385 million annually from the foreigners and around $4 billion for the state as a whole. In addition 24 billion dollar US companies were founded by foreign students who studied at Harvard.

Who pays their tuition and fees? If not the students, then perhaps it is their governments. The average total cost to attend Harvard is $90,000 annually. International students being ineligible for US federal financial aid are more likely to pay full freight. They are universities’ cash cows. Harvard’s international students make up 27 percent of its enrollment. They make up 39 percent at Columbia and an even higher share at 43 other universities with at least 1,000 students. It is not clear that universities favor foreign students to American ones, But it is clear that without foreign graduate students, our science departments would be in severe trouble. 

There are currently more that 1.1 million international students enrolled at US colleges and universities, half of whom are graduate students. India is first with China second. Then come South Korea, Canada, Taiwan, Viet Nam and Nigeria. The number of international students in graduate STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) programs far outweighs domestic ones. In computer science, 72% of grad students are international. Fields like petroleum engineering have international student enrollment rates as high as 81%. Fifty percent of engineering students are international. Over 60 percent of all STEM doctorates are awarded to international students. Again, imagine the fate of these disciplines were it not for the international students. BTW, this past semester the most common name in my undergraduate finance class was Patel. There were five Indian surnamed students but no other international students in the class. Only one attended on an irregular basis the rest just showed up to take the exams. Their grades were one A, one B, two C+ and one C.

I would be shocked if Trump prevailed in court over his banning foreign students from Harvard or any other university. Recall that all this started out with the revocation of visas for foreign students participating in anti-Israel demonstrations. But it has morphed into something much more global – the banning of foreign students period. Again, that a federal government would have this kind of power to ban foreign students should be frightening to any conservative.