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I'm gonna bet that if the fee survives the courts, all 85k h1b slots are still going to be filled even with the 100k fee. Just that those spots will go to the best and not to the slop.
Good riddance. Tuition is insane as it is, and maybe supply and demand will kick in and reduce prices for Americans since demand is down.
It seems to be a 100k annual fee - some of the slots will be filled, but it seems kinda doubtful that all 85k of them will be. I'll take the flip side of your bet.
Even odds, $100 goes from loser to charity of opponent's choice, bet conditional on h1b fee actually happening for a full year and at least 60k of those 85k visas actually paying the fee? i.e. if there's a "$100k fee except for this category of applicants where the fee is waived" and 90% of the visas go to people in the waived category nobody pays, if courts strike down visa fee nobody pays, if visa fee is live for 2 weeks then walked back nobody pays (unless 60k people pay the fee during those two weeks in which case I pay).
Sure, those terms seem fair
Alright, reminder set
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I think you have that backwards. International students are subsidising native students. For cost to come down other things need to happen. University services, wages and administrative bloat needs to be reduced.
One might still believe you have little to gain from them and that they might be bad in some other way (culturally or a security threat).
I know universities themselves claim otherwise, but it's absolutely absurd to believe that native students cost the school more than the tuition they bring in.
Their books are open, right? What is there to disagree about here?
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International students are subsidizing (superfluous) university services, wages and administrative bloat. I don't think native students see much benefit from the money at all.
So you think that, in a budget crunch scenario, the administrators are going to fire their fellow administrators (or, even more risible, their reports that give them clout in the organization) rather than doubling down on the existing sliding scale of tuition and soaking the families at the top even more?
No? I don't think I said that? I'm sure the admins, like all useless bureaucrats, will cling to their gibs until the bitter end, even if it means completely hollowing out the educational mission of the university.
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Uh, native students are the ones mostly demanding the better food, fitness facilities, nicer dorms, DEI offices, etc.
Tell me more about that, because when I was in college I didn't demand any of that. I wanted cheaper textbooks and affordable housing close to campus. I went to local restaurants or cooked at home. Our gym was a little old, but it was fine. I don't recall any student protests demanding fancies facilities. Maybe that's a common thing at other universities that I'm just not aware of?
They're not "demanding" it by protesting, they're demanding it by choosing to attend one university over another and therefore sending tuition dollars to one university instead of the other one. It's demand in the economic sense, not the political sense.
Okay, that's fair. I suppose I might be typical minding. I think I am considerably less nerdy/autistic than many users here (no offense meant, I just mean that I'm a socially integrated normalfag) and even I based my choice of college mainly on (1) the fact that it had the field I was interested in, (2) that it wasn't located in an inner city shithole, and (3) that they gave me a fat scholarship.
I've often heard hat new stadiums/cafeterias/fancy dorms are built to "attract students" but I do not personally know anyone who compared universities in this way. Even the 100 IQ normies at my HS who you would expect might care about that stuff were much more interested in whether a particular school had a good "party school" rep, whether their bf/gf was going there, or whether it was the "correct" school for their family sports fan dynasty (I lived in the southeast). I do not recall once ever hearing about the quality of the dorms or gyms.
However! If I were an unscrupulous admin trying to expand my bureaucratic power, this seems like a really convenient argument to make. "We need 50 million dollars for a new gym to attract students to Foobar State! If we don't build it, students will choose University of Foobar instead! We can't fall behind!" And all the other admins have grifts of their own and know how to play the game, so I doubt anyone would stand in the way except to try to grab those funds for their own power expansion ("We don't need a gym, we need to expand and renovate student housing!")
The missing ingredient here is federal student loans. The federal government offers an unlimited, no-questions-asked, zero-collateral loan to every high school graduate who wants one. Most 18 year-olds lack the impulse control to care about saving their 30-something future self $100,000 if it means they have to turn down living in a luxury resort for four years. As far as the students' day-to-day budgets are concerned, every school is free, so amenities are the only way for the schools to compete. Price literally never even crossed my mind when I was choosing colleges.
Eliminate federally backed student loans (or at least place a reasonable cap on what they'll cover), and most of the cost disease goes away.
Federal student loans are capped, though. The six figure student loan debts are private lenders, who are willing to make the loans because they're not dischargeable.
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This seems plausible, but I remember when visiting colleges a lot about five star chefs and dorms with private bathrooms and campus gyms. Not a lot about the scholarships available. Granted this was over a decade ago.
I am in my mid-30s, so I imagine we were looking at colleges around the same time. To be fair, I do also remember being shown the shiny new cafeteria and student union, and hearing about the new football stadium they were building, but I didn't care at all as a 17 year old. My parents were there with me, though. In hindsight, perhaps these amenities were aimed at convincing the parents, since they would be the ones actually footing the bill. Kind of obvious now that I write it out.
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Superfluous university services etc. that I strongly suspect are mostly demanded by native students. I almost never saw the sort of full-paying Chinese MA students we are presumably talking about use the Disabilities Office, array of mental health and well-being counselors, glitzy sporting facilities or even useless subjects (as they generally come in to get CS and engineering degrees rather than Africana Studies).
You might entertain some hope that the whole system will collapse without their money or native students will be less likely to study useless things if it gets even more expensive, but something something the system staying irrational for longer than you stay solvent. I think ballooning college costs in the US would drive down the birthrate/make reproduction more dysgenic (as more parents decide that they couldn't afford to send a(nother) kid to college and the status drop for themselves and the putative kid is unconscionable if they don't, plus higher college debts delaying ability to settle down) sooner than they would actually drive down college enrollment.
I didn't say international students were demanding shiny facilities and more administrators, I'm just saying that the money from international students most likely goes towards increasing bloat and add more irrelevant facilities. Does a university actually NEED a state of the art massive gym complex or sprawling student union center? These always seemed like make-work bureaucracy expansion projects to me. More facilities = more employees = more admin. At least football can be justified as pulling donations from alumni. Certainly none of the money goes to making education cheaper or better (cheaper books, higher prof salaries, more profs to decrease class sizes, etc).
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At my local university, they are absolutely taking advantage of this particular office, to the point where its staff members regularly call it "abuse" when they think they're talking to a crowd who won't turn around and try to get them fired for saying it.
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I've come from the Australian education system which has similar (arguably greater) international student spending/participation, and yet doesn't really have the same cultures of vast Collegiate stadiums or students residing onsite since most Universities are just smackbang in the middle of the major cities.
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Yeah, most of the huge additional admin spend went on sports, facilities, mental health, nicer dorms etc to compete with other colleges.
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