It's incredibly unfair for the the administration to target international students like this.
However Harvard and MIT aren't all about caring about their international students here. They are also thinking heavily about the money they might be losing. International students usually pay a much higher effective tuition rate. The higher the % of international students the school takes in the more money they take in. If these schools had to replace international students with domestic ones (even if they could) they wouldn't be able to get away with selecting only the highest paying students.
I'm from Boston, we have an incredibly high number of international students, and a lot of the interest in keeping them is about getting their money.
The Boston Globe estimates they are worth $3.6 billion dollars to the area... lots of money, lots of tuition, lots of apartment rentals, lots of bar & restaurant revenue.
> However Harvard and MIT aren't all about caring about their international students here. They are also thinking heavily about the money they might be losing.
It’s okay to have multiple motivations.
The fact that they have a monetary incentive doesn’t detract from the good of what they’re doing. In fact, that’s partially what enables these expensive lawsuits.
We shouldn’t try to downplay good actions just because money is also involved.
Do you really live in a world where Big Pharam is a force for good?
I live in a world where many of my friends and even my father was killed in cold blood by that system in its blind pursuit of profit over health and honesty.
The number of people harmed by perscription drugs when there are less damaging, and often times natural and cheaply available and more effective, non-patented treatments is astronomical and ongoing.
I totally agree that there are cases where the most expensive on patent treatment may not be the best for a given patient. That said there are tons of diseases for which new drugs are incredibly beneficial (think treatment of hep c and blindness), and the the development of new drugs is a net good for society.
Patients and doctors can still choose natural remedies if they believe they are the most effective treatment for a given illness.
> tons of diseases for which new drugs are incredibly beneficial.
These new drugs also often come with harmful effects that are not discovered until many people are harmed or killed. Big Pharma often discovers the harmful effects long before the public does and, in their pursuit of profit, denies any harm, lies, and covers up. See Merck and vioxx.
There are also tons of research on effective non-patentable treatments that are ignored in Big Pharma's blind pursuit of profit.
These "new" drugs are pushed as the best known treatment, while ignoring entire bodies of research.
That is my largest beef with Big Pharma and Big Allopathic Medicine. They ignore much science. Yes, ignore.
Now with Sci-Hub we can, as individuals, begin to see how much is being ignored. I've taken stacks of research papers into doctors in order to educate them on peer-reviewed and well supported science that Big Pharma convienently ignores and damn well doesn't educate them about. In their defense, they do understand the language of science and they were willing to change treatments in response.
Sure. I'm starting to work on a compilation. If you send me an email I can point you at it. I don't have them on me at the moment.
One time it was a 10 year old research paper detailing the simple fact that if you don't force a particular chemo drug into a person over the standard 30 minutes but instead do it over 2 hours you have a much reduced chance of permanent side-effects such as neuropathy. The doctors changed the treatment in response to the paper, and FWIW the person did not develop have any permanent side effects.
The fact that that paper exists and is 10 years old and had no change on the treatements of many people since then (many of which could have potentially avoided permanent damage) led me to further question the "scientific" nature of modern medicine.
Another rich vein of research is in the numerous research on the effects of certain medicinal mushrooms as an adjunct to cancer treatments, both radiation and chemo. In allmost all cases, the effects were very positive and replicable. Some of these papers are also over 10 years old.
Yes of course natural things can be bad and unnatural things can be good. That is totally beside the point (and a total straw man).
We obviously live in a world where natural remedies can't be commercialized the way Pharma drugs can. This creates incredible incentives to push dangerous medicines on people and the expense of everything else. America is the most drugged society in the world - and it also is one of the most unhealthiest. That is not an accident.
You're still conflating the two like they have anything to do with each other. The unhealthiest part has a lot more to do with our food consumption habits and our built environment, while the amount of drugs leads from that. And this isn't even getting into the issues with opioids which started with a combo of Purdue being trash along with the general macroeconomic conditions in the Appalachian Mountains.
Doctors are at least partially to blame for poor prescription practice; they have a much stricter duty to their patients. Doctors are also pursuing profits (as evidenced by their high incomes); they just don't aggregate the wealth into a single entity which can be targeted by class-action lawyers.
> And it is a legitimate defense. Big pharma, motivated by profit, has brought countless medicines to market and saved hundreds of millions of lives.
Big pharma also benefits substantially from taxpayer funded research, which often gets omitted.
> Non-profit pharma
It's hard to see how such a thing would not get sued out of existence by Big Pharma, however generic drugs do indeed have a long history of saving lives.
>Big pharma also benefits substantially from taxpayer funded research, which often gets omitted.
Big pharma receives some marginal benefit from taxpayer funded research, but it isn't as big as most think, and is given by the taxpayer with no strings attached. See my response here:
>It's hard to see how such a thing would not get sued out of existence by Big Pharma,
Im not sure what big pharma would be suing for. Non-profits have a number of problems, but this isn't one that I am aware of. Here is a whitepaper describing some of the challenges. the Whitepaper was funded by a VC firm which actively invests in non-profit pharma.
>however generic drugs do indeed have a long history of saving lives.
Most generics started as brand name drugs which were developed by big pharma with a profit motive. Once off patent, other big pharma companies manufacture the generic with a profit motive.
There's a ton more funding you disregard, there's subsidies i.e. tax breaks, you can't simply look at direct research funding and at the federal level at that, what about state funding? Private funding not tied to big pharma?
This is like when academic publishers defend themselves by saying how much value they add. The fact is the U.S. could easily cover all Big Pharma R&D spending and then some if it wanted to, just the military spending increase this year was in the tens of billions of dollars. What if that went to this instead?
The problem is not the money, the problems is the incentives of the U.S. healthcare system are completely messed up. How else would you explain getting charged thousands of dollars for an ambulance ride?
I am not against Big Pharma making a profit, I am against them jacking the price of drugs by 700% because the new owners saw a cashcow opportunity. That's someone's life right there. I am not for them lobbying against single payer either.
Just look at the recent Remdesivir pricing fiasco. Why can't Medicaid negotiate drug prices for example?
I think we probably agree on more than we disagree on.
I was objecting specifically to the claims that pharma substantially benefits from taxpayer funded research and would sue non-profits out of existence.
I totally agree that the incentives are the problem! The best step forward would be to federally negotiate prices based on relative benefit. Next we could look at outcome based compensation. I think these changes would address 90% of the problem.
Federal funding accounts for <50% of Basic research funding. basic research funding accounts for 1/6 of R&D spending. So federal funding is <8% of overall R&D spend.
From the article you linked:
>Basic research comprises only about one-sixth of the country’s spending on all types of R&D, which totaled $499 billion in 2015. Applied makes up another one-sixth, whereas the majority, some $316 billion, is development. Almost all of that is funded by industry and done inhouse, as companies try to convert basic research into new drugs, products, and technologies that they hope will generate profits.
You are absolutely correct. However, state-owned pharma is not motivated by profit, despite not being a "non-profit" (this specificity was introduced by parent comment).
They can be motivated by profit, as all businesses are. The problem is they aren't regulated by any means - for example, the amount of "ask your Doctor is blahblah is right for you" kind of ads need to stop. It's not the patient who needs to ask the doctor which medicine is right for him, it's the doctor who needs to act in the patients' best interest to provide the right medicine. Not to mention the kickbacks doctors get for prescribing certain drugs.
> We shouldn’t try to downplay good actions just because money is also involved.
I disagree. When there are thousands upon thousands of innocent people in privately-run ICE detention centres, whose economic value is solely based on their being locked up, it doesn't go nearly far enough to say that THESE immigrants are worth fighting for because their economic value is based on their relative wealth.
So you consider it downplaying, I consider it attempted betterment.
Yea but they are also afraid of loosing out on a generation of professors, post docs, academics, value generators, “job creators”.
It is very risky to cut out a generation of top students because the value is not just to the local Boston economy, but nationally. It’s not just cheap labor. It’s apprenticeship by the smartest in the world who will pay dividends for not only our lives but for generations.
I came as a student. I pay 6 figures in taxes. Some of my intl friends pay 7 figures and employ hundreds. I’ll have kids here that will generate enough value to do that as well.
Right now, there is a significant risk that a lot of economic value is going to be lost due to these immigration policies. That is not good for america.
It’s like a sports team: you have the ability to draft the top players from around the world for cheap. Why would you decide to boycott the draft itself and let the competitors (India, China) take those players? Especially some players that you have already trained (graduated students, post docs)
>It’s like a sports team: you have the ability to draft the top players from around the world for cheap. Why would you decide to boycott the draft itself and let the competitors (India, China) take those players? Especially some players that you have already trained (graduated students, post docs)
You're thinking about it from the wrong perspective. The people who are anti-immigration are anti-immigration because they personally might be negatively impacted (in terms of losing jobs or getting lower wages), even if it means the country as a whole is better off. Seeing the US GDP grow 30% faster is little consolation to you when you've lost your job to immigrants (or at least, you thought that you did). Going back to the sports team analogy, it'd be great if your team drafted the best international players and won, but what if that resulted in you getting kicked off the team, or sidelined most of the season?
If that’s the case, then why not have teams draft from the region they represent? For example, maybe the Patriots should not have had a foreign Michigander as their QB for 20 years, that spot could have been given to some up and coming Boston College graduate.
To address your point a bit more directly: can you show me studies where native born Americans have lost jobs to immigrants in the US? I know that many jobs got moved to China and Mexico, but that’s not what I am wondering about.
> If that’s the case, then why not have teams draft from the region they represent? For example, maybe the Patriots should not have had a foreign Michigander as their QB for 20 years, that spot could have been given to some up and coming Boston College graduate.
In the sports analogy, I'm describing it from the point of a player, not a fan. A fan's role in this is closer to shareholder rather than employee. They primarily care about winning (presumably). Ultimately the team is beholden to their fans, not to their players.
>To address your point a bit more directly: can you show me studies where native born Americans have lost jobs to immigrants in the US? I know that many jobs got moved to China and Mexico, but that’s not what I am wondering about.
That's not my personal position, by the way, so I'm not going to bother looking up statistics for it. I'm only describing what anti-immigration's perceptions are. It's safe to say that there's a widely held belief (among immigration opponents, at least) that immigrants "steal" jobs from natives. eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Criticisms_of_the_pr...
> The people who are anti-immigration are anti-immigration because they personally might be negatively impacted
That's generally untrue, though it is what people think. For one thing, the same flexibility that lets MIT pull from around the world lets a student in Boston apply around the world instead of being stuck with whatever Boston has to offer.
The Universities, industry, and government colluded against the American public in order to increase profits for the 1%. There is a write-up about it here:
There is a growing number of Chinese students who graduate from top Chinese universities or return to work in China after their US education. The US may hold a dominant position right now, but that lead is fading and the unwelcoming attitude towards immigrants is driving the best and brightest back home. This is especially true in engineering (vs academia where US still has a huge advantage), where there has been an explosion in Chinese tech companies who pay salaries competent to US tech companies when adjusting for CoL. It’s therefore not surprising that in the last decade we saw many rising Chinese companies like TikTok, Xiaomi, Tencent make waves even in American markets. In the next decade, if the US fails to capture the brightest minds of the world, we could see China start to become a viable alternative to the US, especially for tech workers.
Yeah... I don't see how anyone would strive to go to China considering everything that's been happening and how racist they are to African immigrant workers over there. If you think the US government is acting xenophobic, China is on a whole different level.
That is true whataboutism. Parent talked about Chinese students going back to China. No idea how Chinese discrimination against people of colour applies here.
I can't imagine it being viable for most Western tech workers given the climate of human rights and politics. I am a tech worker, I even have a particular interest in China and know a little Mandarin but I would never live or work there long term given what I know.
I completely agree that the borders should be open and bringing bright people from the all over the world to the US is fantastic. I am also opposed to the recent ruling. I am thankful that you are here. However, I do think the term "generation" is unnecessarily hyperbolic. We are talking about a year (or two), not a generation.
To answer the "why" folks may think this, you and I are considering the general equilibrium impact of the policy, but the vast majority of folks think in terms of partial equilibrium/first order. And on a first order, the "jobs" that folks holding these student visas will be vacated and thus "available" for domestic students. Such nativist views typically fail to grasp that said jobs may simply not be available due to companies sending work to the talent, not just to the trained.
Myopia is a terrible thing to live in denial with, but unfortunately such as things are.
> However Harvard and MIT aren't all about caring about their international students here. They are also thinking heavily about the money they might be losing. International students usually pay a much higher effective tuition rate
As an international MIT alumni, I can confidently say that this is completely wrong. MIT and Harvard have need-based scholarships, meaning that students pay tuition depending on their financial circumstances. Most of the international students come from poorer countries & families compared to an average domestic student and therefore end up paying a lot less in tuition.
Also, MIT's international undergraduate students are usually around 10% of the whole class. Even if you were right, they don't represent a big enough chunk of the whole class to have a significant impact on the money they're making.
The vast majority of international MIT students are graduate students. Except for business students (i.e. MBA, executive MBA and similar), graduate students in research programs do not pay a dime to MIT. Their tuition + stipend for living expenses is paid by research or TA fellowships. I.e. they either work as either research or teaching assistants to receive this money. MIT receives part of the fellowship money as an "overhead" tax, but this is exactly what happens for domestic graduate students.
Notably, in the case of MIT these fellowships are provided to both M.S. and PhD students. I believe that Stanford M.S. students do not get such fellowships and hence need to pay for their tuition.
Source: got my PhD at MIT as an international F1 student.
That’s just direct economic analysis. Graduate students are incredibly valuable to the universities because they generate research which can be used to either directly apply for grants and federal/commercial awards, or which can be used to just add to the university’s reputation (which, in turn, affects their chances of getting a grant or money award, as they have a reputation of expertise). Even if the direct money being paid by these students is zero, I’m sure all universities (not just MIT and Harvard) care deeply about where their graduate students go; that’s a lot of good grey matter going to waste, and universities are in the business of converting grey matter directly into money!
>However Harvard and MIT aren't all about caring about their international students here. They are also thinking heavily about the money they might be losing.
Harvard has a ~$40bn endowment. Even if all 6,500 of its international students are affected, and all of them are paying $50,000 in tuition, and absolutely none of them are replaced, and no economies at all are generated by them not attending, then the university stands to lose slightly less than 1% of that endowment this year.
My point here is that Harvard can amply afford not to raise this issue, and that I rather suspect the issue of principle is more important than you suggest.
They are also help making the case for other Universities that don't have the name reputation that MIT and Harvard do. It is a responsibility that comes with their place in society.
Yes but this is less about economy and more about Trump forcing Harvard to open in fall, which they don’t want to. It’s not about principle, it’s about the unions who don’t want to open.
A lot of people rightly believe that in person teaching is unsafe. My wife is a professor and chose to teach online for safety concerns. No evil union here. Just reasonable humans trying to do their best in a hard situation and a blowhard at the top trampling over their careful planning for his own satisfaction.
Also, just like your wife is thinking for herself, ICE is thinking for itself and wants to do a good job protecting people. No evil intention, just reasonable humans trying to do their best in hard situation.
P.S : I am a former international student, and professors couldn’t care any less about international students. These ICE rules have been in place for years, and no one fought to change them until it’s actually start hit their funding.
Is there actually much evidence of academic unionization at private colleges? I have a family member who's a professor at an Ivy League school and that concern has never even really come up.
They are geo located with other institutions where the unions are prominent, and Trump is hitting them where it hurts the most, the local economy.
In all this process, International students, who can’t vote are treated badly but this has always been the case, with Obama as well. Immigrants who can’t vote are the easiest barter trade.
> International students usually pay a much higher effective tuition rate.
That might be true for other universities but not for Harvard and MIT, whose admissions are aid-blind and most international students there receive huge financial aid packages.
There are lower-ranked universities that have programs (usually Masters's ones) that are targeted towards foreign students who can pay a lot of money.
According to QS only Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, and Amherst do need blind admissions for international students (surprised to not see Stanford on that list). So while in this instance I do not think it is driven by any direct financial motivation, the majority of even "top" US schools do appear to select international students in part on their ability to pay.
Yes, most "top" schools do not have Harvard's endowment, so they have to work with a limited budget. Still, their motivation is quite different from GP's suggestion that they are admitting international students to boost they finances. Anyway, we were talking about Harvard and MIT. I'll add one more thing, some universities do care about the well being of their students.
Plenty of schools have a higher endowment than Amherst. Stanford has a notably bigger endowment than MIT.
In any case, I was not agreeing with GP, I just think "lower ranked schools" is a bit of a strong statement as that does not conjure images of e.g. Columbia for me, even if it is technically a couple spots lower
I do agree the "universities don't give a shit about their students" sentiment is over the top these days though.
MIT's admission is need-blind (which is good), but many aid programs have some requirement attached that is hard to qualify for as a foreigner. I don't know of many foreign student in my class that had financial aid packages, let alone huge ones, so I would be interested if you have information to back up this claim.
At Harvard and MIT "need-blind" means that all admitted students receive a financial aid package, adjusted for the student's financial means, to make it work somehow. It's a combination of grants, loans, and presumed income from on-campus part-time jobs. At some other places "need-blind" may simply mean that admissions are granted regardless of financial needs, but financial aid is not guaranteed. Yes, federal grant and loan programs are not available to international students, but the universities have other resources (endowments, private loans, etc.)
As for sources... I am a former international student at a top US university and I know many others too. Almost no one I've met came from a rich foreign family.
> The higher the % of international students the school takes in the more money they take in.
I thought that private institutions like MIT and Harvard charge the same rates for international and domestic students? For example, MIT's page on cost of attendance only lists one tuition rate[1].
It would be public institutions like the University of California that would stand to lose the most revenue percentage-wise from this policy, right?
edit: see replies below that elaborate on finaid for internationals
That’s not accurate for MIT or Harvard, their is no difference for many of their programs between the financial assistance given to domestic and international students.
I was an undergrad at Harvard on an F-1 visa, the financial aid package was blind to residency status. This is unusual - many private schools do discriminate - but not unheard of. Later I looked at grad opportunities at MIT primarily because - unlike many others grad schools - they did fund international students to the same level as domestic.
I took a look, and MIT and Harvard specifically state that their financial aid is independent of domestic vs international status. Thanks for pointing that out!
"However, whether you are a domestic applicant or an international applicant does not impact when or how you apply or the financial aid you are offered. Rather, this page is simply intended to be a helpful resource for people who are less familiar with the American educational system and are trying to figure out how to apply to MIT."
"Our financial aid policies are the same for all applicants, regardless of nationality or citizenship. All aid is based on financial need, and admissions decisions are made without regard to whether an applicant has applied for financial assistance. Harvard meets each student’s demonstrated need."
But at most of these schools (<10 in the US are exceptions) ability to pay can still affect who they choose to admit in the first place internationally. Whereas >100 schools practice need blind admissions for domestic students. That said Harvard/MIT should be no different between the two.
That’s not true at wealthy schools. I went to Reed (not need blind) and only half the student body there pay full price. That portion should be lower at Harvard and MIT.
That's not completely accurate. Both Harvard and MIT claim parity in financial aid for international and domestic students. However, there is a bit of a discrepancy in the way that income is evaluated, higher taxes abroad leading to less post-tax money even for equivalent incomes, as well as non-institutional funding that domestic students are eligible for, but foreign students are not. The overall effect is more of a shift in the distribution of incomes between international and domestic students (i.e. if you're international you will be paying more at the same parental income level), but there is still a level where attendance is basically free.
> Is admission for internationals in general need blind as well at MIT/Harvard ?
I think that's true now. I don't remember if it was true 10 years ago when I went through this process, because I do remember submitting financial forms together with the application.
> What about income level of people attending ?
The statistics get published, but I don't think they generally get split out between international and non-international students. Anecdotally, it strongly depends on the country the person comes from. Some smaller countries gear their educational programs towards sending their top students to the top universities abroad and have appropriate recruitment programs in their public schools. For those countries the parental income distribution can be quite varied (not counting of course the taxpayer money spent to say send them around the world to international academic competitions and conferences). I think for countries that don't have such programs (usually because they have excellent domestic programs), you tend to see students come from wealthier backgrounds (that is middle class and up - I don't mean to imply that you need to be filthy rich to get in, just that participating in those activities that look good on US college applications requires a certain amount of money and parental support that needs to be supported from somewhere). That's just my sense though, I don't have any hard data.
I see.
My understanding at my own institution (a big one on the west coast) is that international (undergraduate) student admission is not need blind, or wasn't until very recently, since I remember "protests" about this particular topic in the last years.
Graduate admissions has never even pretended to be need blind so that doesn't apply.
This is wrong. International students, especially from locations with good high schools but low standard of living (e.g. Eastern Europe) frequently pay next to nothing at these elite institutions.
Is there aggregate data (over the country ?) on this ? I was pretty convinced there was a significant difference between the two, and I still believe that’s the case at my own institution, but could be wrong.
Beyond the economic value of international students, Harvard and MIT are completely dependent on these sources of cheap, intelligent labor. There isn't enough domestic supply of top students to keep top labs running and publishing state of the art research.
> There isn't enough domestic supply of top students to keep top labs running and publishing state of the art research.
This is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Foreign grad students submit to modern academic slave labor, because the long term incentive is American citizenship. Also many don't have student loan debt from their undergrad degree in their home countries, so they can agree to work for low salary.
Americans have no incentive to work hard in poorly paid grad student positions. And they need to start paying their undergrad student loan debt, so they have incentive to find a high-paid job instead of graduate studies. This especially applies to Americans who don't come from a wealthy family background, so often to American minorities.
false argument. Highly educated immigrants leave even better educated kids in second generation. Not even mentioning all the companies, jobs, and research they create that benefit the whole country. Look up team USA roster in international olympiads on any STEM subject, or IOI/ACM-ICPC for example
Sounds like incentives are aligned: foreign students get a good education and exposure to the U.S. (hopefully building goodwill). Local community benefits from exposure to foreign students (hopefully building good will). Local community gets foreign money. Only the students' home countries are potentially losing out, but even that depends on whether the student ends up sending money back home or returns home to contribute to their own local economy.
The thing about American universities, is that this transactional treatment of international students is well understood by the students themselves.
However, it is also well known, that these same universities are insane career fast tracks for them in the US, their home country and elsewhere. There was a reliability to reputed US universities. Pay us all of your family assets + more, but you will make it back soon with a high level of confidence.(esp. in STEM)
Similarly, we understand that the tedious immigration system of US does a great job of capturing the best international students in golden handcuffs, where they get to tax you like a resident, without providing any of the amenities or rights a resident has.
But, life in the US is much better than that in an underdeveloped country, and even the circus hoops we have to jump through aren't sufficient discouragement to choose one over the other. As long as life is less shit than my home nation, I can deal with some abuse. As Hasan Minhaj puts it, it's the "immigrant tax".
We have no delusions of being treated equally to American citizens/residents.
If you can pick a certain amount of cotton, then you are a free man. (/s...but only kinda)
Where this rubs international students the wrong way, is just like the slave analogy, there is no formal agreement and the slave owner is free do what he likes, since ofc, like America he owns the slave. But, most communication happens is not verbal. There was a long understood, quiet honor system. Trump is violating that.
Many of these student's parents have sold off last of their clothes to send their children to the US. Many of these PhD students have been worked down to their bones on minimum wage, just for an American doctorate. Don't change the deal now. Not when these people have already (metaphorically) signed the deal.
I completely support the choice of any American to want stringent borders. That's your prerogative. No one complains about Japan not opening up their doors to the world. Parents won't bankrupt themselves filling the coffers of American colleges and co-located businesses. Students won't destroy their health doing RA/TA jobs that pay far under what they deserve.
There is an unspoken deal an international student signs when they commit $100k+ to the a US institute. In some sense, it is codified in the OPT system. Here, have 3 years to make back some of the money and fuck off. America, please reject these people at the door. Don't take their money, sweat & blood and then kick them out. That's just cruel.
We go out of our way to pick more cotton than the other slaves. Free us, or never make that promise in the 1st place. It was not illegal in 18th century US, but it sure as hell was dick move.
However Harvard and MIT aren't all about caring about their international students here. They are also thinking heavily about the money they might be losing. International students usually pay a much higher effective tuition rate. The higher the % of international students the school takes in the more money they take in. If these schools had to replace international students with domestic ones (even if they could) they wouldn't be able to get away with selecting only the highest paying students.
I'm from Boston, we have an incredibly high number of international students, and a lot of the interest in keeping them is about getting their money.
The Boston Globe estimates they are worth $3.6 billion dollars to the area... lots of money, lots of tuition, lots of apartment rentals, lots of bar & restaurant revenue.