I interpreted his rage as being directed toward the "without any guarantee they can stay?" part of the statement.

It IS quite wasteful that he was given this opportunity, and then thrown out before he even had the chance to complete his education. Absent any real reasoning (which we're likely to never see) it's tremendously irresponsible.

It's hardly being a jackass to wish that my taxes weren't wasted, in any way whatsoever.

It's not like you're footing the bill for all foreign students single-handedly. There's this thing called society. You're part of it.

If you think your taxes are being "wasted" on foreign students, as if those freeloaders are being forced on institutions like MIT by the government, take it up with your representative or senator.

The academic world is bigger than the US. It might shock you but there are some very capable students outside those borders and MIT would very much like to have them doing research at MIT rather than somewhere else.

Then let MIT pay for that, not me, when there's no likelihood the student will be paying me back in the form of US taxes. The research leads to patents that MIT gets compensated for, not me. My taxes are likely being wasted here, working against the society I support. It doesn't matter if it's only a dime of mine since all waste is bad and adds up to a lot. No I'm not going to take it up with my representative, falling on deaf ears. I'm going to make my point here on HN instead, where it belongs.

So should we be writing checks to Germany when a German-educated person comes over to the US and starts a business? After all, Germany should be compensated for their loss, right?

If an American chooses to move to Singapore to work for an international bank, then maybe they should be forced to pay back the subsidy on their education, right?

Here's the thing: Education is not a waste of money. It costs almost nothing to host a Ph.D. student, there just aren't that many of them. It would take tens of thousands of Ph.D. students to add up to the cost of a single F-35 fighter jet.

Investments aren't about a guaranteed return, they're all about probabilities. I'm pretty sure that MIT's investment in graduate students, including the small number of guest foreign students, pays enormous dividends in terms of research and prestige.

Also if you can name one Ph.D. student that's been given a signing bonus that's anywhere near the kind of money thrown at football players, please do. If you want to know where money's being wasted, it's on lavish stadiums, enormous scholarships, and all the associated pageantry.

Don't think you're the only "taxpayer". Virtually everyone who's ever set foot in the United States is a taxpayer in some form. I know I've paid my fair share of sales taxes just visiting.

If you want to cut funding to MIT so that it becomes a shell of what it is today, you're entitled to that opinion. Just don't complain if that happens and over time the US becomes completely uncompetitive, full of people with obsolete or inadequate education, reduced to having to import talent wholesale like Dubai.

Can you knock off the straw man arguments? Not wanting my taxes to be wasted isn't a valueless point just because I'm one of many taxpayers, or because the US doesn't compensate Germany when a German-educated person moves to the US, or because education is worth money to someone, or because money is wasted elsewhere, etc.

If the US taxpayers' investment in foreign students who may not end up staying here is a net benefit to US society and that benefit has been reasonably maximized, then I'm all for it. Otherwise I'm not. When a foreign student is given a nice education at taxpayer expense without so much as granting them a green card on arrival to increase the odds they'll stay here, I suspect that taxpayer money is being wasted, even if the return of educating foreign students is positive on net.

They're doing research in the US for a US university that collaborates directly with US corporations. What more do you want from the deal?

I'd want the universities to fund the students out of their $multi-billion endowments, rather than get my kids to work longer to pay for it.

Don't the big sports programs pay for themselves?

Not really. They sponge up massive amounts of money from the public in the form of subsidies, tax breaks, and other concessions.

You are aware that not all research leads to concrete, patentable ideas, right?

Yes, just like not all startups are successful for VCs. The revenue generated by some of the research can pay for all the research, and patents are just one of many revenue sources for them. Johns Hopkins has an endowment of $2.5 billion. MIT has $10 billion. They can afford to pay for foreigners' educations without getting taxpayers involved. Taxpayers are involved so they can have even more money in the bank.

> Yes, just like not all startups are successful for VCs.

A dangerous analogy, because the sole criterion of success for a startup is to be financially successful, whereas there are lots of research ideas that cannot be translated into a profitable business, yet are still worthwhile to pursue. Think fundamental results in maths and physics.

I am all for universities to have sources of revenue other than taxpayer money. But I fear that making those the only sources of revenue (you did defend that in your original post) will instill a climate where researchers are prevented from pursuing research topics that cannot possibly bring in any money for their universities.

And this is not just about "knowledge for knowledge's sake", either. Think about, say, quantum mechanics or complex analysis. Would anyone have paid for the early research in these areas with the expectation of financial returns? And yet, here they are today at the basis of a number of highly profitable industries.

I'm fine with spending public money for research done by domestic students or those foreign students who have stated their intention to stay in the US and have their path to citizenship approved in advance. For other students the university should pay for it out of their endowment. In other words the public's money should be spent judiciously, not frivolously.

I think you misunderstand what a PhD student is. A PhD candidate is supposed to generate real science, not just train to become someone who does. By that same logic, a senior researcher (American citizen or not) should not be paid by taxpayer money unless she were to promise not to leave the US in the future.

Not by that logic. It's a safe bet that American citizens who haven't made such a promise are less likely to leave the US than are foreign PhD students who've stated their intention to stay in the US and have been cleared for a path to citizenship before they arrive, but of course are free to leave. I support public funding for both cases.

All I want is better odds they'll stay, based on the assumption that there is more supply of worthy foreign students who'd stay if they could, than demand for them. There's no good reason we shouldn't maximize the benefit to the US taxpayer, by cherry-picking the supply and paving the way to their citizenship in advance. That the PhD students do real science (i.e. a job) isn't a good enough reason to leave taxpayer money on the table.

If some foreign student is so much a wunderkind that they'll do a $million in work for their $250K outlay, but plans to leave the US, that could be an exception.