About Last Week...
Be Afraid, Kids
A story popped up last week which briefly caught my attention.
CNN and other outlets were reporting that colleges and universities were warning international students to make sure to get back to campus before January 20 – Donald Trump’s inauguration day.
Travel bans and deportations will occur immediately upon Trump’s inauguration, so you better be here…just in case, cause he’s a fascist and hates foreigners and such.
Originally, I assumed it was just academia not realizing an election had occurred and was still stuck in derangement syndrome mode. UCLA, for example, advised the kids that the school “will not release immigration status or related information in confidential student records … without a judicial warrant, a subpoena, a court order, or as otherwise required by law…The University also has a strict policy that generally prevents campus police from undertaking joint efforts with federal immigration enforcement or detaining people at the federal government’s request.”
Push comes to shove, the folks at UCLA and NYU, etc., seem to promising to build Anne Frank attics in each dorm just in case.
Pure political silliness I thought and then something occurred to me: money.
At private schools most international students pay the same tuition as American kids, though they are not eligible for certain financial aid programs. Losing, as it were, internationals would be a financial pain but not a catastrophe.
But at public universities, the story is very different – international students typically pay almost triple what the locals do.
Example one – the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Internationals make up about 13% of the student body and pay about $40,000 a year in tuition – in-state kids pay about $17,000 (international is the same as out-of-state, by the way.)
That is an extra $83 million a year on a total budget of about $700 million, or nearly 8% of the school’s entire income, for doing, presumably, the same thing for every student.
Example two – University of Washington.
UW charges about $15,000 in state and $44,000 to internationals.
Example three – the University of California system (note – different campuses charge slightly different prices.)
In general, in-state kids pay about $14,000, internationals (and out-of-staters) pay about $36,000.
The UC system has an extremely high percentage of international students, meaning they generate an extra $1.4 billion dollars a year for the system.
The system spends about $51 billion a year (grad, undergrad, everything,) meaning the overall budget bump is only about 2.7%.
But looked at another way, the UC system spends about $17,000 per student total – it gets $14K from locals – less than the cost – but $36K from internationals, or double the cost.
With 1.1 million international students in the country, one can see how the numbers add up and how many fewer spots are available for home-grown kids.
Private schools can do whatever they want, but it must be noted that internationals take up about 14% of the slots in the entire UC system, slots that could have gone to California kids whose parents and grandparents paid to build the system with their taxes…if the money were not so good.
It reminded me of, of course, of this brutally funny scene from Yes, Minister:
Heaven forfend!
This week’s epigram is again not an epigram but a short video on what happened to kamikaze pilots who turned back and went home.
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