A university's capacity isn't static. The money that comes in from foreign students can pay for additional capacity. You're talking as if every university was allocated a fixed number of seats in 1955 and now we all have to fight for one.
Adding capacity isn't cheap. That gets passed on to the "customers". Which also raises the price for Americans.
>The money that comes in from foreign students can pay for additional capacity.
No, the cost gets spread out among all the customers. There are no mechanisms where discriminatory pricing kicks in, and only the foreign students pay for the additional capacity.
>There are no mechanisms where discriminatory pricing kicks in, and only the foreign students pay for the additional capacity.
There is exactly such a mechanism. The foreign students pay more!
I don't have the exact figures to crunch the numbers (and I doubt you do either), but it's pretty implausible to suggest that foreign students are somehow a loss maker for US universities. If foreign students were a net loss, then universities wouldn’t be so keen to admit them. And if they're profitable then they pay for their seats.
The US university system is an incredible national asset. There are incalculable benefits to having the world's best universities attracting the best students from all over the world. That some Americans have managed to convince themselves that this is a bad thing is enough to turn my brain inside out.
