international student applications are still declining

rick++

Is this a bad thing? The US's NSF (our taxes) funds most US academic research. The monies trickle down to grad students in the US, 60% of whom are foreign born (in the sciences and engineerings). Most will take their education back to China and India, who through outsourcing due to lower wages and superior grad educations, will then out-compete Americans. In effect, we are giving our compebreastion the means to defeat us, and we're paying them to do it.

No other nation welcomes foreign students as we do, and no other nation is suffering the impact of outsourcing as severely as we are (probably because most industrial nations have numerous legal strictures that limit the freedom of business to outsource).

Given the losses to our economy within the past five years due to our unquestioning support for of unilateral economic disarmament (AKA outsourcing), our current system of using US tax dollars to educate foreign students who benefit largely at our expense makes it look like our policy makers were almost *trying* to do harm to America. Times have changed, and our policies of the past that welcomed foreign students in the hope that they would stay after we educate them and catalyze innovation -- they often no longer work. Increasingly, our educatees are going home and taking our compebreastveness with them. Our existing policy of technical incubation may be doing as much harm as good. It's time to reexamine how we should play this game.

If fewer foreign grad students are educated in this country, their education will be inferior to what it is now, more Americans will necessarily fill our open graduate buttistantships, and their educations will be superior to what it is now. America will then become more capable and compebreastive relative to the rest of the world.

Will American expertise wane as we lose foreign graduate students? I doubt it. The best foreign students will continue to attend our best schools, and they'll continue to be the most likely to stay and innovate. The only real harm will likely be the inability of our second tier research universities to attract the same caliber of student. Alas, they may have to educate more dumbbutt Americans.

I don't see the loss of foreign graduate students as a cause for concern, much less panic. In fact, in the brave new world of globalization, this may be a good thing.

Randy