I made friends with many people who came to Canada to study including Iran, India, China, many parts of Asia. I asked a lot of them over the years about their plans. A very common response was that they came to study but have grown to like it here and because of co-op (paid internships) they developed connections and want to stay. Of the five I'm still in touch with, four are still here on work visas and one of those four is weeks away from citizenship.
That analysis assumes that supply for academic opportunity is elastic. Is that a sound assumption?
Because otherwise, it's not fair to say you've lost nothing when a college graduate leaves your country.
Edit: Response to deleted comment: I didn't say anybody would leave the country because getting citizenship was too easy, that's ridiculous and not a very charitable read of my comment. I was addressing this in particular:
>If obtain citizenship but return home, they now have a tie to your country. If they decline citizenship, you've lost nothing.
In the scenario where somebody obtains or declines a citizenship and returns home, then you've lost something. Whether they take or pass up the citizenship isn't the matter. Whatever their motivation happens to be for accepting or declining the citizenship, in either case you've lost something if they leave the country.
My heartburn with "people who want to come to this country to study advanced topics" is a bit more parochial. They're generally good people trying to improve themselves. Good for them.
My parochial issue is that people perform better in an environment they perceive as nurturing. When international applicants have a higher admissions rate than in-state applicants and non-California domestic applicants, it sends the signal to citizens of this country, and this state that our own universities, and thus our government, are deeply ambivalent about our success, or in my case, the success of my children. I understand this borders on a call for paternalism, but, ah, I'm a concerned parent.
Something dramatic happened in 2009 which caused in-state admission rates to drop by over 20 points while foreign admissions increased by 20 points. Ostensibly, the Academic Senate reduced the "guaranteed admission rate" for in-state high schools from the top 12.5% to the top 9%, and "widened the applicant pool". The observed effect on the campus population mix has been stunning. I can provide the graphs (I'll note the downvoters haven't asked for the data), or you can get the data yourself here (2) with a bit of querying (look all the way back to 1994 so you can see that we're not talking about recency bias spikes).
Interestingly, the reported "ethnicity" numbers omit the ethnicity of international students, just lumping them all into "international". Even more interesting is the counterfactual of who isn't crying foul about that. Generally, repressed minorities try to break out their numbers and the CCCP cries foul wherever they aren't winning (this is an observation about foreign policy behavior that dates back to the Korean War, not a comment on the Chinese people). But they aren't making much ruckus about the UC system. Nevertheless, it takes a hot second on campus to see that this international segment is primarily ethnic Chinese.
I'd be interested to see the financial portfolios of the folks who voted for this. One has to wonder what the UC Academic Senate's incentives are in supporting a de facto pro-China, anti-US agenda when you have reports like (3-10).
They pay full tuition (which is a lot of money). U of Illinois even has an insurance that if the number of international students declines too much (so it gains significantly less money from tuition), it would get compensated by the insurance company.
> U of Illinois even has an insurance that if the number of international students declines too much...it would get compensated by the insurance company.
You can generally get insurance on anything, if you're large enough and the risk is somewhat quantifiable.
The issue with abnormal insurance policies is that the buyer may have more knowledge about the actual risk than the insurance seller. I believe this has burned Lloyd's of London a few times on their more esoteric policies.
This, again, has nothing to do with the fine students of Chinese extraction. This has everything to do with the wealthy, powerful, and connected people at the top of the UC system and California state government opting, in true dictatorial fashion, to suppress the education of their own populace (by making in-state access more difficult) in the pursuit of short term monetary gains (from those sweet full-tuition dollars you mention, and probably some other incentives that were discussed over steak dinners). And, indeed, overlooking the negative effects on their own economy and long-term welfare (via espionage, lost education, etc).
If they stay, you win. If obtain citizenship but return home, they now have a tie to your country. If they decline citizenship, you've lost nothing.
And from an economic perspective, they're more likely to create opportunities for those without advanced education.
Yet the historical "Are you willing to become American?" has turned into "Are you American enough to be American?"
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