<p>@LongRangePlan </p>
<p>You said you weren’t going to be convinced, but gosh darn it I’m gonna try. </p>
<p>The situation just isn’t one where universities are rejecting domestic students en masse and filling classes to the brim with internationals just to capitalize on higher tuition fees. The UCs haven’t gone past 15% for international students, and Berkeley currently has 11%. I might not know more about university admissions than you, but 11% doesn’t seem like the filthy-immigrant-favouring, America-threatening catastrophe you make it out to be. </p>
<p>A citation corroborating your claims would be nice. You can’t make a statement like that without being intimately familiar with admission criteria and processes (Something very, very few people here seem to possess.) Extremely qualified domestic students getting rejected in favour of international students doesn’t seem likely, unless they were rejected because the slots open to domestic students had already been filled with domestic students even more qualified than them. </p>
<p>And you know what? Even if their stats were higher and their list of achievements was longer, we are told again and again that stats aren’t everything. What makes you so sure some of those outstanding students weren’t just cookie cutter model students doing only what was necessary to secure a university spot, but ended up being far duller and less captivating than say, the Indian math prodigy doing equations by candlelight?</p>
<p>You do emphasize the phrase ‘Best and Brightest’ quite a lot, so I’m going to assume that your amazing prodigy didn’t get the place you thought he was entitled to.</p>
<p>@epiphany</p>
<p>Walking into Berkeley? Those ‘outstanding’ students had to fight for their slots because international students who were just as, if not even more outstanding turned up to compete for them. International students are not given an equal shot. Not now, probably not ever. We face a far higher academic bar and we pay a hell of a lot more tuition for the privilege (And for us, it really is a privilege) of studying in the United States. What’s more, universities seem to ensure that the vast majority of students are domestic entrants, meaning that international students end up competing viciously against each other for far fewer spots than are offered to US residents. </p>
<p>Yes, it’s quite likely that universities have a set proportion of international students per year, maintained to benefit from higher tuition payments. But this proportion is small, and it just doesn’t marginalize or even significantly threaten domestic applicants. The fact is, American students make up the vast majority of students enrolled at any college in the United States, and it’s going to stay that way. Unless international student numbers somehow go up to more than barely a tenth of the undergraduate population and they start admitting C students from China instead of A+ students from the United States. </p>
<p>Also, here’s a thought. Could the problem not solely be due to international students, but rather an increase in the number of American students who happen to be more talented/interesting/capable than their peers? Perhaps rather than looking into closing off American universities to the rest of the world, you could look into making sure that your child has a more interesting story to tell and is therefore more competitive and attractive than say, the kid next door? </p>