A friend of mine told me that her daughter, who attends UCLA, will be living at home and taking only online classes in the fall. While the family will be spared the cost of on-campus housing, there is no tuition deduction. On Monday, Harvard announced the same policy. Also on Monday, the Trump administration used the new academic reality as a way to eject Chinese nationals from America.
For several decades now, America's colleges and universities have been making bank by holding spaces open for foreign nationals, especially Chinese students who are the scions of powerful people in the Communist Party. The beauty of these students is that they pay full fare. With them, there are no grants, no in-state discounts, no pesky and inconvenient loans. Instead, it's cash all the way.
A year and a half ago, the New York Times wrote about academia's reliance on foreign students, especially Chinese ones:
It's no mere coincidence that Jeffrey R. Brown, the dean of the Gies College of Business, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is also a scholar of risk management. At his first faculty meeting four years ago, Brown fretted that his school had become, like many American universities, overly dependent on a single source of money — roughly a fifth of tuition revenue came from Chinese students.
[snip]
Over the past decade, the explosion in the number of international students has turned education, almost by stealth, into one of the most vital American exports.
[snip]
Nearly 1.1 million international students attended American colleges and universities in 2017. They generated $42.4 billion in export revenue. ...
This chart from a 2018 report on foreign students in America gives some idea of how beholden to the Chinese academia is:
Because foreign students, especially the Chinese, are an important funding source for academia, the Trump administration's announcement on Monday that, if classes go online, foreign students will be denied visas comes as a devastating blow.
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Get them all out of here. It is life or death.