Waste of money is correct
$300,000 to $500,000 taxpayer money, using your numbers, wasted on students who will return to China and India? It's not wasted at all. It goes straight into the pockets of professors, overhead, and to administrators. Almost zero goes to the student.
The cost of sending them back to jobs in their own country is indeed zero if the number of domestic students is kept in balance - and therein lies the rub. Foreign tuition has skewed the graduating class to where it now seems to matter, and it shouldn't. Foreign income should offset the costs of educating domestic students, with domestic education being the priority. Money, not education is an American priority, particularly in light of budget cuts where academic jobs are in jeopardy.
"Faced with sharp cuts in state funding, the 10-campus system is ramping up its campaign to recruit high-paying students from other states and countries, even as record numbers of California students seek a UC education."
University of California Seeking Out-Of-State Students (do you think it is a coincidence that the sponsor of this House legislation is from California?????)
And you can't recruit that foreign tuition money if there are no jobs waiting for them in the promised land. A land where a PhD makes in one day, what a PhD back home makes in a month. Like all illegal or shady immigration policy/tolerance, the fault lies in the perpetrator, the recruiter, the employer, the school, not the worker or student. A student comes to the US with full intentions of working in the US after graduating, which is contrary to their stated intent on the student's visa. S/he, in fact, makes a promise that work WILL NOT be sought or engaged and that they will go home when they graduate. With fingers crossed behind the back and a wink at an employer who can get a slave PhD as a 33% off blue light special.
You have it bass ackwards and never ending. Anyone who has kids should be seriously concerned about the complacency and indifference being displayed by an ignorant public and naive professionals against the twisted goals of corporations and academia in terms of national security and economic interests. A national strategy in the USA is non-existent, while China just announced a petaflop supercomputer using processor chips it developed and fabricated at SMIC in China. The machine is to be used for "military purposes". That means simulation of nuclear weapons to increase yield. Why would they need to do that? Who taught them how to do that? In a world of 7B people and an ever increasing population, and in a world with finite and consumed resources, what will happen when resources do become scarce and they desperately feel the world's resources are theirs for the taking, just as the USA does today?
Someone has thought about that one. But not anyone in the USA. Too busy minting money to care. And that, is the downfall of every empire. Lack of vigilance, indifference, complacency, greed, and no long term cohesive strategy to win. Wars are won on economics - they are also fought over economics. And if you really want to win and take everything, push the red button.
