Should America’s Universities Stop Taking So Many International Students?
Critics say the country’s higher-education institutions should focus on ensuring more Americans get four-year degrees, but college presidents highlight the benefits of global diversity on campus.
The University of California at Berkeley fields more than 85,000 freshman applications every year. About 15,500 of those applicants are accepted, including 4,500 or so students who aren’t from California; roughly 9 percent of those offered admission aren’t from the United States.
Global diversity has inherent value in a as a “land-grant” university established in the mid-1800s largely to serve the children of farmers and factory workers. And as panelists acknowledged in a discussion Wednesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and , some even find international-student recruitment at universities problematic at a time when a four-year degree remains out of reach for so many Americans.
