[TigerLikesRooster]

Re #5 In America's universities, the best money-making major is business. Foreign students all pay out-of-state tuition. Many comes. Even from Europe. Very steady source of income. On the other side of coin, some engineering and science discipline survives on Foreign students. It is not that American students do not come to these area. But their numbers are insufficient to fill up the capacity built for baby-boomers. For example, metallurgy dept. cannot survive without many foreign students. It is not a sexy money-making discipline like Comp. Sci. In social science and humanity area, it is all mostly made up of local population, though. All those liberals. I have to admit , though, that most of CS majors are liberals, too. There may be a few libertarians but almost no conservatives.

[afraidfortherepublic]

For example, metallurgy dept. cannot survive without many foreign students. It is not a sexy money-making discipline like Comp. Sci.

That is true. My son graduated with a PhD in Materials Science (Metallurgical Engineering) a few years ago. His class was majority foreign. But it's not as smooth as you may think. My son was constantly picking up after foreign students and repairing University-owned lab equipment and apparatus after foreign students had demolished it through carelessness. Many of these *students* are from wealthy Middle Eastern families where they never had to do a lick of work for themselves and expect to be waited on by someone else. They can really wreak havoc with delicate instrumentation in a lab.

My son's advisor finally shipped him off to another lab with strict instructions to avoid *helping* any other students repair their apparatus because their incompetence and carelesses was delaying my son's research project and ultimate gradudation!

The other side of the coin is that my son probably would have left school with a Masters, instead of his PhD, except that an Egyptian professor from another Engineering department kept urging him to stay in school "to make his parents proud". The Egyptian pointed out that if my son dropped his studies there would be no white, male PhD candidates left in the program and that that would be a tragedy for American Engineering education. The foreign students often go back to their own countries or often do not meld into business because of the language problems.

So we have an Egyptian to thank for our kid staying the course and finishing with his PhD, although he's still pretty much a lab rat!