Gloom and doom reports have always been around. I can find “new reports” of the dollar becoming worthless from the turn of the century…and similar reports from last week. Sooner or later they’ll be right, I suppose.
Even a tiny rise in my tumor markers can presage the final run of cancer through my body…and the collapse of the mightiest dam begins with a tiny crack. A crack has shown up in higher ed.

I’ve been talking about higher ed on my blog for five years, and while I’ve avoided talk of complete collapse, the structures we’ve built are only supported by the student loan scam…get rid of that constant income stream and 90% of higher ed will shrivel overnight.

Outside of student loans for our citizens, a big source of money for campuses was international students, eager to get a taste of what, in the 20th century, was the greatest higher educational system on the planet. This money is nothing next to the student loan scam, and we’ve abandoned much of our original system in favor of extracting ever larger amounts of student loan money from our own citizens.

The rest of the world has been figuring out that it’s no longer worth paying ever higher tuition for ever weaker education, so the following is only natural:

New International Graduate Enrollments Decline, Again

New enrollments of international students at U.S. graduate schools declined by 1 percent from fall 2017 to fall 2018, and international applications fell by 4 percent, survey finds.

Now, yes, it’s only a few percent, but it’s telling. Our leaders in higher ed looted the undergraduate programs years ago, but it took nearly twenty years before people started realizing the bulk of degree programs are both exorbitantly expensive and worthless.

It’s the same thing with graduate programs, where “washing out” is all but impossible from most graduate schools. The international students, with their own money on the line, will be the first casualty.

“This is the first time we’ve seen declines across two consecutive years, and while we think it’s too soon to consider this a trend, it is troubling…We continue to monitor issues, including changes in immigration and visa policy, with growing concern over the possible negative impact to the U.S.’s image as a welcoming destination for international students and scholars.”

Note carefully: this is the first time we’ve seen a consecutive year drop. Perhaps it’s nothing, but I don’t think so. While the above tries to tie it in to our nation’s long overdue concern about illegal immigration…that’s a wild misdirection.

It’s about the expense, and the education. Graduate programs used to have only a few dozen students in departments with a dozen faculty, with courses typically having a handful of students at most (as should be the case, considering the very esoteric topics of real graduate coursework). Now many campuses sport few full time faculty, but nevertheless have triple or more the number of graduate students of decades ago…leading to a huge Ph.D. glut we’ve known about for years, with Ph.D. mill campuses churning out far more academics than the schools can employ.

Less research-intensive universities — many of which have come to rely on international students in master’s programs as a key source of revenue — were hit hardest by the decline in new international master’s students. First-time international enrollment in master’s programs fell by 15 percent at master’s-level institutions, and by 8 percent at doctorate-granting institutions outside of those classified as most research intensive.

It used to be the international students were a bonanza for the school, great money for the cost of educating them. But then the student loan scam came along, and there was just no need to keep the graduate programs legit, and that leads to the real issue.

The reason I thought some schools would survive the loss of the student loan scam because of the foreign graduate students but…our schools are abandoning this revenue in exchange for taking in even more student loan dollars, as I’ve covered several graduate programs, even at top tier schools, who have turned their graduate departments into just another cash cow, expecting no repercussions any worse than for destroying the undergraduate education.

I see our “leaders’” point: it’s just so much easier suckering the locals with the student loan scam, than building up a school good enough to attract students from 10,000 miles away, willing to pay with their own money.

The rest of the article I quoted from breaks things down a bit by country and program and perhaps this is all just a minor statistical blip, of no real meaning. I’m not ready to predict more doom just on this but if the U.S. is no longer attracting international students, we’re definitely going to have a huge problem once we finally eliminate the student loan scam.

It’s amazing how there’s always that “one person” who tries to make everything about politics in a discussion thread. Even in the supposedly rarified air of higher ed, such is common:

Given the growing hostility to foreigners in this country, both in and out of academe, is it surprising that international graduate students are choosing to study elsewhere?

Wait, what? The bulk of foreign students are coming from China and India…nobody here is “hostile” to them in general, and what hostility there is, is towards people coming here illegally. It’s a complete non-sequitur to tie the legal arrival of scholars to our grad schools to the illegal crossings of our border.

In any event, we’ve now seen a consecutive year decline in international students in our schools. It’s fair to ignore it for now…but what if it happens again next year? How many years in a row would it take before the leaders of higher ed would realize they’re falsely assuming the river of student loans will never run dry? Is destroying our graduate system so these guys can buy more lakefront property such a good idea? Why not keep at least parts of our graduate programs legit? I mean, other than because doing so would require real work, something our leaders aren’t particularly interested in.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com