The Journal ran a story today about how non-flagship state universities are shrinking all around America and taking the economies of the communities around them. How stupid is that.
America's universities have been engines of growth for a long time. As I noted a few weeks back in this post, the birthrate decline being harped upon by Mr. Turbosperm Elon Musk and other rabid pro-natalists with no credible policy ideas has been going on for a long time. For the most part, the population side of America's economic growth has been tied to immigration, and our universities have been a great way to encourage the middle-class of the developing world to come to America and pay money while learning English and American ways in general. I can't pull statistics out of my butt but I am willing to bet that the best broad cohort of immigrants has come through universities.
And it can't all be Ivy League and Public Ivies. There's not enough of it to go around. But the great thing is that we've been educating a professoriate for decades and there are solid and dedicated faculty members spread throughout America's universities. No less a luminary than Kyla Scanlon, the shiniest economist of her generation and a person of considerable wisdom for her tender age, went to Western Kentucky University. Not the fanciest university in America but obviously they have som very fine good people there.
So instead of randomly grabbing immigrant students out of dorms and off the streets and throwing them in holding facilities to show how big and bad we are we should be actively recruiting cash-paying foreign students to come to our universities, live in the dorms, eat in the restaurants and become the productive, educated Americans we so desire.
We don't understand what a competitive advantage this is and won't till it's gone.
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