“This student, like many others, isn’t just responding to an immediate economic calculation. He’s also caught in an invisible (and increasingly visible) demographic force: America is running out of people his age. Even if colleges fixed their cost and value proposition tomorrow — even if tuition dropped and job prospects improved — there would still be fewer students like him to fill seats. We are hitting peak 18-year-old, and the decline is just beginning.”
Most people immigrating aren’t freahly 18 even if they were able to keep up with the population decline. Yes there are people on student visas but it’s less than half the number of H1B visas.