U. of California Gets Bonus from Feds for Selecting Foreign Graduate Students

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new study from the Center for Immigration Studies finds that U.S.-resident college seniors (citizens or legal residents) interested in getting a PhD from the University of California must face the challenge that the university is paid an additional $15,000 a year when it employs foreign graduate students, rather than resident ones, on federally funded research projects.

UC, according to the report on university billing practices, gets an estimated extra $50 million a year from this unusual practice. It is the university, not the individual foreign graduate students, that gets the extra federal money.

The report is at http://cis.org/uc-bonus.

Few, if any, non-California universities engage in this billing practice, according to its author, David North, a Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. North is a specialist on the nexus between immigration and higher education policies.

He argues that the $50 million a year would be better spent by either buying more research than currently, or spreading it around to other universities, or by being applied to the national debt. He says that the practice is indirectly harmful to the non-California institutions that do not engage in the controversial billing process.

UC's ten-campus operation gets the extra money by billing the government for tuition at out-of-state rates for foreign graduate students working on federally funded research grants; these run about $15,000 a year more than in-state rates at UC. Other universities studied by North bill the feds – for all graduate student researchers – at in-state rates, which are usually one-half to one-third the out-of-state rates.

Graduate students working on federal research projects are usually paid a cash stipend and receive what is called "tuition remission." The sponsor of the research routinely pays for both.

Does this practice mean that UC discriminates against U.S. citizens and green card holders in the graduate school admission process? The study does not cover that subject. The study does estimate that at any given time there are more than 3,000 foreign graduate students in the sciences and engineering working on government-funded research projects at UC.

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan research institution that examines the impact of immigration on the United States.

SOURCE Center for Immigration Studies

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