One of the sentences I just read in Yudof’s interview with student media (see City on the Hill of Oct 22, 2009, p. 5) made me cringe:

We have to get the bigger message out there that [….] we are enormously important to the quality of your life, and we’re enormously important to the success of the university of California. Great research universities are a magnet for talented people. And if they come here and they stay, it benefits our population and it ultimately leads to more jobs and so forth.

True, research universities are a magnet for talented people who come from all over the world and are drawn especially to advanced programs (doctoral programs, post-docs). But two aspects of this question have become problems in my view: the structures built by universities such as the UC system, and which are so attractive, are in no small part funded thanks to the large population of undergraduates that UC has a mission to educate at the highest level but struggles more and more to do so. Second, the graduate schools, especially in technical fields, are populated by foreigners who have been selected by a complex process (social, educational, etc.) and have cost nothing to this state or nation. That is, about half of our graduate students (more in certain fields) come here in their early or mid-twenties after benefiting (very often) from a state-based education, a tax-payer paid education. It’s all benefit for this country and state indeed, as Yudof is claiming. It is also beneficial to the individuals involved, obviously. But what of the countries of origin? Perhaps the movement of transfer of wealth should reverse itself more than it is doing, and if it is not done on grounds of rationality and justice, what will do it?