I hate the idea of discriminating on students based on nationality, but out of all the unnecessary attacks on higher education done by the Republicans, this is one I am more ambivalent towards.
Here in Boston, a very significant chunk of the university population (1/4 to 1/3 at some schools) are foreign nationals, most of them Chinese. When they finish their studies, most of them will return home and take their knowledge with them.
The purpose of higher education, at least as I see it, shouldn’t just be profit-driven to make money off of the higher tuition they can charge out of state students. It should be (in theory) to produce highly educated, highly skilled individuals needed for the advancement of society as a whole. But a lot of universities with programs that admit significant numbers of foreign national students are very competitive, and they end up turning away a lot of qualified domestic applicants who would still benefit from that education as a result.
At least for any school partly or wholly operated by the state, the first priority should be to enrich the society funding these schools by educating people who will stay and contribute, with tuition being a lesser motivator.
Now I’d say with Florida’s case in particular, students would be far better served applying to schools out of state given the strict impositions being placed by the highly conservative state government on curriculum, but even partly educated Floridians is better than uneducated Floridians. The state is facing a huge brain drain problem.