Giving Compass' Take:

• Various colleges are weighing in on the debate around admitting international students into American universities when not all universities are accessible for young people living in the U.S.

• How does having a robust international population at a college enhance it? What are the downfalls? What are the benefits for international students? 

• Read more about the Migration Policy's research on the prevalence of international students in America. 

The University of California at Berkeley fields more than 85,000 freshman applications every year. About 15,500 of those applicants are accepted, including 4,500 or so students who aren’t from California; roughly 9 percent of those that offered admission aren’t from the United States.

Global diversity has inherent value in a college setting, but at Berkeley—a public institution that receives substantial support from taxpayer dollars—some argue it can come into conflict with its founding values as a “land-grant” university established in the mid-1800s largely to serve the children of farmers and factory workers.

And as panelists acknowledged in a discussion Wednesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, some even find international-student recruitment at private universities problematic at a time when a four-year degree remains out of reach for so many Americans.

But the panelists—all of them current or former university presidents—roundly disagree with the contention that colleges and universities in the U.S. should be restricted to those who live in the country.

UC Berkeley is charged with giving California students a premier education, and that means “having a diverse student body that includes having students outside the state of California and other countries,” said Carol Christ, the school’s chancellor.

And Yale President Peter Salovey stressed that any notions that universities reap the benefits of public funding while failing to reinvest it in society are a misconception.

Meanwhile, Daniel Porterfield, the former president of Franklin & Marshall College, argued that universities have somewhat of a duty to serve students abroad as much as they do on their own home turf, noting that “globalization gives us a feeling of connectedness, but it also gives us a feeling of fragmentation.”

Read the full article about international students at college by Alia Wong at The Atlantic