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Honestly, we should probably shut down this whole US thing until we can figure out what's going on with it.
If you're going to the Global South to study, sure. If you're an American studying in like Germany or Denmark or wherever I assure you your precense isn't making life more expensive for those living there.
going to school somewhere is totally the same as buying a 30 unit apartment building and converting the first floor to a boutique dog grooming business.
Yes. The production of gentrified businesses exists because if you built it, yuppies will come. But none of those yuppies individually are responsible for the construction of the business. The people funding it hold significantly more power of the details of what happens with the developments. Ideally a government would have proper zoning and oversee this to protect people from gentrification, but obviously those government functions become captured by capital quickly. So fundamentally the issue is labor relations, as always, but in terms of short term harm reduction and organization, renters unions are a good start, as are locally-owned workers coops
There's also studies showing that governments will rezone, increase policing, extend transit, and take other measures to pave the way for gentrification. It doesn't happen organically most of the time.
Gentrification is the fault of the landlords and businesses that actually raise the prices, and it's fucked that we routinely accept language that removes them from the cause and effect entirely.
TL,DR: I do not believe that the amount of Americans migrating to countries in the Global South to study in their public universities could become a large enough movement that they'd offset any previous predatory policy already enacted by the countries in question.
I've seen the user who replied in the post. They are most likely Mexican since I've seen them interact with some of my Mexican mutuals. I am guessing their answer comes in the tail of a particular conversation which sparked a lot of outrage, which to my mind has been misdirected towards the American immigrant population in Mexico, charging them with the appalling situation of the housing market in this country: An American woman who is working remotely in one of Mexico City's hip neighborhoods uploaded a picture inviting other Americans to work remotely in CDMX. Over the course of an entire afternoon, a lot of people started chastising her for it, because according to them, Americans working remotely in Mexico accentuate the problems already inherent in CDMX's and other cities' overstressed and speculative housing market. While some of the critiques were well-meaning and called for being conscious about the effects of American "working tourism" on local economies, most ended up devolving into horrible xenophobia. The controversy ended up having a positive side in that it sparked a big discussion over whether renters in Mexico should consider forming a union, and also a proposal for a Renter's Law.
So, here are my thoughts: Individuals emigrating from the Core towards the Semi-Periphery and Periphery tend to have overwhelming purchasing power that does distort the market in the communities in which they arrive, forcing changes that are sometimes not desired by the original inhabitants. However, their arrival in a particular location is usually at the tail end of a sequence of actions that have been taken before to make a community more agreeable to a certain population. In the CDMX example, the neighborhood in question, La Condesa, has been one of Mexico City's hip neighborhoods for the better part of 20 years and wasn't even a working-class neighborhood to begin with. In this sense, Americans doing work tourism in the global south is just the logical conclusion of policies and laws enacted years before their arrival. The same would go for Americans studying in, say, UNAM: For the average American to even begin considering studying in a public university in Mexico, that University would first have to be as welcoming of foreign students as it is of Mexican students, be able to provide equivalent certification in certain courses that would translate in their foreign students being able to work in their home countries, and there would have to be readily available housing and services to cater to the average American's expectations.
So yes: Americans living abroad, whether for work or studies, do have a gentrification effect in the communities in which they arrive in, but that effect is so minuscule compared to what a particular country's bourgeoisie regularly does to shift the market towards their profit that it might as well be negligible or be considered as part of the previous process. Rather than focusing on who can and cannot go to a particular country, we should look towards curbing Capital's power to modify our living conditions to their liking.
I think it's kinda wild to claim than international students drive more gentrification (or are somehow a major driver of it) than the overall effects of having a college/university in a given area.
In many places universities are straight in the cities and have dorms so I don't know how much gentrification they can do.
Do most universities have dorms in other parts of Europe? Because in Denmark, the universities are in the biggest cities, and maybe have housing for 1.000 people between all of them, which is far too little for them to make a difference in the cities they are placed. Come to think of it, my former university had a specific housing foundation for international students, to help them find housing.
Yeah, it's only good advice if you don't mind having every employer raise an eyebrow at your resume.
This is presented as an individual consumption problem. It is generally impossible to solve systemic problems through individual consumption, you're just one person. If you want to feel good about removing your contribution to the problem that's totally cool, but let's not kid ourselves about whether we've actually addressed a tendency.
In short, if getting a college education on another country's dime is bad, it must be solved through policy or collective action, not because some (likely privileged lib) kid is having an existential crisis about whether they're a burden on Argentina.
I cannot imgaine going to college in a country that I do not speak the language of fluently. Lectures and discussions would be past me, so I might as well just be reading the textbook at home.
college is free in germany for everyone including foreigners
what are the requirements for admission, though? as someone who only has Canadian citizenship
yeah the grades, I didn't finish high-school and instead got my GED a few years later. But mostly I'm too poor to have $8,000 saved up. With the cost of housing vs. wages, I'm not sure I can ever manage that unless something big happens lol.
ah well thanks for the info anyway man
it’s not like a fee you have to pay for uni; that’s free.
see, it's amazing that their society works like this. And that you could scrape by on only $8,000 per year. I think you'd have to go back 20 years at least for that to be a thing in Canada... now rent alone would be $15k+ per year. And our society is too stupid for free higher education.
I'm just so jealous of european countries, lol
second one
if you are rich enough to study abroad, you will absolutely be a gentrifier- most working class people in the UK can't/don't go to uni, literally the only people from my year that could were from middle class families
- the tweet says americans, it's more expensive for them to do it
That figure is definitely far from “no one”.
i said most mate, and yeah, free school meals are for the poorest students but just being working class doesn't mean you aren't financially well off, which is the main thing i was going for in my first comment
congratulations on making it in, genuinely
but working class people can, if they can overcome the socioeconomic conditions limiting them, go to uni.
that was kinda my point, it's the socioeconomic conditions that mean a lot of us can't
the demographics of this website are mostly college kids from financially comfortable families
don't go to college. reject social climbing and smash everything in sight.
2nd one. If a school abroad(maybe not in central and Northern Europe) accepts international students that's not on some govt grant(Americans will not get those), you best believed they will raise the tuition fees and increase the hostel fees overall for even the local students.
