Warning, wall of text: I'm not sure if people are aware of how the graduate programs at American universities are marketed in India. Each year, the admissions departments send representatives to different cities in India to hold information sessions about the university. During those sessions, they share with potential students, the minimum requirements for getting a scholarship, which are pretty low. This motivates more students to apply for the universities, especially since it's also sold as being a channel towards high-salary jobs to students, jobs both within universities and in companies in large cities.

On top of this, they approach "Educational Consultants" in India, who act as middle-men. Many students hire the services of educational consultants in return for guidance, advice, and help with producing materials and taking care of procedures such as applying to universities, writing a statement of purpose and a resume, typing up recommendation letters for their professors to sign, applying to a visa, coaching for the visa interview, help with travel arrangements, AND most importantly, high interest but quick and easy-to-acquire loans where basically you put your parent' house up as collateral. Each paying thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of students do this each year, to apply to hundreds of colleges around the world, making this a multi-million dollar industry. Now, this is only one part of the puzzle.

When the students finally arrive in the university, they try to find the least expensive housing situation. This means that they either live in bad neighborhoods where there is cheap rent, an apathetic owner, and no tenant rights. This means students usually live 4-5 in a tiny two-bedroom apartment where they pay the owner cash to look the other way in terms of violating city ordinances and the fire code, while he does nothing to get rid of the rodents or bed bugs in the building. Students pay from $250-350 a month to live like this, because this is all they can afford. Since some can't afford even the living expenses, they take up jobs illegally in restaurants, gas stations, delis, and stores, where they get paid in cash, less than minimum wage and don't pay taxes. This is in vilation of the F1 visa and if caught by the ICE, they will be deported. For 10 years.

When they get to school, they find that most of the courses listed in the website are not being offered. They discover that their adviser basically forces them to take a bunch of courses they didn't want to take. They find that most of the classes are not being taught by the professors they were interested in learning from, but rather by adjuncts who were hired by the departments to save money. There adjuncts of course have no deep experience in the subject, nor any experience in teaching. To further save money, they fill these classes beyond the capacity, as in the case at the Electrical Engineering department at a large university, where at one point there was 120 students in a class. A MASTERS level class. Due to a complete lack of individual attention, most of the students get low grades in the first semester, and many students lose their scholarships within the first two semesters.

Now, they're in a dilemma, since they now have to pay the full fees or they would have wasted a year. And of course, they still believe in the university and feel a false sense of security in the power of a master’s degree. So now their parents take an extra loan to cover the costs. Hundreds of universities around the country do this, and they charge thousands of dollars as fees. Meanwhile, they rely on the labor of graduate students to teach other graduate students. They also save money by hiring grad students in lieu of professional office staff. They pay these grad students $10 and hour. No medical benefits, or even waived credits for research either. So this poor oppressed population is put to work for the university, and they do so without complaining because they still believe in the American dream. Unfortunately, there's more.

While not hiring more full-time faculty, paying the students a fair wage or improving the facilities, they invest in acquiring more students through recruitmentology. In fact, they take it one step further, they in fact pay per-student commissions to these educational consultants to drive students' business their way. These educational consultants drive their business on the backs of an underpaid clerical staff (and let’s not get into the whole caste debate here). By the time many grad students from India graduate, they don't have jobs. So they opt for an Optional Practical Training (OPT).

Some continue working for the university in low-wage research or clerical jobs. Others, join "IT consultancies" which portrays fresh graduates as having at least two-to-five years of experience on the field and having them work for their clients as consultants. They of course get paid only a fraction of their hourly fees, most earning <$30,000 a year. If they ever get caught, these IT consultancies immediately close shop and move, leaving their employees in a lurch. Most get fired almost immediately, some even get deported. You may have seen this on the news a couple years back in New Mexico.

Meanwhile, the university is putting more and more emphasis on entrepreneurship since they realize that the traditional model of education leading to employment is failing. Of course, this is happening all over capitalist countries as the economy is still lashing out. By focusing on entrepreneurship, they are shifting the failure to the individual. You didn't get a job? Why don't you just create your own job? Go ahead, we'll "support" you. Even the top-economists and professors don't have a perfect answer to how to combat increasing unemployment and the failure of free market-capitalism, but universities claim to have the solution. Create your own job! Yay!

Of course they don't realize that international students are restricted by the F1 visa from starting their own ventures, and only few can acquire a small fraction of the limited start-up funds available, to even qualify for an entrepreneurship visa. Even then, there's a lottery system since there are too many applicants from the same country. This is of course only one of the many aspects of what I call the globalization of the "American Dream" commodity.

tl;dr American universities engage in some shady stuff to make money off international students.