Thanks, we've updated the submission title to clarify.

This completely invalidates the headline! Go study in Japan or anywhere, and you will see that foreign students mostly hang out with each other. Certainly their close friends will be fellow foreign students. This is mostly because local students already have an established friend group.

Besides, many are on short exchange programmes. How close friends can you really become during a 1-2 year exchange? How many of those 40% had just arrived on the last couple of months?

> This is mostly because local students already have an established friend group.

I don't think that's correct, at least outside small countries. I certainly didn't find it unusual when all my school friends went to different universities. Two others from my school were at the same place I was, but they weren't friends of mine.

My university was in London, and had a very large proportion of foreign students. Many of the Chinese students hung out together. The Europeans (including the British) and other westerners mixed together, divided more by interests and age than nationality. Some groups (South Asians, Japanese) mixed with some British students with similar ancestry.

I ran a social club for a couple of years. The students on short exchanges, like ERASMUS, seemed to make much more effort to join in with clubs, teams and societies, since they were only there for a few months.

I was thinking of students who go abroad after a couple of years. I suppose in the US and UK it is more common for foreign students to start from the beginning with the locals.

As for socializing with people from your own country vs. locals and others, I observed two factors:

1) If you are from a big country, it's easier to stay with your own countrymen. If you are from Belgium or something, you have to find friends from other countries.

2) International students motivation tends to vary between adventure/experience and opportunity/academics. Those who are abroad for the experience are more motivated to get out and meet different people. This is largely orthogonal with introversion/extroversion. But, students from rich countries more often moved for the experience, as the opportunities were similar back home. Students from poorer countries are more often motivated to get a better education and future opportunities, and may have more pressure from home to focus on their studies.

> If you are from Belgium or something, you have to find friends from other countries.

But country boundaries are not the only cultural divisions, and national/international is not a simple dichotomy. Belgians in the US might hang out with other Western Europeans but continue to spurn Americans.

Full points for worthless technical accuracy on "the US is not Japan". Zero points for accuracy of any kind on "the US is not anywhere".

And yet the conclusion is still right.

Yeah, that's a totally different statement, with utterly different implications. To be honest, I'm impressed that 60% do have American friends... that's a pretty solid majority.

The data is highly distorted by a large fraction of foreign students being Canadians. "Hey guys lets watch hockey tonight" and a fondness for maple syrup in the cafeteria isn't a major cultural road bump, compared to say a dude fresh out of Saudi Arabia who barely speaks English.

Also the study carefully avoids discussing the stats for the Americans so there's no useful comparison (intentionally?). Is that the same ratio? I wouldn't be shocked. I took some weekend/night classes and those folks are samurai with lives outside class and barely enough time for assignments and homework and existing social relationships, so in those classes I would not be surprised to see 90%-plus of students having no student friends at all. When I was finishing up my degree a couple decades ago I had a wife and kids and a house and a full time job and zero interest in going to a kegger with some kids almost young enough to be my own kids, and after a full days work and a four hour lab and having to go to work early the next morning there's no way I could stay awake for a kegger anyway.

I also took some specialty classes at a tech college and their students have nothing at all to do with each other socially as near as I can tell. A nineteen year old kid living in moms basement, a 40 year old retired disabled army vet living in a house, and a 30 year old single mom working three jobs and living in an apartment walk into a bar together sounds like the start of a joke but it was pretty accurate description of tech school. Socializing with classmates seems to be a purely 18-22 residential/dorm/greek thing. And thats still a lot of kids... but gotta be realistic, its maybe only 3/4 of total students, maybe even less.

I am so old that I know that inserting a 21 year old legal drinking age in the middle of the prime college socializing years of 18-22 must have quite an effect. That must be very weird for foreign kids from countries without drinking age hangups. What I have had a beer with my pizza for two years now back home what do you mean that I go to jail? What I am here in your country illegally and everyone thinks thats great and its illegal to kick me out but I want un cerveza after class and they act like I am felon? Crazy americans... crazy americans.

>I also took some specialty classes at a tech college and their students have nothing at all to do with each other socially as near as I can tell. A nineteen year old kid living in moms basement, a 40 year old retired disabled army vet living in a house, and a 30 year old single mom working three jobs and living in an apartment walk into a bar together sounds like the start of a joke but it was pretty accurate description of tech school. Socializing with classmates seems to be a purely 18-22 residential/dorm/greek thing. And thats still a lot of kids... but gotta be realistic, its maybe only 3/4 of total students, maybe even less.

Sooooo true. It's become, for all intents and purposes, a series of parallel universes that just happen to occupy the same space.

In general, I've found that people will not invest as much in a friendship given an upfront, known shelf life (duration of grad school, year abroad, etc.) unless they are bound by a similar constraint. How often does chatting with someone on a plane lead to a life-long friendship?

This is true for a lot more than friendships. It's less rational than I think you try to give it credit for in your last sentence.

How long were you at your last job? Let's say you spent 3 years and 2 months there. Let's make an assumption and say that your time there was a positive one for your colleagues, and that you left with no animosity and—specifically—no animosity about the timing or circumstances of your departure.

Now let's suppose, though, that you walked in on your first day knowing that you would end up spending 3 years and 2 months there, down to the date of your departure, and during introductions you let your colleagues (including management) know about the limit on your time there. Let's call this version of you You'.

The way this would play out is that You' could make the exact same moves as you in every situation, and yet will be given much fewer opportunities and find much smaller success, despite there being no difference between you and You', save for this small discrepancy. As a result, your colleagues and the company will end up getting much less value from You' than they get from you.

People are bad at maximizing the resources available to them.

I think there's an omission in your argument. The reasonableness of not forming a friendship given limited time constraints is based on time being a limited resource, e.g. it'd be better to spend time on other friendships. In your argument, you didn't analyze whether the time saved by not befriending You' was "better" spent reinforcing other friendships or whatever else. The company may have received less value from You', but the rest of the team may have increased their own value by forming stronger friendships. It's not necessary that this will be the case, but it's a non-trivial assumption to make that befriending "you" is the best allocation of resources. It all depends on the shape of the friendship-strengthening-to-company-value function.

This definitely seems true. Although, it seems that a shared experience of a known duration can create a stronger bond. Lots of people make strong friendships during specific time-bound periods (high school, college, military tour).

also "close friends". not everyone has close friends at all