Those good universities have caps and very tough entry exams. People who go to Midwestern schools are not typically your elite students --but rather students whose parents thought it would be a good investment in career to send their kids to study a couple years in the US.
Ok, you seem to be missing this factor in all of your arguments.
The currencies of all the countries you mentioned trade very unfavorably (maybe not the right word) with respect to the USD. So even if the cost of a higher ed degree seems like a lot to US locals, that cost is a few orders of magnitude higher from the perspective of a family considering this investment for their ward.
The only way this degree is worth the money, even after the substantial scholarship/assistance that US schools used to offer, is if you got a job that pays you is US Dollars. If at the end you don't get such a job, then the degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
A masters degree used to cost about 20-30 thousand dollars in total if you got the aforementioned scholarships/assistance. Then once you landed a tech job you'd have made up your original investment within a year if you lived frugally, which most international students tend to anyway.
After that you could save up your money, which would be a substantial amount once exchanged for the local currency and return. This is unlikely.
Because most would choose to stay and climb higher on their career ladder and provide a more luxurious standard of living for their families.
This is the whole point of going through the university system, not the degree.
You may have a valid point --I will not contest that. However, what you say there was not the experience related to me by international students. Maybe I knew atypical international students. As I understood it, for the most cases, a degree from here afforded them better chances back home at some BIG CO., given they were unable to attend elite home country Uni (National Uni of xx]
>a degree from here afforded them better chances back home at some BIG CO
Again, you don't need the foreign degree if the BIG CO is hiring locally anyway. Sure it makes you stand out, but your net gain is very little compared to someone who got educated locally as well.
This is true, but your in with a foreign degree is different. For china in high tech, returnees (sea turtles, 海龟) are very much in demand and will command US-like salaries (for the same reason, China attracts Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean tech workers, they pay very well in comparison to other Asian countries). This applies to Big Co as well (or at least the big co I worked for in Beijing).
Also these degrees don't offer any substantial advantage in any of the other countries you mentioned.