Schools should do what keeps them in business. If someone is going to pay them to subsidize expensive STEM education, that's what will keep them going, so they should run with that. Without subsidy, they should charge according to costs, since running the program at a loss makes no economic sense and will just lead to them closing their doors.
Why don't we have more US citizen STEM majors and STEM students going into industry? Because people who have citizenship and speak US English fluently are also likely to know the score: you make much more money working for financial manipulators than for productive industry. Foreigners often don't know the score, or they have a harder time swimming in the culture of the business sharks. They go to industry jobs because they are able to get them, don't know any better and anyway industry jobs are a huge improvement over the crap they put up with in the 3rd world. Then there's the people who just love doing it and wouldn't sacrifice their passion just for money. I guess. Those people are, as expected, pretty rare.
Want to make the US competitive, r.e. high tech industry? Want to avoid pitfalls like raising STEM education prices? Fix business climate. Let me say right now that it's just not going to happen before a truly major catastrophe hits us. Wall St. owns the gov't and hasn't suffered at all in comparison to the rest of the nation for the crisis they created. Anyhow, here's a short list of things to fix:
* Remove or short-circuit the political influence of the controlling elite. Their interests normally align well enough with society to allow them the privilege of their economic and political advantages. This is no longer the case. They're now eating our lunches so fast that the real economy is shrinking and they don't realize that they're going to eventually have things much harder when they aren't leeching off a fat and growing middle class but a poor and hollowed-out one.
* Stop externalizing all non-monetary costs. Foreign outsourcing is profitable for the elite and terrible for the society. Destroying the ecology by ruthlessly sucking out natural resources is fantastically profitable. So is keeping dehumanized workers hard under the thumb of management. This single item addresses so many problems that we face, it's not even funny. Almost all economics research should be directed at properly measuring the real costs and benefits of economic activity and giving us the tools to properly decide what to pursue.
* End corporate personhood. Corporations exist as vehicles for accumulations capital and resources to survive changes in management and ownership. The incentives for all parties involved is so far tilted to the short-term that it is really just a mandate to slash, burn, rape and pillage by any legal (or otherwise) means necessary. Personhood rewards this behavior with both unfair advantages and immortality.
* Adjunct the single corporate mandate of profit-seeking with the proper mandate that each corporation has a net benefit to society (including non-monetary costs).
* Demolish regulation and lawyer-strangulation in health-care and replace it with a highly visible system of certification. Make the patient pay for his services and let him decide what he's going to buy. Right now we're all forced to buy health care in the form of Cadillacs. Services have an enormous burden of administration and regulation. There are no health-care pintos. If the huge regulatory and insurance burden is removed and Sally the nurse can treat everyday injuries and colds out of her house or her van without two hired paperwork shufflers to make her legal, then her competition will reduce costs because the Caddy dealership doctors and hospitals will have to compete to survive. You really shouldn't be able to sue your caregivers. They're human and they're going to make mistakes. The key is to focus on making those mistakes both rare and less costly for you and for them. Modern medicine CAN do wonderful things but the expectation that we will receive 100% perfect care isn't ever going to be remotely possible. Forcing everyone to live in a regime of mistake = career-death makes the cost too high for all of us. We all hugely overpay because not everyone needs a Cadillac all of the time and we're all forced to buy them.
* The healthcare regulation thing is basically the same issue for myriad occupations and industries where the legal and regulatory barriers to entry have been erected so high that it blocks the participation of small business (agriculture, energy, telecom, etc). These regulations exist mainly for the purpose of shielding the big players from local competition and no longer serve to meaningfully protect the public. (Do you like paying $100+ for 1000 cable tv channels + internet and having almost no alternative? Do you like your cellphone provider? Do you know how expensive and hard it is to raise livestock and sell the meat at retail? Yet we have horrible service from our monopoly providers and unsafe food in our markets.)
To me, it just seems foolish to be upset or even concentrated on relatively small issues like the cost of STEM education rising when the bigger issues are the root causes and they touch so many more parts of our lives. So. I advise you to save your pennies and try your damnedest to convert them to something that will store real value. Like a cow, chickens and some decent farmland. Like beer brewing equipment. Like a good sewing machine. That stuff will feed you and put clothes on your back. We have concentrated so much power in so few hands. Even if they were genius, well-intentioned, altruistic hands the people at the top are going to make enough mistakes and fight amongst themselves and they're just not going to intentionally give up their own power and wealth so that the wisdom of the crowds can drive the invisible hand of the market to right the economy. No one person or small group can make a policy or run a bureaucracy that will perform better than the function of unbiased exchange among millions. There will be a monetary and economic collapse because too much actual wealth is being squandered on the whims of too few. They've tilted the economic table hard in their own direction and it distorts economics so badly that our systems are going to topple. The only way not to be caught in that disaster is to stop participating in it. Start participating in local and regional economies that aren't controlled and gamed by the elites. For now, it's likely to be a barter system. It may use an alternative currency. It may be a commune. Whatever happens, it's not going to be change within the existing system that fixes things.