Well, Xavier is very needy, so there's little danger of that every happening! Tackling two other issues you raised:

1) Boarding school is insanely expensive, especially if the dorm is a mansion full of the latest high-tech everything. What students has Xavier ever had that could have afforded even regular boarding school tuition? Roberto DaCosta comes from money. Kitty Pryde's father is a banker who lives in Deerfield, IL, so probably pretty well off. Warren Worthington III, of course. That's about it. Everybody else (orphan Scott Summers, coal miner Sam Guthrie, etc.) was clearly on full scholarships, courtesy of Xavier's infinite Richie Rich-style fortune. Even the Fantastic Four went through a period of poverty where they got evicted from the Baxter Building as I recall, but has there ever been a "money troubles" period of X-Men?

2) As has been mentioned in this thread, the in-story reason for Xavier assembling a team of young mutants is so that he can impregnate them with baby aliens once the alien within himself hatches. This plot line had been stated explicitly at least as far back as #161 (September 1982): 




The outside-of-story reason for not having students all the time is that (1) the authors didn't want to write school stories, and (2) if there's a functioning school, then Xavier needs to be around to run it, and Xavier's extreme mental powers cause major plot headaches for anybody trying to write stories with any sense of suspense, so Getting Rid of Xavier is usually a goal of any new X-Men creative team.  Even the New Mutants wouldn't exist without Jim Shooter's insistence, so kudos to him for making that happen, even though some bad things happened with the proliferation of X-books.

* According to the Marvel Wikia, this story was actually intended to be the first issue of The New Mutants but was subsequently promoted to Graphic Novel status (with 10 additional pages and higher quality coloring) when a production problem befell other publications in the Graphic Novel series. So as appealling as your explanation is, the mediocre quality of the story was not an attempt to avoid having anything actually important happening. It was just a well-intentioned semi-miss. Claremont may simply have had too many irons in the fire to do better with this one, especially rushing out an additional ten pages of plot when it changed to a Graphic Novel (tm).  Speaking of which:

* I wonder which pages were added. Probably some of the origin stuff, like the naked 14 year old girl on page 2-3, would not have passed Comics Code in 1982, if this had been published in a regular issue of a Marvel comic? Rahne's hair homages edgy British pop singer Annie Lennox; as such, it's really not what a strait-laced Presbyterian girl, the ward of a conservative minister, would choose for her hairstyle. It works visually to set her apart from the other two girls on the starting team, but it doesn't fit her character. She'd have long, flowing Jean Grey hair, probably up in a bun like Aurora's repressed alternate identity Marie.



* Wait... did Moira just imply that she has taken blood samples from all the children in her area when they were babies, so she can monitor them for possible mutations? Creepy! Good thing governments are totally disinterested in figuring out which citizens are or may become super-human... Does Moira's data ever get abused in the future?

* Another thing about the above images: It's been commented that Europeans are bizarrely backward in the Marvel Universe. Whenever they are fearfully chasing our heroes out of town, they always seem like 17th century farmers with pitchforks and torches. It's a callback to Nightcrawler's similarly gothic experience with modern Germans:



* If Roberto is only 13 years old, then the crowd watching his soccer game seems awfully large. I know soccer is big in Brazil, but is youth soccer that big? Do 13 year olds even have "arch-rival" schools? It's the "championship game," but I don't know what the annual schedule of Brazilian schools is. Their "summer vacation" is in our wintertime. What time of year is this adventure? I mean, look how full that stadium is, albeit the bleachers are only about six rows tall:



* Danielle not only has the "angry at white men" Indian stereotype (which is actually pretty understandable, even if it's a John Proudstar retread story beat) but also the "All Indians are fifteenth level Rangers who are on friendly terms with every predator in the wild" stereotype. Later in the story she says she has "psionic rapport with animals." So, she has two mutant powers I guess.



* Claremont never set up Xavier's "old army friend" connection to her grandfather Black Eagle, which is surely something he would have done years before if he'd known this story was coming. He's big on the long game, that one. Xavier claims he knew Dani's parents, attended her birth, and maybe even knew she would grow up to be a mutant! (I assume that's the "help" he promised to return and offer.) that's a whole lot of knowledge that he has for a character we have never seen before. Danielle will later claim that the only person who know her name is "Danielle" are herself and her grandfather (and her deceased parents, of course). Apparently she's always been called just "Moonstar" her whole life, and the first time Xi'an calls her "Danielle," she snaps back, saying, "I am Moonstar!" But I guess she gets over it quickly, because from the next page onward, she's "Dani" to Xi'an.



* I was glad to see Donald Pierce get to be the spotlight villain, and his plan to take over the Hellfire Club shows that even villains have troubles with the "mutants vs not" thing. He didn't want to kill Roberto. He wanted to recruit him. He probably planned to hold Juliana hostage until Roberto finished the assignment, though Roberto wouldn't last two seconds against Sebastian Shaw.

* Pierce even imprisons Shaw's assistant Tessa, who would later become the X-Man Sage. Xi'an later wonders why the mutant-hater Pierce would use mutants in his plan. I wonder as well. Pierce still dresses like Thomas Jefferson even when he's not in the Hellfire Club, which is ridiculous though totally in keeping with comic book convention that Everyone Has Only One Set of Clothes. I was glad in the Logan movie that Pierce didn't seem to be on the way to cosplay in Williamsburg.



* Using the rule of thumb that a Marvel year = 1/4 an Earth year, the two years since we saw Xi'an in MTIO #100 are only six months of real time, which is reasonable. However, she's still sporting the refugee bowl haircut. That really ought to be something else by now, a plot hole that is rectified in the next issue. Meanwhile, Moira has changed out of the civvies she wore out on the moors; now she is wearing her cream-colored jumpsuit with the purple piping. She always wears this when she's doing science, apparently.



* The guts of the plot: Moira brings Rahne to meet Xi'an at the X-Mansion; they travel with Xavier to pick up Moonstar, including a battle with Pierce's goons. Xavier reads their minds, learning of Pierce's plan to recruit mutant kids to help him knock off Sebastian Shaw. As I said: doesn't seem like a very good plan to me! But anyway, Moira goes to Rio with Dani and Xi'an to find Roberto. Crooked cops (or perhaps just misled cops) arrest Moira, leaving Dani and Xi'an to fend for themselves in a giant city where they don't speak the language (Portugese). Fortunately, Xia'n has a convenient mini-Cerebro in her watch which leads her to Roberto's house. He's just sneaking out, so they follow him to a rendezvous with Pierce's goons, who have kidnapped his girlfriend.

* Is Bobby the kind of 14 year old who would run from his mansion to the slums of Rio on foot at night to try to solve a ransom situation himself? Maybe. He will later confess, "With my power, I thought I could save her." But his super-strength is only good for about five seconds of combat before he's drained. It's a reasonable plot point that at first, Roberto doesn't know how to channel his energy properly and finds himself spent prematurely. No stamina. Learn to pace yourself, kid!

* Meanwhile, Rahne and Xavier go find Sam in rural Kentucky. Xavier is driving a regular jeep like it's no big deal.

* Sam is mistakenly working for the bad guys, who have given him the name "Cannonball," which he is not too embarrassed to keep later.

* Xavier is captured and taken to Pierce's nearby fort, which is apparently in the Kentucky wilderness. Rahne gets away and follows in wolf form. Just as she gets to the base, who should step out of the woods but Bobby, Xi'an, and Dani? Mind you, this scene takes place at night; it's got to be the same night that Bobby snuck out of his house to try to rescue Juliana, unless it took Xavier and Rahne far longer to go to Kentucky than it took Moira, Dani, and Xi'an to go to Rio. This means that somehow Bobby, Xi'an, and Dani have gotten from the slums of Rio to the backwoods of Kentucky in just a few hours. They also somehow knew just where to find Pierce's fortress, and they didn't even bring along Moira, whom we're told has been released from police custody in Brazil. It's just a big fat plot hole all around. (After the big fight scene, we'll be told that Moira is actually lurking around Kentucky with a "hovercar," but we never see that. This is clearly a plot hole being papered over with late-added dialogue.)

* Bobby and Dani make their motives for coming to Kentucky clear: Each of them plans to kill Pierce for the deaths of their respective loved ones (Juliana and Black Eagle). Disturbing motives for 14 year olds! However, once in Xavier's presence with helpless Pierce nearby, Bobby and Dani don't breathe a word about their revenge motives. In later internal monologue, each of them decides to set vengeance aside.

* Xavier is forced to leave Tessa to deal with Pierce so that he can get dying Rahne to a hospital. This is when we learn about Moira and the hovercar.

* I may have found an instance of coloring-censoring. The default X-uniform has six pieces: tights, leotard, trunks, belt, boots, and gloves are donned in that order. In this panel, Dani is already wearing the tights and trunks but holding the leotard in her hands. This is wrong; the leotard goes on under the trunks, not after. There are three explanations:

1) She's new at this costume stuff; give her a break. (There's no indication in the dialogue to support this idea.)
2) It's a colorist's error; her "pants" are actually part of her tights and should be black. She's wearing her tights and about to put on the leotard appropriately. (Probably not this, because the panties have wrinkles that wouldn't show up once they were colored black.)
3) She was drawn wearing undies only (not the outerwear yellow X-trunks), contemplating her leotard, but that was rightly deemed too risque for a shirtless teen girl. So her panties were colored yellow as if they were the trunks, and her legs were colored black as if she were wearing the tights. Really, the choice of scene for this panel is gratuitous and inappropriate. I think Claremont is trying to set Dani up as the Starfire/Ororo, the free spirited person from a cooler culture where they are not so hung up on the whole "wear clothes" thing, especially for women. But I'm not aware that Native Americans in the late 20th century were big on public nudity.



* Rahne, the team member most likely to have a huge problem with nudity anywhere, finally gets her X-suit at the end of the issue, and seems delighted. It would have been nice for Xavier to give it to her earlier, since he already knew she'd have a clothes problem with her shape-shifting. But then the costumes wouldn't all be thematically rolled out at the same time, after the team has earned its stripes.

* I like Bob Macleod's art. Drawing teens is not an easy thing, but I can believe that Xi'an is substantially older than the others, and she looks clearly but not stereotypically Vietnamese. (That haircut, tho.) Everybody has their own face. 

* This is a good time to mention what a terrible name "The New Mutants" is for a comic book. I simply can't believe they chose that same bad name for the movie based on (some of) these characters. It's not like it has name recognition outside nerd-dome. Why didn't they call the film "X-Men: Demon Bear" or something?

• The New Mutants graphic novel was originally slated to be issue #1 of the series, and several months passed between the publication of the GN and the publication of this issue. So if Claremont did write this story before the GN, he had ample opportunity to revise it in light of the GN.

* Here is a good opportunity to see how the colors on modern reprints are brighter than the originals, which could be either a good or bad thing depending on what was originally intended:



• Stevie Hunter gets rid of Xi’an’s bowl haircut. Finally! But Stevie is letting four teens watch. Not cool. I like Bob McLeod’s art in general, but Dani’s head is way too big in this splash page. Is Rahne sitting on the open toilet? McLeod draws Stevie as very thin, in keeping with her ballerina past.

• This issue is Claremont’s homage to the first several pages of X-Men #1, which introduced the team through two scenes: (1) Running them through their paces in the Danger Room allows us to see their powers and personalities. (2) Banter amongst the kids leading to a quarrel. Lee/Kirby kept the tone light with their Baby Boomer characters, like the horseplay between Johnny and Ben in Fantastic Four. But Claremont’s characters are angsty emo 80s kids, and all five of them have tragedy in their recent past, and probably PTSD in their present. So the quarrel gets very serious very quickly. Xia’n, a rape survivor, is going to lash out hard against any perceived threat. Maybe Xavier should have brought a psychiatrist onto his team also instead of just a gym teacher?

• Dani is uncharacteristically smiley at the beginning of this issue, but it doesn’t last long. Dani was orphaned and then ran off to live in the woods, so she ought to come across as a self-reliant weirdo not trained in social cues. She probably doesn’t bathe or brush her teeth or pick up her room as much as she should. She rightly worries that she is already alienating her new acquaintances with the threat that she will put their deepest neuroses on display for the whole world.

• As badwolf said, Rahne does indeed say in this issue that she has trouble growing her hair longer than a burr cut. That must be part of her mutant power. Do later X-writers stay faithful to that detail?



• Bobby has a cool op art pattern behind his head on page 3. He’s reasonably worried about the death threat Xi’an made against Dani.



• Why did Moira bring Illyana to London for her meeting with Gabrielle Haller? Moira was invited to discuss a genetics concern with David “Legion” Haller. When Gabrielle spills the beans that Charles Xavier is David’s father, I bet Moira was wishing she hadn’t asked such questions in front of Illyana. This is mainly Claremont’s way of keeping Illyana in play from the very beginning.



• Claremont sets up the Demon Bear story as Dani tells Rahne about the time she manifested her father’s fear of the monster, just before her parents left to fight it and never returned.

• Stevie thinks to herself that Xavier is not responding wisely to the drama between Dani and Xi’an. Stevie’s instincts are correct; Xavier is off his game due to the Brood embryo gestating within him.

• Rahne jumps through the window into the back seat of Stevei’s Saab in wolf-form, then switches to girl-form right in Roberto’s lap, then is offended when he makes a suggestive comment. What a tease! We already saw in the haircut scene that she interprets his flirting as actual attraction, which it is in his promiscuous way.



• “Xavier’s estate sprawls for three miles along the lakeshore, rising to an imposing bluff- with a majestic view- at the eastern end.” Three miles of Westchester County real estate! Xavier really is rich. In Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, we will see Archangel using the bluff to test flying students. We saw the lake in the Weapon Alpha story. Have the bluff or the lake played into other stories? The Rockefeller Estate is in Westchester; I wonder whether Claremont used it as a reference for Xavier details.

Plus, it’s Chris Claremont. Every cook making a sandwich is a superb chef who left the Tour D’Argent to cater to the crowned heads of this world, every gymnastics contest is a selection for the Olympics, and every book bought as a birthday present is a Gutenberg Bible. It has to be BIG!

Do it! Provocative statements generate more conversation than lukewarm praise.

• A computer screen in Gyrich’s lair gives us some demographic details on the kids. Roberto was said to be 14 in the Graphic Novel, but now we see he’s 13. Claremont needs to keep better notes! At age 14 and 4’11”, Rahne has probably reached her adult height. She’s usually portrayed as short, but not that short.




• At the mall, they also meet Frank, Diana, and some other guy (who always has a toothpick in his mouth) from “Central High” in Salem Center, NY. I wish this plot thread had been followed more in future issues. (I also have an unaccountable wish that the three normal kids had been named Diana, Bruce, and Clark.)



• Salem Center has a two story mall, which makes it pretty big .The kids are at the mall seeing “E.T.” at the cinema. It’s Rahne’s first movie experience. Alkso in the mall is: 310 Flavors (a pun on the Baskin-Robbins chain of “31 flavors” ice cream shops) which is… out of vanilla ice cream! Criminal! There’s also Sears, Burdine, a Spencer teen culture store as well as The Fandom Zone local comics store.

• Sebastian Shaw ponders using the Sentinels to attack the team in what’s now known as a “false flag,” a manipulative ploy to frighten members of his own group (mutants) into being more hostile to members of the other group (regular humans). He needn’t have bothered; the kids were already spooked by the team of Gyrich agents who accost them in the food court.

• Sam rockets into a parked car, smashing it into the Federal Agent on the other side. That guy is totally dead.




• A caption mentions Rahne’s crush: “She has precious few friends. She cannot bear to lose even one. Especially Roberto.”


• Even while fighting the Sentinels, Roberto is thinking about how his father can surely get the kids out of any trouble they’re in with giant robots and/or the American government. Ah, the naïveté of childhood.

• Xi’an uses her powers well. First she stops an agent from shooting Roberto in the back. Later, when Sam has been frozen solid by a Sentinel, she takes over his mind to activate his power and wake him back up. Nice ploy since she can’t directly affect the giant robots.

• Rossi calls it “pretty rough language” when the subdued agent says “Bull!” which tells us that “Bull!” is not really what the agent said.

• I appreciate that New Mutants #3 ends with the team beginning to watch popular 80s detective TV show Magnum, P.I., and this issue picks up several minutes later, finding the kids doing exactly that. Their clothing doesn’t match; I guess it’s asking too much of the two art teams to coordinate that sort of thing.

• According to the first panel, the back of the mansion has a double glass door containing the TV room/library, and right outdoors from that room is the Olympic swimming people where, according to the previous issue, Dani does ten laps in the pool every morning in the nude, in full view of all the windows on the back of the mansion.



• There’s a great shot of Wolverine slinking up the stairs, following Xavier’s scent.



• Xia’n is surprised that Wolverine can resist her control. I guess X-Men get more anti-telepath training than Spider-Man has had. Wolverine also lays Sunspot flat, twice.

• Was anyone else surprised that Claremont actually let Xavier complete his transformation into a Brood Queen? I figured there’d be some last minute save, but nope!

• Ororo is jealous that Kitty is more interested in her friends than her mother-figure. It’s a nice character moment that rings true. Ororo recognizes her own need to be needed by Kitty, and feels Kitty’s dependence on her slipping away.



• Lilandra’s threat to Reed Richards was actually hollow, inasmuch as she has been deposed. I wonder whether Byrne put Lilandra into Fantastic Four not knowing that she was currently deposed, and then Claremont (a continuity fanatic like Byrne) felt obliged to fix the error with this 3.5 page sequence, showing that Lilandra was mad enough to pretend to still be an Empress for a few minutes. She sticks around Earth for a while, saying that she doesn’t have the heart to lead a rebellion against her evil sister Deathbird. So she’s basically giving up on her people. It happens, I guess.



• Upon regaining the ability to walk, Xavier says “for the first time in over fifteen years, I am a whole man.” That sort of “fifteen years” dialogue messes up continuity; Claremont should know better.

• Xavier calls the kids “The New Mutants.”

• Paul Smith portrays Wolverine as more than a head shorter than Ororo, Two heads below Peter.