<p>Xiggi, Are you for Affirmative Action for those Asians that are having trouble breaking the cycle of poverty?</p>
<p>so in another thread u said you were a descendant of ‘royalty’. now you claim you came here with pennies in your pocket. your royal family didn’t help you out? which is it?</p>
<p>A new immigrant just broke all the ties to his/her home country and moved thousands of miles away. Excuses abound.</p>
<p>So you didn’t know a soul & were without connections, how ever did you find work & feed & house your family before you ran out of money?</p>
<p>I am truly interested as it seems you have some real tips to share.
:)</p>
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<p>When I came to this country many decades back, India was a socialist country and there was a restriction on the amount of Indian Rupee that you can convert to dollars and take out of the country. At that time the limit for students was $750/person. I think it is $5000 now.</p>
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<p>I came here as a student. I didn’t work. I had a fellowship, my wife had one too. It was not much, I think together we got about $25k/year or so.</p>
<p>IP, anecdotal evidence isn’t. I arrived with $500 in the aluminum Mayflower myself, and with all due respect, your statements about ‘grad school below poverty level, etc’ are way off the mark. You, like me, and like many others like us, simply took advantage of our own country that provided a free or very low cost, pretty comprehensive K-12 education and depending where you went to college, a passable to good post-secondary education where everything AND books was paid for, and there was little to no cost (or pressure) to the family. </p>
<p>You and I had stipends, paid tuition, and all we had to do is grade papers, do research, or horror-of-horrors, teach a recitation course or two. </p>
<p>Above all, we had an exit strategy. Three signatures on the thesis, a stamp by the INS official authorizing F-1 OPT, and we were off to the races. </p>
<p>Wake me up when you and I would have a prayer in this country if we had attended an inner-city school with an abysmal K-12 record, then somehow got into some Never-Heard-Of-University and then after 5-6 years for a BS degree (not an MS or PhD) while working at the local fast food place, hit the workforce. </p>
<p>You can’t even begin to comprehend the implications of economic discrimination and disadvantage a lot of people face in this country, be it rural poor, urban poor, or suburban barely making it middle class. You can’t see it while driving your Honda minivan to the temple, you can’t see it taking your kids to piano class, and you might see it on your way to check out a new Indian grocery store in Innertown USA.</p>
<p>Turbo, Why do Asians living in inner cities and going to inner city schools do far better academically than African-Americans?</p>
<p>By the way, Honda minivan? You cut me deep bro. And I am an atheist.</p>
<p>All that said, I think we need to provide far more money to inner city schools, far more per capita than suburban schools because it takes more money to teach underprivileged kids. I also think the teacher’s unions should go. Finally, I think there needs to be a stop to teaching to the bottom, and instead kids need to be segregated into different learning groups. </p>
<p>I would keep public K-12 education. If made private, the situation would get far, far worse. The poor would be completely shut out of education and we will have a permanent underclass, which in turn will impede growth and cause socio-economic tensions. However, I highly doubt that anything will work unless the parents get more involved and start to treat education seriously.</p>
<p>Why don’t u try for PGDM course friend it is nice for ur career please make use of that course.</p>
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yet elsewhere you mentioned having a trust fund baby. Am guessing while you may have had $750 in your pocket, the rest was in the bank and in investments.</p>
<p>** aaah calimami caught it and blew the BS whistle too. Quit implying you came her penniless and found your fortune when you and spouse came here on grad school fellowships (20+ yrs ago living on $25k/yr as a student was the lap of luxury in many areas) getting your PhD’s at top schools.</p>
<p>Group ‘XXX’ doing much better than group ‘YYY’ in inner city student achievements is largely a Pyrrhic victory… Neither group receives what they need academically, due to the realities of the inner-city. Add ‘ZZZ’ - rural whites and ‘VVV’, small Rustbelt town whites, and ‘UUU’, Latinos of various types to the mix and trust you me, life for the have-nots in the USA is far worse than life for the have-nots in other parts of the world. </p>
<p>School quality in all of these cases is simply the result of other socio-economic factors; if your factory town got rolled over by moving the factory to Asia, or if drugs have taken over, or if multinationals have wiped out the family farm, good luck with the academics regardless of ethnic group. </p>
<p>In my 30 years in the US I have figured out the reason I made it was the availability and visibility of an exit strategy above all. I can’t speak for others but we all knew that the Honda Accord and Sunnyvale apartment was waiting at the end of the tunnel. The not-so-privileged classes don’t have such a rainbow waiting at the end of the forest. Teachers and schools may help some, but there needs to be a fundamental shift to ‘whole country America’ versus a patchwork of ‘haves’ in a sea of ‘have nots’, which is exactly where we’re headed right now. The patchwork works pretty well in third world countries as we know…</p>
<p>“As far as the differences between the linguistic regions, there are few clear black on white elements. And that is what makes comparing the systems fascinating”</p>
<p>-Schools in Nigeria (public or private, I have no idea) perform much better. And probably other Afrcian countries. You do not need to go to Europe for comparison. I know several immigrants who were considering sending kids back to Africa for schooling. They are as shocked by k -12 as most other immigrants.</p>
<p>I don’t know exactly when you came over, IndianParent, but in 1980 the official “poverty line” figure for a two-person family with no children was about $5,500. By 1985, it had gone up to $7,000. So, far from living “well below the poverty line”, you and your wife were probably well above 300% of poverty. And that’s not taking into account the many in-kind benefits enjoyed by graduate students, or the value of their tuition.</p>
<p>When you came here on a plane with $750 (probably $1,500 between you), you had a ticket to wealth and privilege in your pocket, not to mention the education you had already received (much better, I suspect, than actual poor people in India could get) and the genetic lottery prize of intelligence. It is profoundly insulting to compare yourself to actual poor, disadvantaged people.</p>
<p>I agree strongly with JHS. The 2011 poverty level for a household with 2 persons, in the 48 contiguous states, was $14,710. The idea that a household consisting of 2 graduate students who both hold assistantships is living in “poverty” is laughable. One of my graduate students saved enough money from his stipend to purchase a house in Canada, for cash.</p>
<p>Furthermore, many of our graduate students send an appreciable fraction of their stipends to their families, in their “home” countries, each month.</p>
<p>$750 (for whole family, not $1500) is probably more than most people bring in. You could come with nothing literally. It is not that important. What important is what happens after you are here.</p>
<p>18% of American kids live in poverty according to the 2007 Census. Is that the population we are talking about?</p>
<p>What is considered poverty in the USA is not poverty by anybody else’s standards at all. Those who live in real poverty in some other countries might have better HS education than rich here. Look into program, not economic level. Kids in other countries study physics for 5 years, not 1 year, as one example. There are many similar examples. Program defficiency is part of private education also. Did you ever hear about “Japanese” or “Russian” schools for immigrants’ kids here in the USA? They are not just for language. They are to cover deficiencies of k - 12 education. Something to check out.</p>
<p>My son goes to such a school as mentioned by MiamiDAP. The curriculum is far, far advanced than K-12, the kids are challenged and excited, and the learning is at a far higher level and at a much faster pace as well. However, it requires lots of parental involvement.</p>