… I don’t think bringing in students that can’t speak English is going to make Americans more open to other cultures, when they go to class everyday and look at other students that so obviously bought their way into the school and did not get there on merit.
The author apparently also think it would be a good idea for Americans to study abroad in Iran, you know, where people randomly get arrested for no reason and/or accused of spying and thrown in jail.
at some point, is this fraud? You are taking money and there is no hope of these kids receiving the services they are paying for (of course, it is completely their choice).
My son has a Koren classmate who took a year out of school to learn the language. He speaks with no accent, and is one of those All-American-Asian types of guys. So there is no excuse for failing to provide students with the language skills they need before enrolling them in classes.
I am somewhat of an isolationist. I also support allowing as many smart immigrants as possible into the country. I just don’t want us to allow any welfare cases in.
If Arizona can’t fill its school with tax paying residents or the legislature won’t adequately fund the school, then I understand increasing OOS and international enrollment. In states like Texas where residents are turned away in droves from the flagships and the schools are funded relatively well, I don’t think this makes sense.
This “subsidy” strategy isn’t actually unique to any one school, as I know many others who employ the same technique but never so explicitly say it. Says a lot about how well our education system works that it has to be subsidized by students that pay a lot of money and flunk out, doesn’t it?
Presumably, the schools are large enough that, after dipping pretty far into the pool of Arizona high school graduates, they still have plenty of space to tap the out-of-state and international students for their tuition.
On the other hand, if the international students in question do not interact with other students (or faculty) much (as the author seems to think), they may do little or nothing to counteract what the author calls “the new isolationism”. At worst, if they show up but remain in their own isolated social circles, other students may be more prone to forming unfriendly stereotypes about them.
I love this article. It is not the prof’s fault that the students are unable to understand the material. That’s the fault of adcoms. What I Iike is the bigger message in this article. Too many Americans are afraid of what they don’t understand. Exposing our young people to others from different countries and cultures may be the closest some of them ever get to a foreigner.
The author is correct. The Orange One is capitalizing on fear and ignorance and many people are buying into it. These same people think there is no need for the rest of the world, but without a world economy, our country would grind to a halt. Inviting foreigners to study here is just one small way to help our youth understand that there are a whole lot of people out there who are not terrorists, who are want to be educated, who want to be engaged in a place outside their own country, and who want to get to know us. And we should want to get to know them too.
@Lindagaf I agree with you that the world needs to be a less ignorant place, but I think that’s a different point than setting these kids up to fail and being so complacent about it.
If the schools are so interested in the rich foreign kids’ money, why not make them go through English proficiency classes before they can be mainstreamed into the regular classes? It would be a win win without the moral turpitude they seem to be flaunting.
The bigger issue here is that schools have never been good about filtering out those who actually belong in a university from those who do not. They don’t really have an incentive to, because more students is more money. That’s a problem not just for internationals, but for nationals as well. Those that have no place in a university shouldn’t be allowed to go there in the first place. That’s just playing fast and loose with other people’s money - the student’s, federal loan money, and state subsidies for in-state students.
Generally, the admission standards are set to fill the space available. Of course, the deeper one goes into the class of high school seniors and graduates, the higher risk they will be as college students. But the chance of success in college is not a step function of observable characteristics of high school seniors and graduates.
It is in part the prof’s fault. She is not writing op-ed pieces blasting the admissions dept. and the board for encouraging the admission of students who are not prepared for college study.
If the majority of the students will not do well in their courses, they will not represent their countries well. That will not increase the respect American students have for foreign countries. In the comments to the WP story, many commenters point out that students from some countries tend to cluster together. It’s not surprising if they don’t even know the alphabet.
I have heard the argument of full-pay foreign students supplementing universities’ budgets. I’m not sure I totally buy that argument. It does create more jobs for administrators and professors. It increases the size of the university, which again creates more jobs for university employees. With a larger student body, there are higher capital costs. If that’s financed by debt, the “profit” from those students may not be a profit at all.
It diverts teaching resources from those students, US and foreign, who are prepared for university study in the US.
It may help the universities’ credit ratings, as it would increase the number of “full tuition” students–without pointing out that those students shouldn’t be enrolled at all, as they have no hope of passing courses. Isn’t this fraud?
And on the oh, what to call it, “happy tourist” aspect of the students’ presence in the classroom, most of my children’s friends have traveled and studied abroad. Many of their friends are international students. However, they attended elite private schools. This is a question of family income.
Many Americans can’t come up with $500 for an emergency. Many American students are paying from their own pockets for university study. They do not have the time to “engage” with foreign cultures. They have to pass the courses, and do well. They are often either studying, or on their way to their jobs. They orient themselves to the labor market, because they don’t have the excess resources to play the professor’s game of globalist sophisticate. http://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2016/01/06/63-of-americans-dont-have-enough-savings-to-cover-a-500-emergency/#4a00a3a76dde
Perhaps a headcount-based approach is flawed, to the extent that they shouldn’t build infrastructure recklessly and enroll beyond their capacity to graduate students. Burlington College and its recent closure, for example, may be a cautionary tale of overextension with regards to infrastructure. The space available is not constant in the long run, and is a factor of how much infrastructure the school chooses to build. And while there is some potential to retool infrastructure for other purposes (housing and academic buildings have other interested customers for their services other than college students), it should not be built irresponsibly.
The predictive power of high school factors is much stronger on the lower end than it is on the upper end. That is, it may be pretty hard to predict who the best students are, but it’s not so hard to predict who is a bad risk. A high HS GPA and a high SAT do not guarantee good results, but a low HS GPA and SAT are very accurate guarantees of a likely bad result. The latter group should not be admitted to an expensive university program because if there were any good degree of financial liability on the part of the university for bad enrollments, that would be written off as a bad risk. And for the fringe cases where that proves to be an inaccurate judgment, there should be a backdoor admission through something like community college.
The initial story is dumb-minded in many respects. I have taught college students from many countries. It’s generally true, but hardly an absolute rule, that students from countries that were former colonies of Great Britain have an advantage in learning English well. In addition, students from countries with good exposure to international media, music, and so on, have an advantage in learning English.
So “world history” matters, as well as individual initiative and exposure to English language.
This was relevant especially when we were selecting graduate students. For admission, they would be required to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) along with the GRE or other general exams. Leaving aside the situation where there’s cheating or mismanagement of those tests, which did happen, what we found is that for students from East Asia (e.g., PRC. S. Korea) we had to put a real question mark on their competency in English because we couldn’t rely on the tests. Nonetheless we admitted many graduate students from East Asia. It’s just that before they could be given a typical assignment as a teaching assistant they had to be tested by our university’s English language center; only after they could pass a speaking test were they allowed to work as TA’s.
Now in recent years, as is well known, large numbers of international students have been enrolling as undergraduates in our universities. I don’t share the cynicism expressed in the original post on this thread. But we are still in a relatively early stage of this surge of international students, and one thing that has happened is that the international students pretty much hang with their own groups – their compatriates – which I think slows down their progress with English language. But that’s mainly on the social side, not as much on the academic side. In smaller classes and discussion groups – not large lectures – there is a lot of mixing of students by background. But 100% of the instruction, and the tests and papers, are in English.
Over a period of time, the students with modest initial capability in English perform well in their classwork. I can’t say that on the social side the integration with American students has moved very far. But it has certainly enlivened our town in some other respects with restaurants in quite varied cuisines.
Why not invited these students to a special even more expensive five year program where they get up to speed in English before being thrown to the wolves? You could have a big component of introducing them to American life. Pair them off with American students who perhaps know some Chinese so that they are less isolated and can get integrated into Amercian college life.
@Lindagaf I agree that Americans would do well to have more exposure to other cultures, but I think that things like this hurt the cause. The actual result if the opposite of what the professor wants.
American students shouldn’t go to France to take classes in French if they don’t speak the language… it just doesn’t make any sense.
The fact they don’t speak English well enough doesn’t mean they’re not qualified. They may be excellent in their respective majors. But China doesn’t teach 'real English ', but they ‘teach to the test’, drilling and drilling the format and expected answers. Medium-selectivity universities could dispense with the TOEFL and simply give an English test (or even administer an internal TOEFL) during international orientation, the results of which would place students directly into classes, offer part English support part regular classes, or full esl for a semester or a year.
It’s also bypass issues with TOEFL scrutiny.
Finally, the super smart poor shouldn’t be excluded, because those are the ones we stand to most benefit from.
Asu would stand to benefit from the " no TOEFL " policy, too.
Note that most UK universities are fine admitting without an English language test, and if English is shown to be insufficient, student have to do an international foundation year that includes English, intro classes in the subject in English, and methodology.