You could also look at it as International Students are paying full tuition that helps subsidize the in-state students that do get in.
Most of those private schools have done so due to having had centuries of building their reputations through alumni achievements, academic research, numerous large alumni donations, research funding from public and private sources, etc. Most were also established before the rise of college sports being one of the key centers of many college campus cultures.
Trying to do the same for public college campuses which didn’t have some or all of those factors instantaneously is asking quite a lot…and holding public colleges to an unreasonably high standard…especially if they were established within the last century and being chronically underfunded for years/decades.
Building a respectable/elite reputation for a college…especially a publicly funded college* is rarely an instantaneous process where you build it and it instantly happens. In most cases, it takes decades…even centuries, a ginormous amount of alumni funding, an established alum network of accomplished graduates, research funding from public and private sources, and academic research output from Profs. While there are some notable exceptions due to ginormous startup finding and/or aggressive marketing, they are not how most reputable/elite colleges established their current reputations.
It also requires buy-in from the prospective students and families along with avoiding missteps or you could end up building another public college which is considered widely undesirable to attend by most above-average/high academic achievers.
- Due in large part to a tendency among many Americans to assume private educational institutions are always better than their public counterparts which is not only not necessarily true....but a mentality which is a mirror opposite of the prevailing mentality in many other societies where the most reputable/elite colleges are overwhelmingly public and private colleges regarded as "second/last choices" for less accomplished students on HS leaving/college entrance exams.
If you look at most of the US based high school competitions in STEM, they are dominated by Chinese. So unless the US is just lucky to have the best and brightest from China it seems reasonable that while some of those Chinese students are cheating, surely many of them are more qualified than their US counterparts. It is the sad reality of the situation.
@bluebayou - I was writing about the instructors who have to create assessments umpteen times each term for the classes that they teach. We do what we can to control access to the quizzes, exams, paper topics, etc. that we write but we also re-use old quizzes and exams and take advantage of test banks created by the textbook publishers. There is no way to absolutely guarantee security every single time at every single institution in the country. Today I gave two quizzes. I don’t have access to a photocopier this week because our office is being renovated, so I wrote the questions on the board. No one (not even me) knew what those questions would be until I formulated them on the spot. Great “test security”, but that strategy won’t work for most midterm or final exams.
I don’t think you can make a correlation between “US based high school STEM competitions being dominated by Chinese” and the quality of international students from China.
In fact, I think many of the stronger students in China, stay in China (at one of the prestigious Chinese universities), and are much more likely to come to the US for grad school. Of course, with a population of 1.3+Billion, I’m sure there are plenty of outstanding students to fill local universities and to travel abroad.
I don’t think the issue is the academic ability of students from China. It’s the amount of cheating that’s taking place and it’s impact on admissions and college grades/classes. Academic integrity has always been very important at Universities (admissions, it seems, not so much).
@yearstogo What does that have to do with faking transcripts to get into US colleges? If Mr. Rong, or any of those other kids, was “dominating” US STEM competitions, they wouldn’t be paying an organized fraud ring to create fraudulent documents to get into US schools.
Part of the problem is we have created a “stat based” admission system that is open to abuse and outright fraud.
The excessive reliance on single tests that are improperly proctored make the system ripe for jobbing. Every year dozens - if not more - of kids in the US get caught trying to cheat as well.
Is the problem more pronounced in China? I honestly don’t know. But the fact that some or many Chinese kids do well in STEM competitions should not lead to the conclusion that therefore Universities should accept applicant fraud.
That’s just the weirdest logic.
And they lobby and sue for strictly merit admissions so they can lie and cheat their way in. Holistic admissions filters out their fraudulent ways. An elite campus full of frauds (who can’t speak english) isn’t elite anymore.
Most of the “Chinese” high school students in the US and in the competitions are Americans of Chinese ancestry, right?
Actually, the US immigration system heavily favors, at least for Chinese immigrants, the “best and brightest”, since many (at least a generation ago for the parents of current Chinese American high school students) initially came on F-1 visas to study for (funded) PhD degrees, or sometimes H-1B visas for skilled workers. About 50% of immigrants age>25 from China have bachelor’s or higher degrees, compared to 6% of the overall population of China and 32% for the overall population in the US. Having parents of high educational attainment tends to be an advantage in educational attainment for the kids whether you see it as nature or nurture.
Larger numbers of international *undergraduates/i from China is a more recent thing, since it is only recently that substantial numbers of parents in China are wealthy enough to send their kids to US universities for undergraduate study.
I’m thinking you mean Chinese Americans? I wouldn’t think this group is more likely to cheat than any other American demographic. Culturally, they are more likely to have children prep for the exams (sometimes for years) and stress the importance of education, so a strictly merit based admissions system plays up to their strengths.
A group of International students are the issue (and of course, some domestic students), and they don’t actively lobby or sue for merit based admissions.
Recently, several articles have been published on efforts by colleges to reduce the amount of cheating involved in admissions. I think that’s linked to the number of students that get accepted but clearly are not qualified.
There is a thread about the Boston Globe article in the parents forum back in January, called “Its about time: Cracking down on Cheating in China”. There have been many threads on this topic. Hopefully this will be taken seriously. Cheating is NOT ok.
*ETA: Here is the link http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1853696-its-about-time-cracking-down-on-cheating-in-china-p1.html
What is the draw of rich Chinese students vs other rich international students for these colleges? I don’t get it… Full pay is full pay. I don’t understand why colleges don’t admit more internationals from other countries.
@susyQ7, I guess the luxury goods manufacturers’ lobby has influence :). Only half-kidding.
China has more willing to pay full tuition than any other country or groups of contries. Many there are locked out of the top tier universities (Beijing University, Fudan, etc.) and don’t want to go to lower tier schools, as a US degree is more respected than a lower tier university diploma. Rich foreigners from other countries in Europe and Australia have choices of their own schools which they may prefer to an American university,and an American degree isn’t viewed the same there as in China.
Maybe the application #s shot up because some colleges have been paying “finders fees” (commissions) to agents who present accepted applicants. This turns my stomach http://www.wsj.com/articles/american-colleges-pay-agents-to-woo-foreigners-despite-fraud-risk-1443665884
Recently I received a letter from a Chinese professional seeking a trainee position. The letter was clearly written by a well-educated native English speaker. Ghostwriters of all sorts exist.
Kids who were born and raised here behave just like other American kids regardless of where their parents came from. To protect these kids’ reputation, everyone here ought to help fight off the cheaters.
There are more than one reason that makes the number of applications go up: colleges want more international students, international students see more opportunities to study and stay in the US after graduation.
China also has a relatively small number of university seats relative to its population. So many students who would be considered academically capable of attending a university if they lived in another country may be unable to get into any university in China. Those who have wealthy parents may add universities outside of China to their shopping lists.
There’s a couple of Chinese students with a BMW X5 in my daughter’s college… But they share the workload. After each trip the car is carefully cleaned inside and out as they should :). Good kids.
The car situation is easy to explain actually. A lot of the big cities in China may charge spectacular registration or parking or permit type taxes for vehicle permits so the powers that be (parents) may not know what the cost is elsewhere. I had a classmate from Hong Kong whose father sent him $50k to buy a college car like a Civic. He bought a second hand Acura NSX instead (@UCLA). Great guy also.
Oh yes, multi-millionaire Chinese parents don’t understand the exchange rate and tariffs. Right. It has nothing to do with communist parents stealing millions of dollars from their own people and letting their kids blow it inconspicuously and obnoxiously in the states. Whatever. I wonder if there’s any correlation between Porsche and Ferrari ownership at age 19 and scamming your way into college and through college. No, couldn’t be.