There is this blood from a stone problem. Tuition has been frozen at U of IL (and that’s slightly misleading because IL makes a 4-year tuition guarantee, so it’s only that tuition for incoming students will be the same as last year’s incoming – everyone else was already, in effect, frozen) but state expenditures are going to be down something like 20%. The result? Deferred maintenance, limited facility repair, etc. . .
^^ For good reasons, when it comes to Accounting, only the University of Texas offers a better program than UIUC.
Chinese students, coming to the US for high school (and even middle school), is a growing trend.
http://news.yahoo.com/chinese-seek-freedom-edge-us-high-schools-054532113.html
@IJustDrive:
Or enroll more full-pay OOS&international students.
Or increase OOS tuition even more.
“Actually, full-pay students are more likely to give back than those on FA/scholarships as the latter are more likely to have financial constraints even after graduating on average than full-pay students.”
That’s part of the reason that FA students give less to their alma maters. They are also less likely to experience the glowing nostalgia that richer students do. Many of them are happy and have good experiences in college, but their life there is harder, and they don’t necessarily look back on it as this paradise that was the highlight of their lives. That translates into less giving.
Interesting choice of 2 elite colleges as Beijing and Harvard aren’t places topflight engineering/CS firms in Mainland China or to some extent, even here would seek out first.
Like Harvard, Beijing’s strengths among Mainland Chinese college students/employers are mainly associated with the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences including Mathematics. Only difference is Harvard’s natural sciences are much stronger on average and it’s pouring much money to improve its engineering school so it isn’t as much a “neglected stepchild of FAS” as it was perceived by a HS classmate who regretted turning down admissions to schools like MIT during her undergrad years in the mid-late '90s.
However, I’d doubt many Mainland Chinese or even overseas engineering/tech firms would be turning down eager graduates from Tsinghua or Shanghai Jiaotong Us…two elite universities with long established strengths in the engineering/technological sciences.
This is also underscored by several Mainland Chinese friends who are alums of Beijing and Tsinghua. One had a joke about how fresh alums from Tsinghua go into engineering, technology, and government bureaucracy jobs whereas the ones from Bei-da graduate into a prison cell for political activism or being much more likely to do/say something at odds with CCP orthodoxy.
IL needs the International $$ -
Yeah, well, you are wrong.
By the way, technology companies don’t only hire technology graduates.
I wonder if your friends are even trying to give you a fair picture of the situation …
Well, friends can be ethereal or simply not real.
This sounds like the nickname for UBC - University of a Billion Chinese 
“No, American society is nowhere near as stratified by university background. That’s silly. The majority of people in upper middle class lifestyles went to “average state universities” or are in fields where a college degree isn’t all that relevant or important - for example, running successful car dealerships, or retail stores, or a local chain of restaurants.”
“That sounds just like China to me. In both countries, access to the very top tier of power is essentially limited to those who went to one of maybe ten institutions.”
I explicitly said “upper middle class lifestyles,” not “top tiers of power.” But no matter. I fully stand by what I say. The 1% is NOT uniformly comprised of people who went to this-particular-handful-of-schools. I gather by your screen name that you are not familiar with American society.
This is anyway a very good description of China today.
Something that is hard for some to accept or understand.
Sorghum,
Also, the companies near your central Chinese region may not want to hire folks from top tier institutions away from their local area because of concerns they won’t get many recruits or those who are hired will use them as a stepping stone for a more desirable job back in the more desirable urban Chinese East coastal areas.
It’s a practice not very different from some American companies where they prefer hiring someone who is local to a given area or has close ties(e.g. through marriage/family) because they want to avoid the new hire using them as a stepping stone to land a better job in a popular metropolis like NYC or San Francisco.
Understandable considering most folks who are able to gain admission to colleges in cities like Shanghai and Beijing aren’t likely to eagerly work in what they’d consider a relative backwater regions…especially if it’s in a more rural area.
This is moreso for students who came from backwater regions or rural areas who manage to gain admission to elite urban universities in the Chinese East Coast. Most who succeed either opt to stay and work in those cities or go overseas for grad/school work as both are considered greater markers of success.
It’s one factor in why many rural villages are practically depopulated of everyone except seniors and in some cases, extremely young children:
http://ripr.org/post/chinas-villages-are-dying-new-film-asks-if-they-can-be-saved
So how many Chinese undergrads are there at UBC? That article makes it sound that UIUC and UBC are very similar demographically…
McGill, on the other hand, can only be affected so much because they still have to respect the university-wide 50%+1 rule…
:)) Major provincial cities are not depopulated. The population of Chongqing is 30 million. There is a lot of money to be made in cities like that. Many students, even after going Beijing and Shanghai, do like to come home, at least to their own province.
The main reason not to favor “folks from top tier institutions” is that for 99% of companies, they don’t need them and won’t benefit from them. Most upper middle class life comes from financing, designing, manufacturing, packaging and marketing widgets. Not from being a civil servant in Beijing.
Just like America.
Also, the prevailing culture among technology companies and even senior government positions in Mainland China is such they have a strong preference for only hiring engineering/technology majors, even for non-engineering/tech jobs.
Part of this is due to companies and jobs becoming much more technologically centered and the perception among employers that engineer/tech majors are among the “most intelligent” as demand for such majors has become such one needs to score high on the gaokao to get into a highly desirable major for that major in addition to getting into a given university*.
Another part of it is a form of “me too-ism” as many recent political leaders were engineering majors such as Jiang Zemin(Shanghai Jiaotong EE), Hu Jintao(Tsinghua Water Conservancy Engineering), and to some extent Xi Jinping (Tsinghua U ChemE**). Same with many high profile self-made millionaires/billionaires.
- One's gaokao score not only determines which college one ends up at, but also the major/department one is allowed to study in. This illustrates one serious issue with such an application system. If you're strong in a highly popular major with many majors, but score too low on the gaokao, you may end up attending a university with a major mismatched to your talents/aspirations. This is the same situation in other East Asian societies such as Japan, South Korea, and the ROC(Taiwan) This is another factor which has driven some South Koreans and ROC folks for decades and now more upper-middle class Mainlanders to do undergrad overseas.
** Xi attended during a period when universities were still effectively shut down and heavily politicized due to the Chinese Cultural Revolution so the quality of his undergrad education wasn’t as strong as those of his predecessors or those who attended Chinese universities after 1979.
You mean to say that the FA students’ out-of-class time is more likely (for example) to be spent working the concession to earn money at the football game rather than paying to watch the football game?
That exists in the US, though in a more limited fashion. Capacity may be limited relative to student interest in some majors, such as nursing, so that only the most competitive applicants (whether directly from high school or in the first/second year of college) are allowed into the major.
UIUC’s student body is 14% international. That’s higher than before, but consider that Harvard is 11% international and I don’t see articles of Harvard being overrun by international students.