True. UIUC’s explicit mission is to serve the tax paying people of IL, so maybe that’s why it’s more notable.
Part of it is likely to be due to perceptions that state Us like UIUC have a primary mission of educating its residents so 14% international may seem a lot whereas Harvard’s status as a private university with a worldwide draw won’t draw as much condemnation.
In fact, having many international students can actually be a positive draw for many elite U applicants.
I’ve been hearing similar things about Rutgers’ high in-state tuition as a factor many NJ residents within the last several years are flocking to NY state and City colleges.
Several new younger friends are NJ residents who have opted to attend CUNY colleges like Baruch or Hunter because even as OOS, it’s still cheaper than attending Rutgers or other NJ colleges at in-state rates.
@Pizzagirl, true, though these days, the tax-paying people of IL are funding only a small percentage of UIUC’s budget.
Nope, there are many good majors in China, and many ways to aspire to an upper middle class life style.
Most publics today are NOT state funded. They are at best state-assisted. How much control should they get for their 10-20% funding is a fair question. Tuition revenue now exceeds state funding in many cases.
How much control? Since the state owns all of the assets and everyone is an employee of the state(see more below), then I would say a lot. The state is also funding more than the “direct approbations” as seen in the budgets.
Page 9, in the following document, shows the FY 2015 budget for UIUC.
https://www.obfs.uillinois.edu/common/pages/DisplayFile.aspx?itemId=99447
Most of the “unrestricted” funds are direct approbations and Tuition (the “income fund”). What makes the DA appear smaller, as a % of the budget, are the restricted funds, like research grants. The university has limited ability to direct allocation of restricted funds. A research grant to study the corn weevil has to be spent on studying the corn weevil.
A HUGE cost, not included in these “university level” budgets, are “State Payments on Behalf of the University”. These funds are appropriations to the State Universities Retirement System (SURS) to pay the employer’s contribution to SURS and to the Department of Healthcare and Family Services to pay a portion of the cost of providing health insurance to employees paid from state and selected restricted funds. The FY 2015 budget was estimated at $1,123.6 million.
If you look at the overall UI system budget (page 2), the overall budget is $5.6 Billion, $2.1 B is unrestricted funds (mostly DA and Tuition/fees), $2.4 Billion is restricted (research grants, hospital revenue, etc.) and $1.1 Billion is the “State Payments on Behalf” for the retirement system and health insurance.
We saw this trend first hand when we took GMTson2 around for visits/interviews at east coast boarding schools. The admissions waiting rooms were FULL of families from China.
GMT, were the children /parents fluent enough in English to be viable?
Not saying there’s not.
After all, they also have self-made millionaires who never went to college or sometimes even high school. However, they had an abundance of other advantages which counteracted that ranging from natural entrepreneurial talents to having and taking much advantage of strong connections with local/regional and/or national CCP officials*…sometimes to dubious extremes.
- Including military connections. Many self-made million/billionaires cultivated and maintained links gained from their military service in the PLA in their youth and parlayed that into their later financial success. Incidentally, the PLA has become so notorious for focusing so much attention on money-making enterprises that its associated corruption has prompted the CCP to order the PLA to divest itself of them and focus on its main mission of military preparedness.
Now you are reinforcing just how similar it is to the US.
Except that
- Most of those types of self-made millionaires have had cozy ties to the PLA due to their military service.
- Unlike the US military, the PLA was until recently directly involved starting up, running, or partnering up in business and moneymaking ventures and is so heavily involved that corruption and serious concerns by CCP leadership about its military readiness have been publicly implied. For all its problems, the US government and military have policies and practices to prevent such issues from getting nearly as bad as the case with the PLA.
- There's a cloud of suspicion hanging over their heads about whether such corruption played a large part in their financial success due to such close connections to the PLA and their using it for all its worth in both aboveboard and not-so-aboveboard ways.
“Most” is a gross exaggeration, in fact it is simply wrong. You don’t seem to have grasp of how big China is, and how many diverse (and usually fairly honest) ways there are to make money.
Considering widespread corruption, especially in local and provincial governments and in the PLA have become so extensive even the central CCP government has issued public calls and initiated a public anti-corruption campaign for a while, making an honest living to the point of being a millionaire/billionaire as a Mainland Chinese citizen…especially one with no connections is exceedingly difficult.
At best, you will need to deal with officials demanding bribes or favors. At worst, you could be persecuted on trumped up and not-so-trumped up charges. This has happened even with international businesspeople from Western Countries like the US…and they have many more advantages and protections due to their citizenship and foreign diplomatic services than the average Chinese citizen.
For instance, this case:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-american-businessman-released-from-china/
Reading between the lines, this was very much the usual company with stronger connections with local/provincial officials using them and their power to stomp its unconnected business rival.
Sorghum lives in China. You don’t.
Indeed, @cobrat, I know you like to go on about China, but as a keenly interested observer myself, I would say that your perspective often seems second-hand or dated.
To me, the difference between the US and China is mostly one of degree*. China is like the Wild West now. It’s a stage that different parts of the US went through at different points in time. Including the Wild West but also the Robber Baron era back east (when Rockefeller was blowing/buying up competitors and Vanderbilt would rather ruin a man than sue him because the law was too slow). Read “The Jungle” and take a gander at the stuff that went on back then.
- The big difference is that China still is a Communist autocracy.
I agree with most of the parallels. However, one major difference between the US and Mainland Chinese cases was there wasn’t the degree of use of one’s connection to the US military and using it to facilitate wealth building to the degree it exists with many Chinese self-made millionaires…especially those without HS/college educations or higher.
Interestingly, in much of that equivalent time period in US history, the US military and its budget was downsized after the Civil War to a peacetime force that was less than 60,000 at its peak which didn’t increase until the Spanish-American War and the expansion it entailed for the war itself, the Philippine-American War, and the occupation of Cuba, Phillippines, and other former Spanish possessions. The US military also wasn’t directly involved in starting up, partnering, or running money-making ventures/businesses to the same degree the PLA has been doing…and to the degree they were recently given an implicit edict by Xi Jinping to focus more on military preparedness.
The US military was also nowhere near as influential in government and national policy to the degree the PLA has been since the very founding of the CCP state.
A non-sequitur considering most staunch defenders and denialists working on behalf of the CCP in the “50 cent party” also live in China.
Moreover, many people living in or working on behalf of similarly or more starkly highly authoritarian societies…say North Korea aren’t as likely to be forthcoming about the society’s shortcomings because it could affect their livelihoods and moreso, their freedom.
Especially considering Xi Jinping’s administration has been tightening up regulation of such institutions and cracking down on dissent:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/30/china-repression-dissent-xi-jinping
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/29/us-china-universities-idUSKBN0K70TI20141229
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-25/xi-jinpings-dreaming-of-a-red-christmas
Bringing it back onto this topic, this tightening of control over Mainland Chinese universities is likely another reason many Chinese families who can afford it are sending their children to US.
“Bringing it back onto this topic, this tightening of control over Mainland Chinese universities is likely another reason many Chinese families who can afford it are sending their children to US.”
Well, the lack of hope of the future in a country run by an authoritarian Communist government (and lack of certainty engendered by such) may have more to do with it.
@LucieTheLakie - off topic, but I just have to know:
Is that a wheaten terrier in your profile pic?
Awww!
I wonder about the social dynamics on campus between the mainland Chinese students and the Chinese-American students.
In conversations w ethnic Chinese colleagues worldwide, I find that mainlanders are generally not liked by the chinese diaspora. I observe this first-hand in my trips to Hong Kong and other cities in Asia.
^^^Interesting question. At UIUC, about 15% of the undergraduates are Asian, while 15% are non-residents (mostly Chinese).