All in all, one gets the feeling that, while all those Chinese students aren't going to suddenly go home, the big enrollment increases are probably over. Then again, one might have thought that three or four years ago, too -- and been totally wrong.
This piece contains minimal data + analysis, and no real argument or opinion. It's just a blog thinkpiece with a clickbaity/controversial title. Don't waste your time.
The only issue I have with Chinese students is how acceptable cheating seems to be in their culture. Obviously this isn't true for all Chinese students, but it is wide spread enough that my parents (Professors who teach grad classes in physics and oceanography) say that you can't trust the standardized test results of Chinese students because there is a good chance they cheated.
This applies to many "model minorities" that aren't form Western countries. I've heard the same thing about people from India and Russia/Eastern Europe.
From my experience Indians (and practically everyone else, except the Chinese who cheat everywhere) only really cheat once they get into college. The Chinese probably cheat because English qualifications are really difficult for them.
But YMMV. It's really pointless to point fingers. Americans cheat by abusing ADHD drugs, heck there's a shortage in most states and a $20 prescription (~20 pills) goes for $20 a pill on the street.
And really, everyone is racist. It's practically innate. It's going to take a while to get over this. I mean as animals we always distrust those who are different from us. Some are just more expressive of there racism than others
abusing adhd drugs is not the same as cheating. A person who uses ritalin to study still knows the material at the end of the day. A person who cheats does not!
you are missing the point. Cheating is bad because a degree is supposed to be a guarantee of a certain level of knowledge about a subject. People who use medication to study have that knowledge, people who cheat do not. Is using drugs to study fair? No. But that isn't what I am arguing.
Not only are the Chinese students crowding out qualified Americans from the few top spots in some of the world's best universities, it is a well-known fact to the FBI that Chinese (and other foreign) intelligence agencies recruit citizens studying in the US to steal research information that the hackers in Shanghai can't as easily get from afar.
My father was a researcher for a major university for decades. He fought tooth-and-nail for every dollar in grant money he could get to create the knowledge that underpins the basic electronics that run our devices. And he would get tens of thousands of hacking attempts from China every single day.
He also spent years building a hardware test environment, and a Chinese grad student that worked in the same lab took the designs and replicated them in China for a tenth of the cost - all without as much as a decent thank you.
But the Chinese pay full price so the few American students who can get in save a little on tuition, so it's all ok.
Their point stands. The Chinese government is a bad actor with a history of tapping university students for industrial espionage. Their population also dwarfs ours which could justify some concern about American students being "crowded out."
Yes, yes I am. The Chinese government is completely complicit with the information robbery campaign that they have waged for decades. They don't give two fucks about the trials and tribulations necessary to create knowledge as long as they can steal it and make it for cheap.
Am I blaming the average Chinese citizen? No.
But the Chinese government IS composed of millions of people, who are either complicit (in that the information stolen benefits them directly or the local businesses whose growth helps the bureaucrat's rankings) or actively working to steal every byte of information that American researchers worked damn hard to create.
And before anyone comes back with the predictable "but America stole information to grow their economy in the 19th century too!" response, first tell me why abundant land, natural resources, and immigrants weren't as big a factor, unless you seriously think forging steel is as significant as manufacturing high-precision electronics.
Well, if its ok for USA to do Industrial Espionage (see Echelon programm), I don't see how it is wrong for Chinise to do the same to get economic advantage. You Reap What You Sow.
It is one thing to have a total surveillance program for the purposes of national security. Every reason exists to do so.
However, I believe that one must either commit to being despicable and brazenly stealing industry secrets to benefit one's own nation's, or to keep those secrets within the confines of intelligence agencies.
Now - and this is where ethics get a bit fuzzy - one could very easily argue that economic advantages allow one nation to enrich itself at the impoverishment of others, and so it is a long-term matter of national security to ensure that national economies are "topped off" with secrets that help them compete against foreign corporations.
But to follow that line of thinking, industrial espionage is an act of war.
Did your father publish the research and try to keep the hardware test environment secret? If not, and the research was proprietary for companies, that is messed up. Otherwise, graduate students leaving and taking their work with them, as well as experiences and knowledge from the research they provided during their time as students is pretty par for the course. It's a two way street, your father provided funding, the student provided labor in return for education. After you're done, you don't just leave that research in your adviser's lab, you often build on it at either a postdoc or professorship, in return for citations and a working relationship.
So we just declare our research labs "safe spaces" to keep them out. And if any Chinese student complains we deflect by accusing them of cultural appropriation for wearing clothes from the Gap.
From the related thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12015388
"In today's digital world, it appears to be a virtual certainty that computers accessing the Internet can—and eventually will—be hacked."
=>
"In today's education world, it appears to be a virtual certainty that research information from countries which allow foreign students can—and eventually will—be stolen."
An open source information treaty might solve the problem. Share info between overlapping projects and GPL the resulting IP, publish in an open journal. Everyone saves money on research and hacking.
Let's not blame Chinese learners for the US's political refusal to provide free university education. And when the US was developing, it notoriously thieved intellectual property, to Charles Dickens' dismay. (Because that's how you develop.)
What we could do it triple the cost for each Chinese, and give two Americans citizens a free ride. Does socialism only work one way? Right->Left?
This article ignore a few opinions/facts:
1. Chinese are taught the US is their enemy, and that they should come here to learn our strenghts and weaknesses and take them back to China.
2. Chinese poeple have a history of stealing intellectual property through universities and everywhere else. The lack of moral and ethical judgement is stunning and sad.
3. Chinese have manipulated their currency including tieing it do the dollar, which is on par with just printing fake money for your citizens. Therefore citizens are now 'new rich', and can afford to buy what hard-working citizens of other countries can't because their countries don't manipulate their currencies.
4. US lets in anyone willing to pay in cash, mostly. Anchor babies, investment citizenship, expedited services for the wealthy, etc.
5. US has race quotas as a legal precendent, where the universities can set the amount of Asians, etc that are accepted, regardless of qualifications. Not up to par? Who cares, let them in, they got the cash...
6. US has the best colleges in the world, and has for some time. Do you think the Chinese want to study in Tibet?
This is ridiculous. Racial quotas in American universities select against Chinese people in favour of on average less-capable whites. One of the more noxious examples of modern racism is the fact that the ivies have much higher standards for Asain students than for any other race. Basicly a reply of the 1930s Jewish quotas.
Espenshade and Chung found that African-American and Hispanic applicants would see their acceptance rates go down noticeably if affirmative action were ended:
> According to the study, without affirmative action the acceptance rate for African-American candidates likely would fall nearly two-thirds, from 33.7 percent to 12.2 percent, while the acceptance rate for Hispanic applicants likely would be cut in half, from 26.8 percent to 12.9 percent.
White students' numbers wouldn't be affected much, but 4/5s of the "missing" African-American and Hispanic students would be "replaced" by Asian students:
> Removing consideration of race would have little effect on white students, the report concludes, as their acceptance rate would rise by merely 0.5 percentage points. Espenshade noted that when one group loses ground, another has to gain -- in this case it would be Asian applicants. Asian students would fill nearly four out of every five places in the admitted class not taken by African-American and Hispanic students, with an acceptance rate rising from nearly 18 percent to more than 23 percent. Typically, many more Asian students apply to elite schools than other underrepresented minorities. The study also found that although athletes and legacy applicants are predominantly white, their numbers are so small that their admissions do little to displace minority applicants.
>Espenshade and Chung found that African-American and Hispanic applicants would see their acceptance rates go down noticeably if affirmative action were ended
I care about fostering merit more than equality of outcome. Lowing standards for emotional reasons isn't something I care about, or even think is moral.
Considering performance after acceptance it's actually reasonable. The best performing group at most Ivy's is poor white students. If anything they are far to open to questionable metrics.
PS: Rich white students tend to do far worse at school, but look better at admittance and do better after graduation.
Having trouble locating sources, I heard it from a collage professors. But, from what I recall it works something like this.
Poor students are vastly less likely to have motivated parents that push and pay for activity's to look good on collage applications. If test prep can add 100 points to a standardized test and two students both have the same score but only one did test prep then the other likely has higher innate intelligence.
After the first year innate intelligence makes up a larger role than pre-collage preparations for students motivated enough to get into an Ivy.
After school social networks play a larger roll in success than small gaps in innate intelligence. Richer students tend to form more valuable social networks.
While I can't agree/disagree with you points due to the lack of evidence, I was curious to see who did best at Ivies. I felt it would be Indians/Americans of Indian origin. Probably biased because I fall into that category :P
You can justify any bias in such an ad-hoc manner. Rich students might to better because they had better preparation. (Which I had heard but I discount in the absence of evidence.)
Some subjects like math are less subjective. The gentleman's C is an old concept with a range of meanings. But, there has been a long history of students who don't really need to learn anything at collage. However, they greatly benefit from connecting to their peers.
That seems like a non-sequitor. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough but I was saying you are making your claims without any data, but you were relying on the personal observations of a professor.
I think chinese have moral and ethical judgement, its just that their culture has other values of what is moral or ethical. I think Intellectual Property is the creation of the Western Culture, do not expect everyone to accept it, or at least not in the form the West uses it. I emigrated to Europe from Russia so I think I understand them a bit more. I remember the times when you had nothing to eat in the 90's, because you had no money or better to say that the money lost value too fast. It was insane to spend it on "Intellectual Property". You can steal food, but how can you steal IP? I am sorry, it just doesn't feel real to me, no matter the amount of propaganda.
On the other hand I understand, if you use software without paying the developer, he will have nothing to eat too, so I pay for it, its just no property there that changes hands.
Also US manipulate their currency too, like take more debt and print more money.
I think your post is very one sided and I dont feel any pity. I mean US sells places in their universities to the highest bidder and then you complain that the highest bidder is you competition?
Where in the article does it state how Chinese students are saving our Colleges?
I would expect the most populous country to send the most people to the US for education. Especially one with a rising middle and elite class. The only thing that's holding India back is the poverty, middle class isn't growing as fast as China. Most Indian immigrants I've met here already have degrees.
Of these students, 974,000 or about 1 in 20 (round it to 5%) is a foreign student.
The important thing about foreign students is that, except for a few cases of truly spectacular talent, they pay full freight and effectively subsidized US students.
Now of those 974,000, about 1 in 3, or about 300,000 are of Chinese origin.
That is about just under 2%. I hardly consider that crowding out US students.
(Please also note that some US students who go to China and learn from their schools, though I assume this is tiny.)
So in terms of fear of "crowding", I think this is overblown.
In terms of taking IP over to China, its important to understand that the vast majority of this IP is free stuff that anyone can learn. We are talking about math and science up to the graduate level.
When you talk about the truly advanced PhD level stuff, well they are "stealing" it, but they also "create" it by working on experiments, interacting with other people, and so on. They contribute it as much as they "steal" it. At least, in my experience, you can't really learn at the PhD level without engaging other people.
So if someone here believes the Chinese government has a secret plan to send over their best and brightest to toil for years in top academic institutions and take back the knowledge they helped create, all I can say is: this plan is going to backfire and help the US as much as anyone.
I think the reason behind the glut is that India and China greatly outnumber US populations 4:1, while number of universities in China is only roughly 2:1, and India, it is about 2:5.
i thought this would be about studying. walking the campus of usc (univ of southern calif) i was struck by the shocking physical and psychological divide between the asian students, huddled in the library, versus the white students attending what looked to be an on-campus rave in the middle of the quad. the former representing the new kind of usc student, the latter representing the greek / legacy / party stereotype of yesterday's usc. note that usc's academics have skyrocketed in the past decade and my theory is that it is on the backs of new students from asia that is propping up those SAT / matriculation rates, while simultaneously dragging along the detritus of the legacy old guard.
Chinese students are spending time and money to learn and take knowledge back to China. Meanwhile, kids in USA are wondering if college/education is worth it.
Well, that is if you study something useless like art history, sociology, media, communications or english literature. I laugh whenever I come across someone who's spent thousands of dollars going to university to study english.
Well, if you studied engineering, science, medicine, accounting or law. You'll eventually probably make good money. If you can't land a job in the US, you can go abroad and your American degree will be valuable in other countries just for the fact that you studied in the US.
There is a huge glut in some of the sciences. I'll only speak to Biology/Life Sciences, since that's what my degree is in, but I would say well over 50% of graduates, including myself, don't end up working in the field. The jobs I got, and could get, in the Bay Area, were right about in the $34k/year range (and that was for someone fortunate enough to have multiple years of research experience).
Spending a few more years in school and taking on more debt to get a graduate degree might have helped, but I make as much or more now doing IT work than most of the people I know who have Masters degrees in the field.
All in all, one gets the feeling that, while all those Chinese students aren't going to suddenly go home, the big enrollment increases are probably over. Then again, one might have thought that three or four years ago, too -- and been totally wrong.
This piece contains minimal data + analysis, and no real argument or opinion. It's just a blog thinkpiece with a clickbaity/controversial title. Don't waste your time.