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Does US Owe the World an Education At Its Expense?
An anonymous reader writes "'Right now, there are brilliant students from all over the world sitting in classrooms at our top universities,' President Obama explained to the nation Tuesday in his pitch for immigration reform. 'They are earning degrees in the fields of the future, like engineering and computer science...We are giving them the skills to figure that out, but then we are going to turn around and tell them to start the business and create those jobs in China, or India, or Mexico, or someplace else. That is not how you grow new industries in America. That is how you give new industries to our competitors. That is why we need comprehensive immigration reform." If the President truly fears that international students will use skills learned at U.S. colleges and universities to the detriment of the United States if they return home (isn't a rising tide supposed to lift all boats?) — an argument NYC Mayor Bloomberg advanced in 2011 ('we are investing millions of dollars [actually billions] to educate these students at our leading universities, and then giving the economic dividends back to our competitors – for free') — then wouldn't another option be not providing them with the skills in the first place?"
in France. :)
They come, study, get a diploma...
And go away
For all that time, free university, free medical expenses...
F*ck socialism, it killed my country.
Oh, wait, we do.
For every immigrant that comes over here, we send the "donor" country back one of our citizens. We get an engineer, and they get a TV talk show host or a Senator. Seems like a good trade to me.
-- MyLongNickName
Yes and here's a freebie
Does the US Owe the World an Education At Its Expense?
I think paying in the order of $10k dollars a year in tuition, then additional injections of cash to the local economy in housing and sustenance hardly counts as free...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CollegeTuitionsUsCanada1940to2000.png
Do you have any idea how empty that would leave our campuses? (Not to mention our faculty offices ...)
BTW: I teach at University level.
Just a cursory fact check should inform the "editors" of this article that international students are cash cows in many universities and actually keep many colleges open.
Ironically the burden is directly the other way around. International students help fund the programs that local residents benefit from.
Wait... the end of the summary and the subject line have the opposite meaning... I see what you did there....
Yes.
The money would be better spent educating the hundreds of millions of people already here. We're barely in the top 20, now in terms of average intelligence.
How many people in your neighbourhood can tell you how to spell neighborhood?
Why not place a tax on providing education to non-US citizens, whether residing international or domestic, and earmark that tax toward an appropriate program of creating scholarships earned by merit by US citizens. Just saying.
Yes. A very stupid option, but, yes, it is another option.
"If the President truly fears that..."
He fears no such thing, the man is a serial liar and is speaking only that which he believes will advance his cause; allowing more illegals to enter the country and become Democrat voters, this is truly all they want.
How about funding school for kids in our own country who test high enough. My broke ass parents couldn't pay for school and now I have to sit and watch idiots go to college for bullshit degrees.
I could take an $80,000 loan and let sallie mae rape me for 10 years... No thanks.
The best way to avoid a fight with someone is to be friends with them. The first step in becoming friends with someone is actually meeting them.
Competition between international businesses is much preferable to war between nations.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
The idiot solution is "stop training them"
That approach only perpetuates the severe labor shortage for highly skilled workers.
The smart solution is "encourage them to stay once they graudate"
For example, provide a simple path to citizenship for US-educated graduates, at least in high-demand subject areas.
Another idea - since foreigners pay much more for tuition (you knew that, right?) offer them refunds on some or all of the cost differential, payable as a small annuity over several years *after* they become a citizen.
The dumbest thing you could possibly do is the current state: train them, then kick them out. Yeah, bright.
So you won't have those who chose to stay. Problems solved indeed!
I didn't realize anybody was we saying owe international students anything.
In fact a lot of universities encourage international students because they owe full tuition.
The way this submission is crafted invites a flame war, but ok, let's tackle it.
The submitter is evidently not aware that the vast majority of international students pay full freight and then some when they attend a US school. So, in the small picture, that's why US universities market to them, at a time when US students are having difficulty ponying up (for a variety of reasons), and state legislatures are cutting funding for the public institutions.
Bigger picture, yes, we're educating the competition, but we're also familiarizing the next world elite with US culture much as the British used to, making the world ever more US-centric. Given the economics for the schools, believe me, these students are going to come. So, we might as well make it easier for them to stay AFTER we've educated them, and thus allow them to add value to the US (culturally, economically) over the long run. If we create the brains, why encourage them drain back out into the world?
Luke, help me take this mask off
Two problems with this outlook:
1. It misses the benefits of having foreign students in the US, and having our own students exposes to students from other countries without needing to travel (so those who can't afford the time/money to travel still get more exposure). These benefits are far reaching. If we became a country with world class universities closed off to non citizens - we'd rapidly feel a diplomatic bite, and face more insidious harm long term.
2. A college education is more than just job training, and the perspective and growth it provides are only allocated to a small portion of the populace. We need to be talking about making college as universal, free, and affordable (for society) as high school. Then we'll see some real progress.
Loads of brilliant people who've gotten educated overseas move to the US. Their home countries have "paid" for their education. The US benefits, it goes both ways.
Lets change things around: When a brilliant highly educated person moves to the US - they US should have to pay that person's home country.
What silliness.
Obama is playing longball. By doing it Obama's way it's a two-fer because we would drain the smartest and most motivated from our competitors and then use them in *our* workforce.
Think of it in evolution terms as injecting new competitive genes into the genepool.
They are earning degrees in the fields of the future, like engineering and computer science
If we're talking about degrees from competitive universities, then this indicates a failure of US students to compete for those opportunities.
If we're talking about degrees from non-competitive universities, who cares if they go back home?
You can't blame foreigners for our own failures in high school education and promoting a culture of learning.
The current situation does inure some benefits to the U.S., but in not easily measurable ways which is why they're not talked about all that much.
My observations when I was a college student was that international students would gain a perspective on the U.S., Americans, our life, and our culture which was different from what they expected when they first arrived. I assume when they went back home that this new perspective would cause them to evaluate their own local press and government statements about the U.S. in light of their first-hand experiences and knowledge. I had lab partners from Saudi Arabia, Ghana, and mainland China, all of whom I was able to talk with about perspectives and impressions of the U.S., and I have no doubt that each of them had a more nuanced and healthier view of the U.S. after having lived here.
If you want to stabilize relations with China and various Muslim areas of the world I think we'd be well served to invite far more of their students to study here so that when they go back home they can correct the thinking of their friends and family. Likewise the Americans who have a chance to study with them will realize that by and large "people are people", dispelling the simplistic "us versus them" mindset we seem to be afflicted with.
Cyrano de Maniac
Should be "Does WE owe the world an education?"
If you ask it this way: "Does US Owe the World an Education At Its Expense?"
No.
Perhaps there are other ways of looking at it ...
Jobs are created in foreign countries because 1) THEY ARE CHEAPER!! Anyone remember when HP (under carly fiorina) fired 30,000 programmers who made an average of $75K per year and outsourced to India at $400 / month! Do the math! 2) Intellectual Property - China respects no IP laws. They take, steal, replicate and sell back to us and we look the other way. also the parasitic nature of copyright trolls in the US is killing business innovation. 3) Environmental Laws - The US doesn't have or tolerate people bathing and washing clothes in rivers with decomposing dead bodies floating as a common occurrence, nor do we have community outhouses hanging over these public waterways like India. China is seeing a spike in illness because of large portions of the country have become toxic. We have laws that make manufacturing more expensive by not polluting. 4) Health Care - the rest of the WORLD has state health care. In the US companies flip the bill for a bloated, inefficient and horrible system. One that rates near the bottom of the industrial world and grows at 17% annually in cost. Bottom line is it's not a talent shortage or education shortage. The above listed items create an unfair playing field that should - SHOULD - be balanced with tariffs. Talking about amnesty or HB1’s will NOT solve the problems. .
If you want to go the "does $country owe the world an education at its expense" way, certainly you would also want to discuss if foreign professors, scientists and technicians should be educating the US and giving US citizens the tools to start businesses elsewhere. After all, those professors, scientists and technicians happen to have been educated elsewhere, at other taxpayer's expenses, and now the US is benefitting from this brain drain caused by its (formerly) strong economy.
International students are the ones that are paying full price for our universities, and they're the ones that keep our universities funded.
Universities court international students like it was nobody else's business.
A good part of the US GDP can be traced to actually selling higher-level education to international students. Consider that each international student brings in $50k+ to the US GDP, and multiply that by the number of students per year. It's easily a bigger industry than Hollywood.
I'm surprised that Government doesn't allow more sales of education to international students. Our economy could use that money.
Foreign money really does grow an economy. Consider also that in the 90's, the immigration door was wide open. Millions of people came to America. Now consider that each one needs to buy a house, at $100k+ each... you could pretty much explain the incredible GDP growth back in the 90's by our open border policy back then, and you saw how it hit our economy when we closed the borders after 9/11.
Maybe instead of standing in the way of entrepreneurs (no matter where they're from) why not remove as many obstacles as possible from business start-ups? Maybe an "incentive visa" for starting a company and hiring Americans, with a fast track to citizenship?
Why does "immigration reform" always mean "making illegals legal by fiat"?
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
FUCK YEAH! US #1-o motherfucker, fuck yeah fuck yeah fuck yeah fuck yeah fuck yeah! Were the most edjucated tops beat that you socialisst Europusies! Lol
Posted from my iPhone fuck yeah!
If the President truly fears that international students will use skills learned at U.S. colleges and universities to the detriment of the United States if they return home ... then wouldn't another option be not providing them with the skills in the first place?
It is if you think less education and less freedom in the world is a good thing.
Why wouldn't we want to fill our country (speaking as an American) and thus surround ourselves with smart and motivated people? Would we not all be better off? I feel like there's a degree of protectionism inherent in the question, which is fine (who really wants to compete with smart and motivated people?), but probably a bad idea as far as raising the standard of living is concerned.
There's a separate argument somewhere in there about the growing wealth disparity in America not translating into a rising standard of living for everyone, but that's a different fight...
Sorta related to this point, though, is: why assume that these people *want* to stay? Don't they have the option of returning to their home countries if they so choose? Wouldn't retaining them also prompt the USA to try and become a more attractive place to live in general? If they're worth keeping here, aren't they that much more valuable to their home countries?
Keeping and retaining smart, motivated people means that the country as a whole gets better, for everybody. We should strive to do this and welcome people who want to be a part of making this happen.
C
Bob, I'd like to bid.... *looks over* I'd like to bid... 205!
'They are earning degrees in the fields of the future, like engineering and computer science...We are giving them the skills to figure that out, but then we are going to turn around and tell them to start the business and create those jobs in China, or India, or Mexico, or someplace else. That is not how you grow new industries in America. That is how you give new industries to our competitors.
My apologies, Republicans.
This man is completely clueless .
Easier paths to citizenship isn't going to make these students stay in the US when they have no intention of doing so, and taking in wheelbarrows full of money from foreign students in exchange for education isn't stopping any American from getting a degree.
Dear Obama: If you want to drive American business, start looking at the insanity of taxes (small and mid-sized businesses get crushed while megacorps who can offshore and have foreign subsidiaries loophole themselves out of the situation) and the cost of our education system itself (which has nothing to do with foreigners).
It's our competitive advantage that the best and brightest young people from all over the world want to come to the USA to study. It helps us to brain drain the rest of the world for our own benefit. We should do more to keep these people in the USA when they graduate. Most want to stay. Even in cases where they do go back to their own countries, we gain soft diplomacy by exporting our way of life to other parts of the world.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
and you people claimed bush was dumb... sheesh.
They are earning degrees in the fields of the future, like engineering and computer science...We are giving them the skills to figure that out, ...
Mayor Bloomberg advanced in 2011 ('we are investing millions of dollars [actually billions] to educate these students at our leading universities, ...
Giving? Seems like they're paying us, investing in our universities, to study and earn their education. They pay for a service/product US universities are providing. Isn't that how Capitalism works? Sure, we could provide them access to our educational system, but who's going to pay the schools then?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
That title smacks of American dick waving. As usual.
Owe? What are you talking about? Smarter candidates are coming and taking the positions of American students fairly, and then taking their FAIRLY WON education and leaving.
What's the problem?
Seems like everyone is implying that US Citizens are too dump to do STEM so we have to train non-US citizens to do the work? I don't see alot of talk of helping US Citizens in getting a STEM degree (financially or otherwise). All I keep hearing is that somehow US Citizens are generally to lazy or dumb so they have to go somewhere else to get smart people. I'm a Ph.D student in a CS program where over half of my fellow grad students are non-US citizens. I'm doing well in the program but feel like I'm going to be looked on by future employers as too dumb because of my citizenship. Also, unlike many non-US citizens who get scholarships, I can only get more loans (fellowships and scholarships being too hard to obtain) and a Teaching Assistantship which eats into my study/research time. I'm staring at possibility of being saddled with over $100,000 in loans to pay off and not particularly liking it. It's too bad no one interested in advocating for helping out US citizens getting STEM degrees.
When they have no future in their native countries due to lack of education, they can turn their skills to violence, criminal activity and terrorism. We can then spend the billions used to educate and spread "OUR CORE" values peacefully to other countries on defense contractors. Fly drones and blow them up them up at home. Thus our economy grows and we keep our values right where they belong, here is the good ol US. Makes sense to me and very Progressive. BHO is making me ashamed I voted him.
Denying talented people access to education and knowledge is just about as anti-nerd, anti-tech, and anti-OSS a view as I can imagine. How can anyone suggest that with a clear conscience?
Hey, Slashdot, that old saw about the *IAA needing to adapt or die? It applies to everybody, even the IT and computer industries.
(CAPTCHA: sellout. How appropriate.)
I farted
Then maybe we should figure out why that is, and fix it, rather than continuing to import the droves of internationals who take university positions away from residents of this country.
Keeping internationals here for the sake of Academia is such a biased and stupid opinion to have. In engineering you are literally only relevant until people graduate. You should not be dictating policy for your sake alone.
If I can't get a job in Europe because they have to prove that there is no national qualified to do the job, then I don't see why our country should do the opposite.
At least from my observations, most people think the guys going to college in the states from overseas came here on a raft. In fact, all of the foreign students I met were from well-off to outlandishly rich families (3 Saudis I met of a group of maybe 10). The poor foreigners are the guys doing the lowest-rung work in our economy while the middle class guys are those small shop or restaurant owners. I'd say at least 95% of the foreign students I've met meet my description.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
As someone who has experience paying the international tuition to a US college, I can only say that whoever wrote this has no clue whatsoever. The income from international students is a huge source of revenue for many schools, especially now that state money is increasingly tight. Insinuating that we are giving them a free ride at the expense of US taxpayers is blatantly dishonest. How did this drivel make it past the editors?
over 40% of ceo in the US are of foreign origins, so good luck COMPLETELY DESTROYING what's left of a economy..
the thing is that most American's aren't even interested in the skillset those migration students are interested in, and most americans are incapable of starting such degrees simply because they lack the math skills...
if you want to reform you should reform the lower-education to include the same kind of math skills kids in russia/china/japan get...
YOUR LOWER SCHOOLS SUCK!!! and are puking out worker duds in a world where there are no industrial jobs left..
Foreign students pay at least twice the amount of what US, in-state students pay. Also, if you just take a look at any Masters or PHD programs, you will see that they are full of non-US citizens, so in a hypothetical foreigner ban, these programs won't be able to survive with only American students. There are also other advantages such as expanding US culture into other countries/cultures, exposing US students to other cultures, etc. So in other words, US is not giving free higher education to anyone, don't worry.
There is a balance. We feel free to bomb anywhere on the world, its only fair we provide free .edu anywhere on the world. It balances out, sorta kinda not really.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
If you want to solve the "war on terror" the best way to do it is get as many leaders of extremist countries to chill out and have less animosity towards the U.S. The easiest way to do that is to bring them over to the U.S. when they are 18 or so and introduce them to college life then send them back to their home countries and hope they can influence others.
then wouldn't another option be not providing them with the skills in the first place?"
Spoken like an american who has no clue how good he has it, which is saying a lot given how terrible US education is.
In India, or China or the middle east, assuming the program you want exists there are far more qualified applicants than there are places. So that's the first hurdle. Those spots may be decided by bribes, clan, political connections, or gender. And not 'oh they bias admission to black slightly' I mean 'they don't let you in if you're a woman' kind of bias.
Once you're there you have a problem. All of those political connections, bribes, clan loyalties etc. determine who gets the test questions in advance, and who doesn't. The US system, for all of its faults is relatively honest. If you get a 70% on an assignment then you can be reasonably sure that the identical assignment submitted by someone else should have gotten about 70%. And not 100% for being in the right clan, or 0 for not paying the right bribe to the right person today.
You can't just 'give people skills'. Skills come from practice, honest evaluation and actually being taught something related to the skills you are trying to learn. Those things are work, sometimes hard work, and they cost money. Which is why some places regularly charge a huge amount of money for foreign tuition. You aren't going to become a good programmer by watching youtube videos, and you have no way to prove you know how to program if no one will honestly asses your work. That's why the very best and brightest from a lot of places get sent away: because even their own governments don't trust their own education system.
The problem is not about preparing brillant foreign students. Is not preparing brillant local ones because they can't pay for education, or prefer not to risk owing money for the rest of their lives getting it. Or even worse, preparing dumb, or not motivated enough because they have already their economic life ensured.
Worse than using it in someone brillant from some other place (you probably are enjoying something designed or invented at least in part by someone from other country), is giving it to just a few. Give it for free, if you want just to local students, but in both cases that is not wasting money, is investing it, even if the person go somewhere else.
Anyway, there is no future in education, at least in most constructive areas. Working in the financial or legal sectors is the sure way to be in the top 5-10%.
Do you have any idea how empty that would leave our campuses? (Not to mention our faculty offices ...)
BTW: I teach at University level.
That is a nice thought - we can only hope it would play out that way. Currently kids either have to come from some serious wealth, have truly exceptional high school records, or be part of a minority group to get into most Universities. BTW: I have kids in high school and have been looking into it lately.
Hey, if it also emptied out faculty offices then it could help solve our unemployment problems a bit as well!
The world does not need more religious training.
Hosting top foreign students is about as close to "win/win" as you get, depending on how it's managed. They pay tuition. They do research. They spend money on basic necessities while here (rent, food, etc.). Sometimes, if we're lucky, they stay here after graduating and become citizens. Highly paid citizens who are likely to contribute more in tax revenue and economic activity than they consume in govt. services. That is to say, the exact type of citizen we want to attract.
Someone with a similar opinion:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2012/10/09/the-20-billion-export-industry-that-the-government-is-holding-back/
To say that international students pay more tuition and therefor pay their own way is overly simplistic as all of the grounds, buildings and other infrastructure were paid not only by tuition but by donations and state/federal funding at some point.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Seems like everyone is implying that US Citizens are too dump to do STEM
Too smart to do STEM. You'll end up $100K in debt unemployable past age XYZ due to ageism, any position in industry is gonna get outsourced probably to employees of the foreigners in your CS program (in america your boss in industry will be an art history BA degree holder, making twice as much as you might I add, not a foreign PHD). The good news is although we massively overproduce PHDs there are job openings at that level for like maybe 20% of them, so there's at least a chance you'll get a PHD level job when you're done. Small, but a chance.
I've "forbidden" my kids from going into STEM weirdly enough the school is all about STEM initiatives. As if there's going to be any STEM jobs in the entire country in 20 years LOL. May as well open a textile worker program and maybe an auto assembly line worker program while they're at it, LOL. As a life skill its handy, as a career its useless, but as an educational tool to encourage critical thinking, its not bad. Kind of the USA's version of how every (mid to upper class) kid in England had to learn Latin and Greek to teach them logic and reasoning, not because its a very useful career skill.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
In practice the US benefits by being able to select the best foreign students, sells them overprices education at a tremendous cost and then it will have the opportunity to keep a good percentage of them.
And of course it would be much more dangerous for the US to reject this slice of the world population, because they would be perfectly able to build a similar teaching / research structure if they would need to...
Americans aren't filling the classrooms, and Universities are quite nice now. In fact, luxurious the ones I've been to lately. When American kids get around to valuing education again, someone needs to keep these things going.
At the undergraduate level, there's no "problem," as none of the US government-backed or university-backed financial aid programs support nonresident foreign nationals. Our universities take their tuition money and provide an education.
The issue would be at the graduate level in the sciences and in engineering. But we need to be extremely careful about exactly what is being paid for. First set aside fellowships, which also don't apply to nonresident foreign nationals. The absolute standard practice is that Ph.D.-level graduate students in the sciences and engineering have their tuition, and a small living stipend, paid for by a combination of teaching assistantships and research assistantships.
In the case of teaching assistantships, then the grad student provides some number of hours per week of teaching, and in return gets his or her tuition paid for and a modest stipend. This is in turn funded by the tuition that undergraduates pay. The University is, in essence, simply hiring someone to do a job. The grad student spends some of his or her time teaching and uses the rest of his or her time, and status as a University student, to further his or her own education. Although there can be issues with non-native-English-speaking foreign graduate students and their ability to communicate in English, that is beside the point, and there's no investment in the grad student, on the part of the government or the University, that's being "lost" if the grad student returns to his or her home country after graduation.
In the case of research assistantships, these are offered by individual faculty members to graduate students working in those faculty's research groups. The faculty, in turn, get the money from research grants, almost all of which are funded by the government. However, the funding agencies are not directly funding specific students, rather, they are funding particular projects. To get a research grant, the faculty member submits a grant proposal that details what they expect to learn, and how much it will cost in terms of equipment, materials, labor, and so forth. When such research leads to interesting results, it is published, and the funding agencies are acknowledged. What funding agencies want to do is fund successful work. In this case, the funding agency is paying to have a particular scientific question investigated. Invariably, the people who are actually in the lab doing the labor to produce the results are either the grad students, or postdocs, or sometimes undergraduates. Their salaries, and grad student tuition, are paid in exchange for this labor. But fundamentally, the government funding agency pays for, and hopefully gets, scientific results, without concern for who does the work to get the results. But again, there's no investment that's being "lost" if the grad students or postdocs who did the work decide to leave the US once the work is done, because the investment was in the scientific work, not the individual students.
With the graduate population in the sciences and engineering at US Universities, you'll find the whole cross-section of American graduate students, plus the very best of the foreign graduate students. Only the cream of the foreign crop comes to the US, and this leads to the skewing of the graduate populations in which the best and most promising students are more likely to be foreign. And for the faculty researchers, its in their best interests to work with the best students, in order that their work be successful and lead to further research grants. So it can be in the best interests of faculty, and the Universities themselves, to welcome the best foreign grad students into their research groups.
*** Work like a king, command like a slave, create like a dog.
How on earth did an uninformed idiotic statement as a question make it the front page of my once beloved slashdot? I wouldn't even expect crap like this on reddit.
First of all, the US does not have a monopoly of good schools. Europe has many good schools, and there are schools that provide competent college-level education all over the world. Closing the doors of US universities merely directs the demand to these other good schools, and would probably not substantially decrease the creation of competition.
Secondly, the US has a moral obligation to many countries, having terribly damaged their institutions and infrastructures over years of intervention. Even if the US was paying for their education (and we are generally not), a person with a sense of history might not think it's so unfair. One could even argue that the richest country in the history of the world has an obligation to humankind to help develop as much of the limited pool of talent we have. Would it really benefit us if the next Darwin or Einstein is denied the best education?
Thirdly, many universities are private and most professors (except perhaps ones with truly sensitive expertise like nuclear engineering) are mobile. Countries are not going to stop trying to compete with the US just because we stop issuing student visas. If we leave them no other choice, they'll simply invite our universities to set up satellite campuses, or just hire away professors. The resulting brain drain could be even worse.
Basically, the only way it'll work out as the submitter imagines is when there are lots of qualified and motivated US students who can afford the education to fill the slots vacated by foreigners. With the economy in trouble and government slashing education spending, it's more likely that a lot of schools will downsize, shut down, or simply move.
That may have been the situation at one time but not anymore. The draconian way that aliens are treated at our borders has turned a lot of people away. It is not so common anymore for an alien in the US to pay full tuition. For people outside the US other destinations, particularly Australia and New Zealand, are much more attractive. There are still a lot of people who are willing to come to the US but the numbers are down, and the US is not necessarily the first choice for many people. The national hysterics that occurred in response to 9/11 changed many things.
I came to this country to attend university and nothing was handed out to me. I paid full tuition and all living expenses out of my pocket. So, I actually brought money in and helped the US economy. Not only that, but after getting a degree, I STAYED and became a heavily taxed US citizen. So, not sure what the point of the article is.
If universities produced widgets or something tangible they'd be hailed as America's new great export industry and we'd all be so proud about how they're 'competing internationally' and all that stuff. Instead because they produce a service people get scared, because production requires someone to visit the US for awhile.
...ions. Usually at a higher rate than locals.
We don't owe the world an education, but we'd all be a lot better off if more people were educated, so it's in our best interest to seed smart america-friendly people all over the globe.
We should probably focus on getting the American south up to speed before we start helping people further from our monkeyspheres, but ideally we should aim to educate everyone up to the limits of their intelligence.
Take a look at your own admissions policy.
I suspect you fill find the answer as to why you think your campus would be empty.
Even State Funded Universities are falling into the trap of rejecting anything but perfect 4.0 local citizens just to have room for the "diversity" crowd from over seas.
B Student: You go to trade school
B+ Student: You go to Community College
A- Student, Maybe, depending on slots available and if you bring all your own money and are a legacy.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Your country does exactly that. Ever heard of Department of Labor certification as a part of getting H1-B visa? I thought so.
...That is why we need comprehensive immigration reform."
Does anybody REALLY believe that this is why Obama want's 'comprehensive immigration reform' (translated: amnesty)?
Or do we think that he wants to pass reform so that he'll have a few million illegal aliens granted citizenship so that they can vote for his party?
Otherwise it's being read as "Does the us" as in "Does the we".
There is a clear difference between 'US' and 'us': one is a capitalized abbreviation and the other is not so, UNLESS YOU ARE SHOUTING the difference is clear.
I've never understood why english titles capitalize every word either.
English titles do not capitalize every word 'small' words like 'a', 'the' and 'of' are not capitalized except at the start of the title. Americans, on the other hand, divided their country into states so they could have more than one capital and have an economy based on capitalism so it's perhaps not surprising that they like to capitalize every word in a title along with random other words like 'figure' and 'table' in their scientific literature! (no clue why these words deserve special treatment but I'm only English. ;-).
"... That is how you give new industries to our competitors. That is why we need comprehensive immigration reform."
IIRC this kind of immigration reform was recently tried in the UK (although I'm not sure if it was actually implemented). The idea was that the government wanted to stem the tide of immigrants, but couldn't really hope to achieve that aim, because most of them were entering legally from other European countries. So, they sought to restrict the number of foreign students in the UK. But, then the universities became angry, because this measure meant that they would lose much of their income. The students were angry too, because many of them felt they might not be able to complete the studies for which they were paying. This simple exchange of knowledge (education) for money has been a part of our western economies for quite some time now and many would be rightly upset if one country or another were suddenly to impose such artificial restrictions for political reasons.
If Mr. Obama wants to do something about education in the United States, restricting the influx of foreign students with parents willing to pay those ridiculous tuition fees is not going to help. The only thing that would make a difference is if higher education were to be made more affordable for larger numbers of American students.
*they didn't build it* :D :D
hahah you fucking cynical americans, you need to loosen up a bit
There is a key important point missing in this argument (didn't read TFA, might be there). And that is that most of these foreign students in STEM fields are in US grad schools, not undergrad; and the undergrads pay tuition (often at full price with no aid) anyway.
For the grad students, you could say well we won't help others become competitive by denying them admission, but who will do all the research at US universities that actually makes them so good? US universities are world renown due to the publications, IP they generate, etc. Guess what, the vast majority of the grad students who do all the work are foreign. Take them out, and very soon the US universities won't be so good.
And it's not as if the foreign students are displacing Americans. Believe you me, most grad departments and Professors would prefer Americans, but Americans in general don't want to go to Grad school for STEM fields.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
Nah, he's only just made it up to the jingoist rank. He'll need to grind a few more levels to hit racist.
There is nothing atractive about the us
Sure there is: Reese Witherspoon, Beyoncé, Olivia Wilde, Anne Hathaway, Julia Roberts, Jessica Alba, Odette Annable ... the list goes on, and on....
Yes, all those 15 million illegals that crossed the Southern border, along with their offspring are hard at work studying and excelling in various STEM disciplines so that they can help build a better USA. "Fields of the future?" I think it's more likely that they're working in the fields right now.
I've got nothing against hard working immigrants. If I was in their shoes, I'd be doing the same thing. I blame the federal government for a deliberately failed immigration policy.
Meanwhile, they learn the local language and culture. They are more likely to do business with you.
The reverse is also true: US students will learn that there are people outside the US with different cultures and beliefs to their own and that, if they want to do business with them, they will need to take this into account. Since they provide this education for free to US students perhaps the question should be "Does the rest of the world owe the US an education?"...or we could just agree that its a mutually beneficial arrangement that we all learn about different peoples and cultures and leave it at that.
Money isn't patriotic. Money flows to where it can be used to make more money. Why am I not surprised that Hussein Obama doesn't understand basic macroeconomics?
Ron Paul 2016
'They are earning degrees in the fields of the future, like engineering and computer science...We are giving them the skills to figure that out
Last I checked, you pay through the nose to attend top US Universities. Sure, you may "earn" the degree by attending classes and doing coursework and turning in papers -- but you get the ability to do that by PAYING FOR IT.
It seems Obama has a huge disconnect with the Americans by failing to realize that these expensive Universities are every bit as profit driven as any other Corporation. And in fact, the lure of Foreign dollars has caused many schools to woo foreign students who are able and willing to pay more expensive Out of State tuition such as we see with the University of California, which is chock full of Chinese and yet keeps raising local tuition rates to the point where many California Born and Raised are having to leave the school before getting their degrees.
I'm feeling disturbed by the daftness that Obama is displaying. He misses the point completely. The point being, that in the generations before, the students would come here and typically stay in the US, taking jobs with US companies. But that is not the case any more for a number of reasons, but mainly because employment chances are slim here, even for American born graduates.
The market demands are all overseas now, especially in the fields of science and engineering. The America market is tapped out. No matter what we may innovate, our market has peaked - all 330 Million Americans are reached and the birth rate has slowed. Asia is where it's at, where billions of potential consumers who currently live in backwards conditions and are not reached wait to be tapped into.
It only makes sense that once these billions of consumers are reached, Asia will become the dominant superpower in the world, and before too long will be tapping into that talent pool to start developing products for themselves and everyone else rather than relying on American innovation. And at that point, it's game over for America.
And I think Obama knows that it's game over. Because when a Democrat President starts talking up a NATIONALIST platform (limit foreign students etc) to preserve our economic prosperity, the writing is on the wall.
This is a problem Nationalism wont solve. Nationalism is what has caused our market to peak and cap out. We need MORE IMMIGRANTS not less fewer and we need more jobs to keep the immigrants here. If we want to compete in the future, we must keep our own market growing while maintaining our technological lead. Looking at it from a purely market-driven perspective, we must practicality DOUBLE our population, to about 700 million over the next few generations time to maintain a growth rate. That growth rate will cause a demand for resources that will require a wealth of new jobs and technology to maintain. After we have hit that target, the market will begin stagnate again, but at the point, the sizes of the global markets will be more equalized, keeping the US in about equal footing with markets in Asia.
But the President doesn't have the power to mandate such national growth of the population or of the direction of private Industry, so we are pretty much locked in the present course at this time. And so, while Foreign Students are willing and able to pay extra Tuition Fees for our Universities, we might as well enjoy it while it lasts, because it's only a matter of time before Universities in Asia match or surpass the reputations held by the top Universities in America and will no longer want to pay a premium to come here when they can pay less in Asia and take a job in Asia.
It costs a lot more to move 'em from Hymietown to Hebron, than it does to give a few deserving foreigners the rewards of academic excellence.
then wouldn't another option be not providing them with the skills in the first place?"
Spoken like an american who has no clue how good he has it, which is saying a lot given how terrible US education is.
And that is spoken like a person who has no clue how difficult it is for many (most?) Americans who desire an education past high school.
In India, or China or the middle east, assuming the program you want exists there are far more qualified applicants than there are places.
That is also true in the United States if you are a not-wealthy U.S. citizen.
Those spots may be decided by bribes, clan, political connections, or gender.
Also frequently true in the United States if you are a not-wealthy citizen (perhaps replace the word "clan" with "family" to make it less confusing for the pedants among us).
All of those political connections, bribes, clan loyalties etc. determine who gets the test questions in advance, and who doesn't.
I will grant that this is, to my knowledge, not policy in most U.S. institutions of higher learning. However, if you believe that a wealthy or politically connected youngster who is a poor student in a four-year university will suffer the same consequences of that as a middle-class youngster who was lucky enough to get into that same university (mostly a hypothetical of course, because someone who is both middle-class and a poor student will never get in), you are either ignorant or deluded.
Just as an FYI, I have children in college, one family member who used family connections to get into a college he otherwise would never have been allowed to attend, and come from a family in which being a college professor is the most common career. While I won't claim that makes me an expert in all things higher education, I can assure you that everything I have said is from the basis of things I have personally experienced.
also lot's of IT stuff is not CS and not really Full College (non tech school) Bachelor's and Master's is over kill.
most computer Science programs are about theory and not the business parts, It / networking, how to code (real skills), user experience / UI , ECT.
Also a lot of the desktop / IT / help desk / ECT.. stuff is jammed into the degree system taking some think that should be 1-3 years mixed class room , hands on class room and apprenticeships. 4 years is to long and they have to fill that time with some fluff and filler.
Democrat Underground is down the hall on the left.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I think the linkage here is that nobody reads a fricken book anymore in this country and wants everything spoon fed to them in 10 second clips on youtube.
Okay, here's a little history for the anonymous poster of this article?. The US has had students from other countries going to school here for a very, very long time. We have also had students go and study abroad. I have a co-worker who went to University in East Germany (Yes, Trabant driving, commie loving East Germany). For example, one of the most famous Harvard students was Isoroku Yamamoto. You remember him, he led the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Our Education system should be available to people all over the world but we shouldn't subsidize it nor should we give preference to an exchange student over a citizen wanting to get into a graduate program or even regular admissions, which is now becoming a more common occurrence because all higher education institutions love money. To a point thoug, espionage is a bigger problem for us competitiveness and trade secrets/technology are always getting stolen. We need to be keenly aware that there are foreign governments who don't like us and have targeted our industries, our universities and our societies with friendly faces leveraging our "open" society. There's not one US industry that has had wholesale theft of technology and that's a sad state of affairs for all of us.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
US owes an apology to the World.
Foreigners are coming to US and paying our high tuitions. This is a flow of wealth into the country of $21.8 billion, according to the linked article. This does not support the argument of Mayor Bloomberg, who seems to think we are giving away the education. No, education is our product which we are selling. And we have some of the best education in the world.
I had a ton of fun with the "foreign" students in college who were most like me -- Europeans (British, Irish, German, Czech). They talked in class (even when language was a challenge), they socialized, I brought them home, went on trips, got invited overseas to live at their houses and they smuggled over fresh beer, food and cigarettes.
The non-European students were completely invisible. They didn't socialize, they didn't speak up in class, and they only spent time with each other. There was a guy from Kenya I met at a bar a few times (we seemed to have the same drinking schedule) but that didn't really count.
Was there a benefit? At the time it was fun to meet the European kids, but the reality is that you don't learn much from people the same as you. They smoke different kinds of cigarettes, but they are almost identical otherwise.
It was the non-Europeans who would have had the biggest benefit, but they didn't participate.
Indian final year Masters student here. Let me point out the picture from the foreign students point of view. When looking for PhD positions, many of my fellow students applied to US, including one who wants to work on the exact same field as I. He found 5-6 good research groups in US. I found 2 in Germany, 1 each in Austria, Denmark, India and Scotland. I chose not to even consider the US ones for a few reasons. Firstly, the graduate school application procedure in all major US universities is a complete crap involving:
1. Two ludicrous exams called the subject GRE and general GRE. The first tests high school grade knowledge in physics when the applicants are applying for a PhD position. The second one is a weird mish mash of puzzle solving, visual pattern matching and multiple choice questions in english vocabulary.
2. An English language proficiency test called (TOEFL). This one is more useful than the first one.
3. Paying an application fee ~200 USD.
4. Not a single human interaction between the people you'd be working with.
If a student wants to have a reasonable chance of getting admitted in an US university, he should apply for >5 colleges. The total expense come down to >2000 USD. This is more than the total fees we have paid to our college during the whole time span of our 5 year old course. Contrasting it with the alternatives, they all:
1. Require no exams.
2. We need to email the professors our CV's and statement of purpose.
3. They shortlist some students for an interview (sometimes on-site, mostly on Skype). You actually talk to your boss, see if you get along.
Now, despite this big hurdle, many students do aspire for a US education. The reason is mostly the perception of US as the "land of ideas". The place most of the stalwarts in Physics- from Einstein to Feynman- have called home. (This perception is changing BTW with the experimental particle physics scene shifted to Europe and German universities happily admitting more and more foreign students each year). Now if you decide to shun foreign students from your universities, what exactly happens? They choose to get equally good education elsewhere, you lose talented individuals (and make no mistake, at least in grad school, top 20 US universities will set the bar much more higher for overseas applicants as compared to american ones.) contributing to maintaining your reputation as the land of ideas in Physics.
In engineering you are literally only relevant until people graduate.
Yup, no good engineering research comes from universities.... Oh, wait ...
Which is a lot of hassle for the companies, which most of the time they don't want to do
I see an 'X' next to troll to tell /. this is not troll. "Nope, this is definitely a troll" I tell myself
flamebait? Nope, also accurate
politics, usa, education? Sure!
So where's my 'X' next to story?
and yet for some jobs the degree has skill gaps.
Isn't one man's medicine another man's poison?
Tell people before their studies they are not welcome to the US? And tell the same people they are welcome after their studies? Having other countries getting their hand on those students? Having these people learn about other alternatives than the US?
Oh, I learned about the country and the people of France and they are really cool, but I'd like to go over to the US, as they need scientists and I don't care that I don't know anything about the US. Sure, that'll work. Do it. Tell them they are not welcome without a degree. They will come in masses after they got one somewhere else.
Are you joking? H1Bs "prove there is no national qualified to do the job"?
How often have you worked with H1Bs? Many competent, many not competent at all. Never seen US citizens as incompetent as bottom rung H1Bs. The "certification" is fraudulent BS. H1B pimps funnel kick backs and favors to corporate hiring managers. The slush funds that H1B pimps can suck from the system is what fuels the demand for H1Bs, not a lack of local labor.
batter batter batter batter batter batter batter batter batter batter batter batter SWING!
He is a master at floating policies that on the surface may appeal to one demographic or the other, but he always brings it home in the end.
As a long time graduate student in engineering, I see my foreign colleagues forced to return to their country of origin or elsewhere due to immigrations difficulties and problems with student visa's all too often. These are students that are not only capable but also wanting to work in the US who we are basically throwing them away. Furthermore, I see this reform measure as further realization that the commoditization of higher education is a failure, and we must return to the original goals of educating individuals for the benefit of our skilled workforce.
A lot of people are emphasizing undergraduate education, but I think that's actually missing the more important group: graduate students, who we *do* actually foot the bill for.
I'll be finishing my PhD in physical chemistry in a few months. Right now, my group has about 15 postdocs and graduate students. Two of us are US citizens. This is not atypical.
If we suddenly decided that we would restrict graduate education to US citizens, the results would be catastrophic. Right now about a third to half of PhD's in science and engineering are awarded to foreigners (I'd bet money this is higher at elite universities) and probably about 75% of postdoctoral workers are foreign born. If you get rid of them our output would drop sharply, since the majority of the science workforce falls in these categories. Second, faculty, probably about half of which were born oversees in any case, will make the eminently practical decision to leave for countries where they can continue to recruit the top talent (and cheapest labor), increasing the rate of decline. The US scientific engine would effectively implode.
So. Good luck with that.
The U.S. is the only nation on Earth that treats foreigners better than its own citizens. Foreigners come here, take advantage of affirmative action policies, treat Americans like shit, and then claim discrimination if they don't get what they want. Half of them don't speak English or pretend not to whenever it's convenient.
To hell with that. No more work visas or green cards. America is for Americans. Foreigners go home.
It might be cheaper to educate the whole world than bomb then into submission.
Just sayin'.
You are welcome on my lawn.
How about we not give foreigners college educations, and give Americans free college educations instead?
Just an idea since I owe about $12K in college debt and I still haven't finished yet and I'm in my 30's :-/ It would have been nice if at 18 my own government said "here you go! free college if you want it!", not "Too bad, you have to pay for it ALL".
Just saying.
"(isn't a rising tide supposed to lift all boats?) "
The one big problem with the rising tide theory is that in the falling tide, the big boats crush most of the little boats. So there are mostly only big boats left for the rising tide to lift.
If you're going to be cynical about it, then let's think of it this way: by bringing in large numbers of foreign nations' best and brightest, the United States is being given a chance to shape their minds and give them a more positive impression of Americans, American ideology and American institutions. The students who come here are usually the brightest, most ambitious or politically connected, and if they return to their home countries, they will likely become a part of the elite cadre that runs that nation's institutions. With a positive view of the United States, they're much more likely to be sympathetic to American requests and US interests. In addition, while they're in the United States, they will make connections with Americans, so years later, those connections can be leveraged to support American interests (channels for backroom dialogue, keeping tabs on foreign research, etc.).
I'll just throw this out there, I think all these limitations on immigrants and travellers is a crock of shit. My ancestors came over as white trash during the great era of immigration at the turn of the last century, Irish, Hungarians, Russians... Polish. Yet, somehow, America managed to do pretty damn good for itself in the last century, at least until it started flexing in the goddamned mirror and all over the planet too much. I say we go back to humble America, the one that works, where we tear down our own fences and dismantle our own army, observe strict neutrality, and let anyone who wants to work come to this country, and let the chips fall where they may. God was on our side the last time we did it, and I suspect He'd be on our side again.
This is my sig.
Good point. And as everyone knows, the cost of education for average Americans has been skyrocketing out of control. Internationals paying full price just serves to push the price of education higher for everyone else. Sure it's good for administrators and it's job security for academics and it's great for textbook publishers, but does it really serve the founding mission of many of these schools?
When my parents defected from from communist Eastern Europe, they were tried and convicted (in absentia, obviously) of defecting. One of the aggravating circumstances brought up during the sentencing was that they took with them the degrees they earned at the university (under socialism, it was "free"), thus weakening the home country while enriching the enemy's.
When people pay their own way for something, they can and should be able to do with it as they please. It's the cornerstone of liberty.
And before any of you start saying that, like a mortgage, they don't own their education until they've paid off their student loans, please consider the implications. If a person cannot live and do what they want because they owe money, isn't that a form of slavery (Ironic this idea coming from Obama, don't you think?)? In fact, I think that's how most human trafficking works these days, isn't it?
Why aren't white people allowed to have their own countries any more?
If non-whites are so wonderful, why are they desperate to live around 'whitey'? Why don't they want to live around their OWN KIND?
This is the most blatant lie I have read in a long time. US has benefited enormously from the influx of highly educated immigrants, whose education was paid for other countries. The US got them FOR FREE...
I bet that there are many, many more fully-educated foreigners coming to US than people who pursue their "cheap but good-quality" (really?) education in US then move abroad to benefit other nations.
The ones who peddle the idea stated in the summary are either disingenuous or don't know how good they have it.
the smart one is to use the fact so many people want to come here to draw on the brain pool of the world and keep the country in a strong technical position that keeps us rich and keeps it such a nice place to be - see how that feedback loop works ? We should make it possible for the talented to stay.
single player healthcare will fix a lot stuff in us.
For years we have employers who do stuff like work you 39.5 hours a week, jack your hours around so on paper you are working only 30 hours on week and 50 the next so you are not full time even when you are working full time.
Walmart is the king of stuff like that
Also the high number of contract jobs with no healthcare
In the early '90s more than half of the Nuclear science students were from Iran, and they went back home! Nice.
Then the North Korean's sent their students to Iran! Win-Win-Win!
We even trained the pilots for 9-11.
However, my friend from Tehran, came over, got a degree in Business, and stayed. He is a hell of a cook.
So, I say kick out a vast majority of the forein students in critical fields,
and anyone suspected of terrorism?
Make your time!
Come on now, the ad-hominem attacks and bitterness accomplish nothing.
Challenges in academic achievement due to being born in poverty in the US are rarely purely issues of money, but commonly issues of culture. That's a huge issue--no getting around it--but it's nothing like class warfare. More typically, in poorer areas, the parents may have no education, and college may never be expected, planned for, or even understood in the first place. The student may have no educational goals and no idea that higher education would be of any value to him/her. Even if he/she does decide to give college a try, the student may have no idea where to start or may give up on the idea early on to pursue a job, a hobby, or a romantic interest. If it's not valued, college is a lot of work. Most 'wealthy' parents simply have the expectation their children will do it anyway--just like the parents did--which is simple inertia. Unfortunately, the same expectation has the opposite result if the parents dropped out of school.
But if the *desire* to do college is strong and money or academic performance are really the core obstacles, why not check out local community colleges? The costs are very low, the entry requirements typically are as well, and the teachers are there to teach rather than to do research. In some places the admission process is little more than verifying your check clears, and it's only a few hundred dollars per class. That's dirt cheap, by the way--compare it to the property tax bill you've paid every year. If your kid does all the assigned work he/she can expect a reasonably good GPA and then transfer to a state school to finish up. That cuts the costs in half and removes most of the 'can't get accepted' barriers, and after getting the BS, the degree they award is exactly the same as any other.
How about we educate our own damn people first? Secondly, this is our damn country, and both political parties have failed their Constitutional oath in protecting our borders. It's now to the point that we are overran and will have to resort to force to reclaim it. Mexico brazenly flaunts their silent invasion of this country. The cheap labor has be exploited to destroy our middle class and their unions. We are going to have to get damn nasty about this and it's a shame.
You have to understand that both sides of the political coin in our government are corrupted beyond measure. They have to go, and this means people have to get their heads out of the old schools of thinking. The Right has violated our Constitution with the Patriot Act and garbage like "Citizen's United", and now the Left is wanted to shred our 2nd Amendment. Again, it's two sides of the same corrupted political coin.
First thing on the agenda, Wall Street needs held accountable for their crimes and treason. The greatest rip off crime in history will not go unanswered for. We need to give this government an enema, flush out the vermin running it and go after our enemies within. If we don't, we are headed for the biggest crash of a country the world as ever seen. This house of cards can't stand in the storm that is coming.
Take the Red Pill.
It was a round world last I checked.
France isn't being killed by immigrants sapping it's free education.
France is getting killed by french welfare recipients who are more interested in protecting their national language than they are in accepting the fact that the rest of the world speaks English (or Mandarin) and using some of that free education that the government is handing out to learn to do something f*cking useful with their lives.
Do you ever notice that it isn't the global companies that push the barrow about patriotism, 'buying local' etc? Patriotism is actually all about TAX REVENUE.
WTF does it matter if someone uses what they learnt at Harvard to to sell you stuff from India, or to sell you stuff from the USA? Harvard still gets paid the same, you still get the same goods. Oh wait, the US government doesn't get paid the same amount, because people who live outside the country don't pay USA taxes.
If it weren't for local governments trying to retain their power, people would be able to move around the world as freely as all our products do.
And despite what our governments tell us (that they'll all come here, drive the government broke, and try to blow us all up) the only thing that would happen is that high-taxing countries would need to be competitive with low-taxing countries.
I'd still choose to live and work in a high-taxing country, because I've been to India. My free travel advice: leave India to the Indians.
Completely wrong. Most STEM departments have 10 foreign applicants for every 1 domestic (at the graduate level at least). My old department (and I expect many others) had a quota for domestic students. They would not admit more than half foreign students even though many of them were far more qualified than domestic students who did get in.
Yes, we could totally kill our large universities, abandon whatever role we still have in research, and send people a clear message that we're xenophobes. That would be one of our options.
I am pretty sure, though, that "let's encourage people to come live here and be brilliant" is a better option.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
import the droves of internationals who take university positions away from residents of this country
University positions are awarded in a competitive process, usually, and at least on paper the process must be non-discriminating as to nationality etc. In truth you're quite deluded if you think that anyone here "imports droves of internationals" who take positions "away" from "residents". Those residents you mention are fiction. They don't exist. It's as easy as that.
Never mind that technically, a resident of this country is, in this whole discussion, anyone who passes the presence test for tax purposes, so:
To meet this test, you must be physically present in the United States on at least:
31 days during the current year, and
183 days during the 3-year period that includes the current year and the 2 years immediately before that, counting:
All the days you were present in the current year, and
1/3 of the days you were present in the first year before the current year, and
1/6 of the days you were present in the second year before the current year.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
We're actually not doing too badly, we have higher income inequality and more poor people but we educate those poor people better than most countries.
http://phys.org/news/2013-01-poor-international-student.html
Ta-da! Exactly. If admissions were truly competitive without quotas, U.S. STEM graduate education would be almost entirely attended by international students.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
STEM should be a huge priority.
There should be lesser government support of underwater basket weaving degrees. They're useless.
Most undergrad foreign students pay tuition which is most of the times several times higher at state universities because of lower tuition for "in-state" vs. "out-of-state" students. However a lot of graduate students can get an assistantship teaching or research where they have to provide at least 20 hours a week in services back to university so no free ride here either.
It is only an option if you are an idiot....
Smart people who get into our universities are highly motivated to be successful... we should attach a green card to the back of every masters degree and Ph.d we issue to a foreign student on the condition they seek employment/start a business here in the US. More startups means more jobs means a faster growing economy.
a rising tide lifts all boats when you are talking about a poor economy..the US economy does not benefit from economic growth in developing countries but developing countries benefit from growth in our economy.
Republican Underground you mean.
The US owes its own people an education first. But the fucking Red states are doing their damnedest to prevent that. All they care about is god and guns.
So, should Universities in California prevent students from New York from going back to New York and create jobs in other state, and vice-versa?
This just doesn't make sense. Intellectual development and barriers are incompatible with each other. We give a lot, we get a lot back. A lot of United States students come to my country to study and teach, and I could never convince myself they are stealing our knowledge or our jobs. The lack of boundaries in Universities is an example to be followed by all society, not a problem to be solved.
The problem with the current educational method is that nobody stops to ask if this is the best way to educate someone. We merely keep doing it this way because dozens of generations before us did it this way. Because people a few thousand years ago decided to do it this way.
You go to school. You go to a higher school. Then eventually to some sort of college, where you obtain a degree that prepares you for.... a job where you may not actually use what you spent the last 22 years learning. You spent a lot and filled your head because somebody in ancient Rome, who knew nothing of our modern world, figure this was better than nothing.
On the face of it, this system is nuts. You take a human youth in some of the prime years of their lives and stuff them in a classroom. Make them sit and learn wrote things they may never use. Make them pay a lot for it. But mainly make sure they show up for class for two, four, eight, ten years, The entire rest of their lives, they won't have the energy they have at that age. They could do so much. But you make them sit and learn things they may not ever use, in ways that haven't changed in a hundred years, managed by an enormous education construct that exists mainly to promote itself.
Is this right? Is there a better way? Is there something better we can do with our people than having them spend between a quarter and a third of their lives in a classroom? Or do we simply do it this way because that's how our parents did it, and dammit if we're going to let anyone have it easier? Is it education to educate, or more of a rite of passage or initiation ritual?
If people are a product, and education is the factory, then the factory is a mess badly in need of something like the Toyota Production Methods because what comes out the other end is often not what business needs. If we wanted to do something great for education, we would revisit every element. Root out inefficiencies and waste. Develop ways of finding continuous improvement, etc.. Just like making cars.
Just not the cars that keep getting recalled, of course.
Sig for hire.
That's how you give business to our competitors (overseas)? Like GM, 3M, IBM?
You know, had communism won, we would all have free education up to our doctorates and this would be a non-issue. The US took it upon themselves to fight communism and support a "free world market" and "globalization" where offer and demand is the king. Now it's come back to bite in the ass: cheap chinese/mexican labor is [supposedly] taking over american jobs because you know, they're a better offer (cheap labor) for a great demand (cheap laborers) and now it's spilling out to all levels of society: jobs being sent overseas by the same corporations that provided hardware and profited from war efforts a few decades ago - and international students are now flooding the US universities (because hey, they pay a lot more tuition than resident/citizen students) and coming back to their countries to empower their foreign industries. All the while, STEM graduate levels on US and UK are going down.
Good luck West, with your new generation of Ke$has and "One Directions" and hiphop stars, which pretty soon you can all watch on your Korean-made electronics. Booyah!
Reading the article, it's clear that Obama is not suggesting that foreign students should not go to United States. He is suggesting that United States should stop forcing them to go back home, when many of them actually want to stay in US.
Where I live (Canada), universities (like mine) charge international students between 8 and 9 times as much as locals. Some of my CS classes had 60% of the class from Hong Kong. UBC (University of British Columbia) has had a backronym applied to it for a long time: University of a Billion Chinese. But they pay for a lot of services. And they contribute to the local economy when they are here. Look, you can argue left and right about providing foreign students with an education, but the truth is that if you have companies (like Intel or GE or a million others) that export jobs to China or India instead of offering jobs at home, then the opportunities will be there. Training and education does not equal jobs if there are not jobs to be had. The climate for the trained locals must be for them to start businesses (and they will start local businesses if the climate is right). But the US Government (like the Canadian Government, sadly) doesn't mind giving big breaks to corporations (in Canada corporate tax freedom day was yesterday, but personal tax freedom day won't be till late June). Corporations are sitting on trillions of dollars. Its not in the economy, its basically 'dead money'. I'm all for the government dinging them on it. Use it or lose it. If you invest it, you aren't taxed on it. If you sit on it, 10%/quarter. You can't blame Chinese students if there are more opportunities back home.
Engineering doesn't do much research, and that is generally product-oriented. Math and science do much more research than engineering. The only engineering research done in the university level is very very specific and rare (JPL/CIT arrangement), and technically, even the one example I came up with, the engineering research isn't done at the university, though I've not explored the link in that much detail.
Learn to love Alaska
Internationals paying full price drives the cost down. The cost increase has been the large cuts in funding. The internationals paying full price help subsidize the local's tuition.
Learn to love Alaska
Bah, yet another reason I moved out. I moved to a country where education is well subsidized thought university level. There are a number of "free" universities.
Learn to love Alaska
STEM departments? Or STEM post-graduate? The Engineering school at Texas A&M had separate admissions requirements and you could get admitted to the university and rejected from your preferred major. Or get kicked out of that program, but not the university. There were lots of regular domestic students wanting into engineering. It was the graduate programs that were dominated by foreigners. The domestics got an undergrad and left.
Learn to love Alaska
The Indian education system doesn't suffer from the issues you mentioned above, in fact a lot of rich Indians go to US universities like Cornell and Harvard for Undergrad because they can't get into good Indian ones(which admit students with rigorous tests) and Universities in the US let them in more easily. The Indian system has other major issues: horrible primary and secondary curriculum in most schools, a retarded evaluation system that necessitates colleges to hold 'Entrance Exams' and poor availability of school education to rural areas.
but locking overqualified into low levels to start is bad as well. Take a desktop / network / sever guy. They may not do that well on help desk level 1 or be to well fix the issues but take to long for the level.
Seems like everyone is implying that US Citizens are too dump to do STEM so we have to train non-US citizens to do the work?
Nope. Show an example.
I don't see alot of talk of helping US Citizens in getting a STEM degree (financially or otherwise).
Why do you expect that to come up in a speech about immigration policy?
All I keep hearing is that somehow US Citizens are generally to lazy or dumb so they have to go somewhere else to get smart people.
I read the entire thread above moderation level -1 so far. Not one person has said anything like that.
I'm a Ph.D student in a CS program where over half of my fellow grad students are non-US citizens. I'm doing well in the program but feel like I'm going to be looked on by future employers as too dumb because of my citizenship.
Many employers do look down on Ph.Ds, regardless of citizenship.
Also, unlike many non-US citizens who get scholarships, I can only get more loans (fellowships and scholarships being too hard to obtain) and a Teaching Assistantship which eats into my study/research time. I'm staring at possibility of being saddled with over $100,000 in loans to pay off and not particularly liking it.
I have known about two dozen people who went to grad school for a Ph.D in CS, engineering, or the biological sciences. Everyone got a stipend. It is not necessarily easy to get funded, but I think all of them would not have gone to a school that could not credibly promise to fund them.
Why are you in a Ph.D program?
If you want to work in industry, a Ph.D can get your foot in the door of some specialized jobs. If you don't already know what that job is, you don't care about having it enough to get a Ph.D . For example, if you have a burning desire to write compilers, a Ph.D thesis on compilers will help you get your first job. It won't get you more money (when you consider the income and raises you missed while in school) so you really need to care about your topic for this to be helpful.
If you want to teach or research, you need a Ph.D . However, you should know that there are way more applicants than jobs. If you can't get funded as a student, you should be concerned. You will be competing for jobs with people whose research was deemed worthy of funding. I would guess that they have some advantage over you that will allow them to win the academic jobs competition.
If you want to get a typical programming job, leave now. I don't mean to be harsh, but a Ph.D hurts you. Google and Amazon will ignore it, and not think any less of you. Other businesses will think you are overqualified.
It's too bad no one interested in advocating for helping out US citizens getting STEM degrees.
Think of the people you have met in your life. I am sure almost none of them have the ability to hold a job writing programs in (for example) C++. How long would it take to teach them, and how many would refuse to do the work it takes to learn? Of the people I know, no more than 5% could possibly learn to program in a reasonable amount of time. And those people are busy being doctors, actuaries, quantitative analysts, and in one case running a restaurant. A few more stipends for grad students won't change that.
International students paying MORE money to Universities to fill their coffers drives prices up? Did you even read what you wrote? International students are only charged higher BECAUSE Universities don't have enough money, and would have to raise tuition prices for locals OTHERWISE.
I have from someone working at X we weren't actively hiring, only putting out feelers
I am a Mexican freshman at Yale University, and I will major in computer science. I know that I will be tied to the United States for probably the next few decades of my life. There is no way that I will find a better job in Mexico after graduating. Chances are that if I do find a computer science "related" job, it will be as a web developer for some website building company; not precisely what one would expect after an ivy league education. The University is paying most of my tuition, and visas were never a problem; and so I owe this country a lot. But have no doubt, if I ever get the chance of creating jobs in my own country I won't think about it twice. There are more important things than profits.
One of the reasons the US are one of the leaders in technology is that they've managed to attract the most competent people worldwide by paying them more than elsewhere or giving them an environment with more means to further their work.
At least half of all of the great American researchers I can think of were born outside of the US.
If they stop accepting foreign people, it means that the best researchers will just be working in other countries, and the American scene will eventually become obsolete.
even with free college not all are cut out for it they can learn better in a trades / tech school setting or even hands on. Free college will not fix all issues with higher edu.
sports players should not be forced to go to college they should be able to be at the ncaa level and do a trades or even a tech school.
Take out the joke for sports players only classes and let them go to school if they want or pay them (less then the pro level but on the level of say Minor League Baseball)
our riches are built on two weak neighbors and an ocean that kept the war out in the 1930s/40s. We were the only ones that didn't get blasted into the stone age when mechanized warfare happened. The middle class (which is largely what people mean when they say 'our riches') was an accident following WWII. Pretty much everyone fought in the war and they came back war heroes entitled to a bright future. That plus fear of communists seizing your factory kept good paying jobs here. Well the baby boomers are retired and the current war vets are coming home to Walmart jobs. The US isn't vibrant, it's rapidly dying as a bunch of ppl with low self esteem and the opposite of an entitlement complex race to the bottom.
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I'm staring at possibility of being saddled with over $100,000 in loans to pay off and not particularly liking it.
Go to your nearest community college for 3 years, living at home and working 2 part time jobs. You'll make more in 3 years than you spend on school (taking a wider variety to make sure you like what you decided to pursue). Then transfer to your nearest state school. Live at home if you can, or the cheapest dorm if you can't. 2 years to finish off your degree (all you need after 3 years in community college, though it can become 3 years if you need to re-take anything from the "better" 4-year school or there are too many classes that weren't available at CC). You can exit college with more money than you went in. I graduated with no debt, but I did have a scholarship (merit based) for $1000 per year.
Learn to love Alaska
The student compiles the following lists:
List of all achievements accomplished by US companies, universities, etc..
List of achievements obtained under direction, with direct involvement, or based on ideas of 'foreign' scientists/technicians.
The student calculates the intersection between these two lists and discuss the result. Extra points will be given for detailed analysis of contributions of foreigners (i.e. von Brown, Einstein, Fermi) to the outcome of WWII and the following US scientific program.
Bonus: the student provides the link to the discussion on Slashdot about the consistent reduction of patents filled in US during the strict immigration policies of the Bush administration.
academic adrift http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_large_numbers_of_college_students_don_t_learn_much the old education system needs change.
That will fix it.
Does owe the world an education at its expense?
Consider your answer carefully. Precedents are waiting to be formed here.
Obama is not saying that the US shouldn't educate foreign students. He is arguing that the US shouldn't deport illegal immigrants with degrees.
This is a dumb argument for immigration reform because given there are 11+m illegal immigrants its fairly clear that the the US is not deporting anyone.
The illegal immigrants are fleeing the US because its economy is a total mess and they can get better jobs and lives overseas.
https://itkan.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/megatrends-education/
Education needs to be better fitted into today’s fast paced IT, and needs to take a page from the traditional trades with some kind of apprenticeship system”. He also believes a more hands-on approach is more effective, especially for IT prospects and workers that have disabilities. The older education system is left behind when it comes to offering more hands on work.
And a no an intern tied to the old collgle system / must have a degree does not really work and it's not really fixing the issues.
Interns need to open to all tech / trade schools / non degree classes / drop in classes. Also the tech schools and Community Colleges have more night classes then the older university system. Also most Community Colleges will let you take classes drop in / NON degree. also needs to be a REAL internship with real work kind of like an apprenticeship.
My understanding is that the US (indeed nearly any developed country with an open admissions policy) benefits from a reverse Brain Drain. That is, foreign students, usually top candidates, come for an education. And they pay a premium price to do so, far more than citizens do (from what I remember, tuition was routinely 4-5X more expensive for the foreign students).
Having received the education, many of those students find ways to stay. They have had several years to acclimate to the local culture and see all sorts of opportunities. One change that is real is that some places in the developing world, are now developing at a pace fast and exciting enough to entice some of those new grads back home. I say good for them, but I still believe the brain drain is skewed strongly towards the developed countries.
The real story, in my opinion, is the price of an advanced education. The college and university communities are placid and comfortable. There's little competition on price because most people take it as gospel that education is worth it and maybe even that a more expensive education must be worth more. Certain online education systems contain potential to change this but only at the margins.
The main university response to the cost? Scholarships. Don't address the cost directly, subsidize it! How many businesses would attempt that? And for that cost, students are routinely treated like baggage, particularly the undergrads.
Why do you think your country is rich? Natural ressources are good, but you are not Saudi Arabia, and that's a good thing too.
Except that the US produces more gold, more timber, more food, more coal, and more natural gas than Saudi Arabia.
The presidents view that another country having productive people hurts your country is idiotic. Every productive person creates things for other people. The more productive the human race becomes and the more free we are to trade the better off we all are.
The only point of view in which another country having productive people is a threat is if you think of the tax payers at cattle. The more productive the other farmers cattle are the more it hurts you.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Paid a bloody fortune for it and subsidies US students with my tuition.
So I politely suggest that the poster may just go somewhere private and Cheney himself.
Well you forgot:
And at least 1 person will be frustrated that nobody is talking about overpopulation and how encouraging the importation of extra people from countries with a high birth rate will do nothing to stem the environmental degradation that comes from having too many people.
That's my thought. But I'm always way down in the minority.
This is really just about social security and money (or inflation) -- our system requires infinite growth/inflation or it implodes. Nobody thinks about sustainable anything till the well runs dry, and everyone tries to draw from it faster and faster as it nears bottom.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I've been at some big name universities with departments that had highly international student bodies. In recent years, I've taught in such departments.
We're getting the world's best and brightest. They often do better work that many coddled and insular American students. Then, a significant percentage of them have a "panic period" somewhere near the end of their studies in which they try to figure out how to stay, start a business, take a position at a company that's willing to hire them if they sort it out, but not to go farther than that in terms of immigration help.
Then, they go. I keep in touch with a number of them that have gone on to do significant things in their own countries, some even on the international stage.
It is, quite seriously, a travesty. They could have been representing the U.S. and contributing to the economy here. Instead, they took a slot from a (probably admittedly less qualified) U.S. student who will now never reach their full potential, and we send them home with a bunch of tangled red tape and rejection letters from USCIS at the end to contribute to economies and societies elsewhere.
It is very, very seriously short-sighted. Too many Americans imagine that such people would be "taking our jobs" when in fact many of them would be "making our jobs" instead.
So who are you going to get to teach your kids when all that highly qualified faculty packs up and moves somewhere they can find a decent supply of grad students (read: the people who do all the work) who are interested in something other than getting an MBA so they can be upper management, or being on Oprah?
Both political parties in the are behaving badly here:
Except in Europe they really mean it. In the US you can say that no citizen can do the job but then you don't have to prove that the guy you are bringing in has the experience you said no US engineer has.
And that is spoken like a person who has no clue how difficult it is for many (most?) Americans who desire an education past high school.
basically the same thing to your entire post: Orders of magnitude problem.
Yes, if your parent is a professor you can get in when you otherwise maybe shouldn't quite be able to. But there's space to allow for those sorts of risk at US schools, and it's limited in scope. With lots of other places that's the majority.
That is also true in the United States if you are a not-wealthy U.S. citizen.
While there is a huge difference in connections, the difference in quality of education between a hugely expensive one and an inexpensive one is not anywhere near what is in some places.
The Indian education system doesn't suffer from the issues you mentioned above
Not all of them, but most of them. I have 2 uncles who teach at Indian schools and 8 cousins in indian universities and we get about 30 indian grad students a year where I am and they all say the same thing: about 1/4 of degrees even from the best indian universities are basically fraudulent and bought with bribes, and there's no way to identify which ones those are on our end. We even occasionally get the odd student here who thinks they can bribe their way through, and it usually ends up being my job to tell them it's best to pack their bags and go home before they've paid tuition.
I grant you, that ratio for Harvard business school could be the same, but no one would know differently, harvard medical school on the other hand, no way.
India definitely has *far* more qualified people than it has resources to educate them. India has some combination of political connections and bribes pervading a lot of the system including the entrance exams an curriculum.
Universities in the US let them in more easily
Maybe the pay your way in schools, but we certainly don't. We take indian students (and chinese students) because they are on average significantly better than our domestic ones, and we get our pick of them. It's hard to realize just how much bigger india is than the US, but to find people at the quality of stop students from india and china in Canada or the US is very very hard, they exist, but in an absolute numbers problem, there aren't a lot of them, and indian and chinese students (and arabs and persians) are usually looking to go into fields like science and engineering which hard enough to fill with capable people at the best of times.
The issue of international study students is separate from that of illegal immigrants. Immigrants that are here illegally are not receiving free university level educations. Neither are international students here to study. They have to acquire visas to study and pay tuition. US immigration law requires foreign students to leave as soon as their studies are completed. Which is counterproductive to domestic businesses. These are bright people who are entering the professional workforce, highly educated but working outside of the US. We should encourage them to stay and help American businesses so that we benefit from their education
Cheers !
I'm so disappointed that there are people who actually agree with this! Don't you guys have an empathy? Is it just impossible for you to put yourself in someone else's shoes?
Imagine you had the opportunity to go to another country and get good education ( I'm not even gonna get into the tuition fees...). You finish your degree and want to work in the country, but everywhere you go you are turned down. Why? Because the businesses in the country don't accept your degree or just doesn't mean that much in that country. Tell me honestly, what you are going to do. What are you going to do in a foreign country that won't allow you to stay without a job?
I dunno about you, but I'm not going to live on the street or stay in the country illegally until my ass is hauled by to my country...
Instead of asking yourself the question above, you just assume people are there to "steal" education and of course the only solution is to deny those thieves entry to your country. Hasn't it occured to you that businesses are multinational and international now? How well do you think your graduates are going to be prepared for such a business world?
No, go ahead America. Close all the borders, continue bombing nations out there for their resources - or as you euphemistically put it "liberate them". Cut yourself from the internet and kick anybody who looks foreign out. Let's see how that works out.
This isn't about education, it's not about taxes and it's not about immigration. It's about investment.
The people the president is talking about will find it easier to start a high tech startup in China or Korea than they will here. It doesn't matter where they come from, whether they paid tuition or were funded by NSF and it doesn't matter if we make them leave or want them to stay.
They're leaving because the opportunity in high tech is right now somewhere else.
English is presumably your first language, please learn to use it. Your post is the stuff of English teachers' nightmares.
Editor promotes trollish article written by an anonymous reader...
Okay, given that I don't think it's ever fair to anthrpomorphize an idea (or in this case an article or summary) as having an opinon, whose opinon is this?
My conclusion is simply that this editor thinks that a the US should let foreigners into US schools, but wants to maintain a sense of plausible deniablity...
About half the engineering grad students in American universities are from foreign countries.
Once they transfer back to their countries R&D knowledge whose development was paid for by Americans, guess who will be out of a job, possibly permanently?
"we are investing millions of dollars [actually billions] to educate these students at our leading universities"
and then links to a pdf, which has the first line:
"NAFSA: Association of International Educators estimates that international
students and their dependents contributed approximately $21.81 billion to the U.S.
economy during the 2011-2012 academic year."
They are paying you billions, not the other way around
After reading and seeing the intelligence (or absence thereof) in the US presidential race (most notably on the side of the republican candidates, as well as members of congress and house), as well as reading many very intelligent posts (not!) of people on social media, clearly proving total ignorance of anything not directly concerning the US or their local issues, I wonder whether the US school system may need to take care of itself first ...
About 24% of international students have their fees paid primarily by domestic scholarships. You can get some raw data at the IIE.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Re family size, this used to be true, but no longer. Mexican women in Mexico are down to 2.1 children per, and 2.4 per in the US. The US rate is down 23% from 1990.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Never thought I'd see it.
Brought tears to my eyes.
Mod parent up for great justice!
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Meanwhile French highschool dropouts work 35 hour/week jobs for a paltry 1500 euros minimum wage.
That must be why France's economy is failing while dragging down the eurozone with it!
And nobody ever emigrated to France again!
Having an isolationalist policy of keeping people out is a bad idea and a great way to end up on the losing end of foreign policy. All the instances of unfortunate foreign students are not the norm and the good students far outnumber the bad. There are certainly instances of local students taking advantage of foreign students as well. As we all know, the US has never been an isolationist country and has become awesome because of it.
On a different note: I think having too many smart people in this country is a good problem to have. They'll figure out something smart to do. And it causes a real Brain drain in many foreign countries.
The students are there due to preferential policy
U.S. Universities have stopped being about education, and are now about profit. Nothing else explains turning away students who want to pay for their education, and then complaining about having so few students demanding a course that they must cancel it, and it "happens" to result in stretching a 4 year degree into a 5 year one, adding 25% tuition and fees per student who is allowed to attend.
Obama bemoaning the foreign students getting their education in the U.S. and taking their knowledge elsewhere is missing the point: Admissions are preferential towards those students who pay the most, and it tiers as: (1) International, (2) Out of State, (3) local. There have been numerous investigative articles about this fact: http://www.schools.com/articles/are-finances-a-factor-in-college-admissions.html
Some universities go so far as to spell it out explicitly; here's what Vanderbilt has to say:
"Those international students who demonstrate they can afford the cost of attending Vanderbilt will be given preferential treatment in the admission process."
Source: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/financialaid/undergraduate/international.php
The degree stretching activity speaks most loudly to the fact that tuition is a minor factor in the financial gains a university makes per student; there are also fees, but they would be the same as a first year student in their first year vs. a fifth year student in their fifth; instead, the incentives to the university to continue educating a given student go up with the amount of time the student has already attended.
What would be interesting to see is if there is a stretching bias toward "high value" students; in particular, whether stretching happens uniformly across the board, or whether you are most likely to get stretched if you are an international student, and least likely to get stretched if you were an in-state student.
In any case, the fix for what Obama is complaining about isn't to keep the international graduates in the U.S. after graduation, it's fixing the admissions bias towards international students for economic rather than academic reasons, and fix the stretching for economic reasons, which can often make it uneconomical for some locals to attend at all, or cause them to drop out before graduating. If a university exists to educate students first and make profits second, then it will end up making decisions which are in the best interests of the students.
I think you'd find that the international students are better than the local students on average.
Why? Because not as many parents, govs, corps, orgs are going to fork out $200k+ over 4 years to send a below average student to study in the USA. If you ain't that great, you end up studying somewhere cheaper, or not going to university at all. Only the very rich can afford to spend money like that. $200k buys a lot in India or China.
There's also a greater pressure to not waste that investment. Some crack under that pressure...
First of all, I am a tax paying US citizen who paid through the nose for his undergraduate education, and I do feel pissed off that 60-70% of all seats in the Ph.D. programs in my field are taken by foreign students, most of whom pay nothing for education here and are terrible at teaching in English. At same time, there is one important reason why its good idea to educate foreign students here for free. We export our ideas abroad through these students. Think of students who come from countries that are considered America's rivals such as China or Russia. Think about students who come from undemocratic, politically corrupt countries in the Middle-East or Africa. A lot of them will inevitably go back to their countries. They will take them them not only their degrees, but also the knowledge of our society, our political system, our much cherished basic human rights, such as free speech and the right to vote. Some of them will eventually assume important leadership positions in their countries, whether it's in education, government, or private sector. Through them our ideas will influence their countries too.
Owe the world? Really?
If you're worried that you're giving them all sorts of skills for free only to kick them out of the country - - - maybe the key is not to give them all sorts of free skills in the first place? In my state they want to give instate rates or even FREE college tuition to illegal aliens.
It turns out most of the problem of radicalization lies with the second generation, ala Bin Laden. Your natural hatred of your parents while a teen quickly morphs into seeing them as nothing but ingratiating servants to the White Man, thus justifiying destruction of said Man and his culture.
This is the most blatant lie I have read in a long time. US has benefited enormously from the influx of highly educated immigrants, whose education was paid for other countries. The US got them FOR FREE...
I bet that there are many, many more fully-educated foreigners coming to US than people who pursue their "cheap but good-quality" (really?) education in US then move abroad to benefit other nations.
www.ixticaret.com
I was an international student at an ivy league. **By far** the smartest guys were the international students, they raised the bar a lot in all my science classes (I majored in CS) and also literature/arts. I payed full price, no financial aid. I also stayed for many years after and payed *lots* of taxes. Think about it, the US gets the very best from Europe/Asia selected from a pool of millions of people, many more than the pool in the US. For free. Are you really complaining?
What makes American schools the best in the world (especially at the graduate level) is that they admit the best students in the world. Stop admitting the students, and the schools will no longer be the best. It's that simple. Furthermore, top professors/researchers choose their universities on the basis of where they have access to the best students, which makes this proposition a vicious cycle. So, American schools would lose their edge in less than a generation.
For asking these questions. I've been asking these questions since 1994. Look at the case of Attila the Hun. A barbarian Mongol captured and educated in Rome. That education was later used to defeat Rome. Osama bin Laden. Educated in US. There are many more of those type of examples in history. Those are extreme examples with extreme results but the same principals still apply. Why are we educating foreigners?
I don't know about you, but I think this country could use more people willing to bust their ass and pay whatever it costs for a quality education.
Don't those kids pay through the nose for the seat at those universities?
How is the US paying for it?
The new health care laws require anyone working 30 hours + per week to be offered health care. one of 2 things will happen - employers will slash hours to 29/wk, or they just quit offering health care. It's cheaper NOT to offer health care and just pay the fine.
"then wouldn't another option be not providing them with the skills in the first place?" You would be denying BIG Business of profits.
If this is what Obama wants, lets make attendance or a degree from an accredited US post-secondary institution a condition of citizenship for those currently in the country illegally. I'll tell you why that won't happen: because what he's saying is a bunch of bullshit and he knows it. Immigration "reform" is about legalizing the wholesale importation of poverty into the United States as a hedge against wage inflation. It has been a hugely successful strategy for US business for decades and they and their Congresscritters are working hard to legitimize it.
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But not, not, one million (billion) times NOT at your expense. We payed for it in hard-earned cash. My wife's PhD cost about US$ 100K at a state university (CSU), my BA cost about $40K at a private university (DU). On the other hand, even if you had payed for it, consider how many of the world's problems would be solved, or vastly ameliorated, if most people were educated to the top of their abilities. Hunger, overpopulation, climate, STDs, poverty, religious struggles, a ton of others. All of these are the root causes why the US is the target of so many attacks of all kinds. The truth is that this headline is sensationalist and aims to cause controversy. Using the word "owe" in this context is a sure-fire way to raise the voices of Americans. It's code, it's a dog whistle for conservatives, it connects (to them) with entitlements and a lopsided sense of economic justice. The better question to ask is: "how does it benefit the US to invest in educating foreigners?" And once again, though: every single foreign student I know of in the US pays for their education. And what's more, we pay out-of-state tuition. So back off.
You can't take two different cultures, one whose fringe groups are violent, and one whose fringe groups aren't and try to assign the problems to visible sound-bite-sized differences. The reason Asian extremists aren't blowing people up could be the calming affect of a diet rich in soy sauce, or the pervasive influence of Hello Kitty. Simple contrasts: "what does this culture have that that one doesn't" won't do it.
Looking at the whole problem, the Asians have won and lost wars with us. Some they started, some we did. Both sides have behaved honorably on many occasions when it wasn't in their own best interests. The Japanese in particular are total technophiles and the US is addicted to gadgetry. So with that history and those commonalities, of course we can find ways to get along.
The Persian Gulf is not well stocked in technophiles. Their lives and goals are very different from ours. Our wars over there have been about oil, and when they are not conducted in the open they have been covert, and nothing like honorable. An overall problem with their culture leaves them with large pools of people whose livelyhoods are completely out of their control, subject to the bittersweet tides of the global energy market and bad leadership. Their leaders know that the US acts like the world-police when it comes to oil security, so decades of propaganda against the country they are most likely to meet on the battlefield, is just part of the bad-dictator-101 handbook.
Of course we can't get along with these people. It will take decades of honorable, selfless behavoir on our part in order for the Persian Gulf countries to really trust us, and this last decade hasn't been an ideal start.
So it's the hostile option then.
Education should transcend borders. The idea of it being illegal to live, work, or study somewhere is preposterous. Every civilised nation should have a clear track for becoming a citizen, especially if one has attained a college degree from an institution in such a nation. Borders are artificial; are nearly as arbitrary as the US Dollar.
If the President truly fears that international students will use skills learned at U.S. colleges and universities to the detriment of the United States if they return home (isn't a rising tide supposed to lift all boats?) — an argument NYC Mayor Bloomberg advanced in 2011 ('we are investing millions of dollars [actually billions] to educate these students at our leading universities, and then giving the economic dividends back to our competitors – for free') — then wouldn't another option be not providing them with the skills in the first place?
This is probably one of the most abysmal uses of parallel structure I've ever seen. What's worse is that we see this sort of thing on Slashdot all the time. The goal of written communication is not to cram every thought in your head between two periods. For any sentence, say what you want to say and get out. Is it a complete thought? Then don't bury it in parenthesis within another sentence, much less a more complex one. Does your parallel structure require parallel structure? Then what you're writing -- though you may not know it -- is a paragraph. If you can write everything you want in simple sentences, try to do so. No one will thing you stupid for writing clearly and concisely.
Isn't a rising tide supposed to lift all boats? That's the argument NYC Mayor Bloomberg advanced in 2011. "We are investing millions of dollars [actually billions] to educate these students at our leading universities, and then giving the economic dividends back to our competitors – for free." If the President truly fears that international students will use skills learned at U.S. colleges and universities to the detriment of the United States if they return home, then wouldn't another option be to not provide them with those skills in the first place?
Foreign students are hardly taking anything away from the US economy, in fact the contribute massive amounts to it, in the form of huge tuition fees. Many of these people later stay in the United States, and contribute to its economy.
I strongly feel that the United States does owe the rest of the world. Most of the last 60 years+, the United States has waged a war of economic terrorism against the rest of the world, through coercive trade laws, economic blackmail, and rampant militarism.
The plundering of British and German technology in the aftermath of the Second World War, was the core foundation for the US economy in the last century. German technology, and engineers were shipped to the United States, and the UK was blackmailed in the post war period, with reconstruction loans, to provide jet engine, aerospace, and computer technology.
I have nothing but contempt for the US approach to foreign relations, the foul fascistic, terrorist supporting foreign policy, and the absolute corruption of the ruling junta in Washington.
How can you give a speech about international matters regarding the well-being of our country in terms of jobs and businesses without even saying the word "trade" or "NAFTA"?
re-adjusting how you deport, block, or create citizens of illegal aliens has little bearing on these things.
Once again, we're being shown a scapegoat for the real problems we're facing. Jose Shmoe isn't our problem, the laws governing international trade is. Globalization right now is what is killing us. It's inevitable in time, but only when the other countries catch up - in the mean time, we're just doing this re-balancing that's destroying the middle-class. And in time, the middle class will be gone, and our economy will collapse in on itself. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. My, what a wonderful world.
Could be viewed as just another way to ensure cheap labor and corporate masters.
For all the talk here about foreign students paying their way, and how great it is to make "friends" with your former enemies from abroad, I have to wonder where you all were when the Chinese MBA's started buying up US companies and replacing their staffs with Chinese speaking immigrants, and where you all were when the massive outsourcing devalued tech and manufacturing jobs.
You will serve your corporate masters well in the new world order !
Education in the US at the US's expense? Count me in.
Pretty much anywhere else I'd have to pay hefty tution fees.
Been there, met quite a couple students from Tunisia, Algeria and Marocco. That's outside the EU. Most of those students coming from these countries to France for their studies (as opposed to those who were born in France or already lived there) were entirely funded by scholarships including tuition, housing and medical bills. That is, a scholarship from the French state, not from their state of origin. One of them even came from a really rich family. Still the French state paid for everything. Now I'm not saying that it was a bad investment for the French state. I don't know if it was or not, and some of these guys were really good. But there are far more students from the mentioned countries coming to study in France than the other way around and it's definitely wrong to believe that "foreign students pay tuition fees" applies to all non-EU countries
The simple solution would be to give those graduates visas. But those graduates are absolutely no argument for admitting the 11MM illegal immigrants!!!
Does Obama really think we are THAT stupid?
You have given evidence that that shows that Foreign Students have provided a net CONTRIBUTION to the US economy of $21,807,000,000. That means that they are a positive influence. Why would you want to take away things that positively contribute to the economy?
Thanks for the links, I have drawn a different conclusion from the data.
They do pay more. Which is why American students can't get in to their local universities. That is just wrong. Universities should be run at cost and shouldn't pay anyone over the going rate for the job. Maybe a couple of hundred thousand for the top job and that's it. Places lice UC Berkeley should have to take their Californian students in preference to foreign students. Maybe allow 15% out of state and 10% foreign but allocate 75% to local kids, unless they don't apply. Education should be the primary role of these places, not making cash for their management.
If you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always get the support of Paul.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."
"How good he has it" is totally irrelevant to "how to ought to be'. "How good you have it " is always the argument the despot who wants to excuse the crappy treatment he's dishing out to the people he's dishing it out to . So what if women aren't being stood up against a wall and shot in the head ? Does that mean women to whom that doesn't happen "have it good" and should appreciate whatever oppression their society dishes out to them? "How good you have it" means nothing more than "someone has it worse than you somewhere" So the fuck what? What the fuck do you think follows from that? Fucking moron.
You just went full retarded. There is not enough that well qualified american people there to do the work.
FTFY
I'm it's in the best interest of the United States of America to have it both ways.
When they graduate we give them citizenship, a driver's license, a car, a visa card and cut em loose.
Screwed.
Franklin Institute was the first engineering center that made industrial standards--on angle, direction (clockwise), and depth of spiral on screws. If you didn't conform to the standards made you were... uh... what's the word....'forced to revamp your factory at expense'.
Industrial standards, ideals, beliefs, heck... what styles of drinks/media/songs, preference in accounting and banks. The entire cost of education is teeny-weeny compared to the plain costs to promote American beliefs and markets (do we count the military conquest of neo-colonial markets... I wasn't, but if I did the cost soars).
Then...... many stay. In which case we've got the best and the brightest of the world here. And... this is the only controversial point, maybe undergraduates contribute to the society and having them come here benefits us ?... a stretch....
As a PhD student in engineering, at a Uni with 20+ other PhD students in Mechanical engineering alone, I disagree with your assessment.
There just aren't enough of you. How many psychology PhD candidates are there for every one engineering PhD student?
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