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Russia Backs Sending Top Students Abroad With a Catch
First time accepted submitter Clark Schultz writes "Vladimir Putin plans to send the country's top domestic students abroad in an effort to prepare engineers, doctors, and scientists with the most modern education. The initiative comes with a catch: Students must return to Mother Russia to work. Though critics say that the students may be tempted to stay abroad after receiving their advanced degrees, Putin is confident they will be properly motivated to keep up their end of the bargain. As one advocate notes, the 'brilliant' practice of educating Russians at top global universities dates back to the times of Peter the Great."
Just don't come back gay.
If they don't want to go back to Russia, they don't have to accept the grants.
I'm not really seeing a problem here?
Sent from my PDP-11
They will be made into nobles. After several generations, there will be a revolution, and cycle will repeat.
the whole point of these programs is to kind of 'leapfrog' a country's current level of technology/skill. If the state pays for a student to study abroad (i'm looking at you Saudi Arabia), it should absolutely be implied that the student *should* return home to put those skills to use.
From the summary:
"educating Russians at top global universities dates back to the times of Peter the Great"
So... what's the point of this story?
.
... the world out there will NOT believe in you when they know you are from Russia, or China.
Trust me, I've been through this, for the past few decades.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The crying shame in the UK is that many graduates cannot find real jobs and end up flipping burgers. If Putin ensures that they have a good chance of getting a job upon return to Russia - many will find that an attractive proposition and be more than willing to return.
Malaysia does the same thing. Send out bright students on a full scholarship to American universities (preferably the cheaper, public schools), with the requirement that they perform a short stint (3-5 years) as an indentured servant of the state.
For foreigners it's generally a good deal, not withstanding the opportunity for corruption in selection. You get a free education and a guaranteed job when you graduate.
But it sucks for Americans as it drives up tuition.
Still, can't have those damn 'racists' (meaning 'white people') deciding who they live with, can we! Much fairer to have a handful of JEWS deciding for us, and telling us how 'racist' we are for not wanting third world parasites destroying OUR countries... and of course, we couldn't object to having JEWS living among us, could we! After all, a parasite cannot live off of other parasites, and the poor Jews will die if they don't have a 'host' to suck the blood from...
This is common practice on lots of countries. In Venezuela this has been going for almost a century (though i don't know the current status since our problem with $$$), they give you a scholarship to study abroad with the condition to come back, otherwise they give you (or your relatives) the bill.
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Best of all with this practice is that russians aren't hypocrites, at one time they educated foreign people with the same catch, that they would return home and benefit their own populations. Of course, hopefully with some new ideas and as many as possible as KGB/GRU agents.
Or all the loved ones they left behind, will pay for their mistake.
Nothing new here. Many governments run scholarship schemes for study at foreign universities and include a period of bonded labour afterwards. Even the US does this in areas of its strategic interest, such as naval architecture.
Many people from Commonwealth nations studied at Australian, UK and Canadian universities as part of the Colombo Plan for development of poorer Commonwealth nations. This aspect of the Colombo Plan was by far the most successful and there are periodic attempts to revive it.
Let's ask ourselves: What would Ivan the Terrible do?
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Why would they want to do that? Russian science and engineering education (especially undergraduate) is top-notch. I would NOT want to have been educated in the States, including the overhyped Harvard or MIT although I do like working and living here. Graduate school is a different matter but it is hard to beleive that the problems with Russian science are education related. Money (or lack thereof) and lack of respect is a more likely cause.
Pay for the education through student loans.
Then Russia owns them forever, just like regular creditors.
Will find an alarming drop in relatives answering their skype calls.
It's not because you're Chinese. It's because you're CONSTANTLY going on about how you left China decades ago, and how you're a naturalized U.S. citizen, and other crap like that.
If you're endlessly bringing that up here at Slashdot (your comment history is excellent proof of what I'm saying, by the way), you're probably doing it offline, too. That'll annoy people to no end.
I don't know how to put this politely, but if the people you're referring to are anything like the people here, we just want you to shut the hell up about you leaving China and becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. We really don't care that you're Chinese; we do care that you're annoying us.
[*] Gazetted officers are the civilian equivalent of the commissioned officers. Induction to the service by the President published in The Gazette of the Government of India. I had the right to sign government documents and files in green ink. My batch mates are under secretaries and joint secretaries of the government now. I am a lowly slashdotter with 31 achievements.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
in the US if they wanted to. So why not? Hell, they could partner with the State Department for stateside enforcement on this whole "get educated in the US, contribute to the economy back home" scheme.
Perhaps Putin will find new ways to motivate them.
I say we cut Russian and Chinese student VISAs until their countries behave more reasonably. Why train your enemy?
an ill wind that blows no good
Vietnam has a similar scheme where they issue scholarships to western countries (eg. Australia). I'm familar with the Vietnam-Australia version and this is how it works. The Vietnamese/Australian government have these joint scholarships, from memory they were pronounced as "OZ" scholarship, but I've never seen how it's spelt.
After the students complete their studies, they are expected to return home and work for at least a year (or two?) before being allowed to work outside Vietnam. This is written down on their scholarship contract and the time is tracked. To discourage Vietnamese students from simply staying in Australia, they are forced to leave for at least 1 year (or two?) before re-entering the country. Where they go Australia doesn't care, as long as they're out of the country.
This sounds all good in theory but in practice a lot of Vietnamese students rather not go back home to work. Simply because after having tasted the good life they do not want to go back. And more so if they pursued an academic career, because it's non-existent back home.
Have gnu, will travel.
These days you can just buy textbooks, read them, watch youtube videos, go online to ask questions, and learn just about anything you want that you would learn from a university. OK, some exceptions maybe, for instance, labwork experience but you don't need an expensive fancy university for that, your local community college or university can do just fine. You can get just as good an education at your local university as you could at a prestigious foreign one but you need to have interest and ambition.
Yes I am college educated but almost all of what I know isn't from school. I speak three languages just about, almost none of that is from school (one from my parents that I learned as a child, Spanish from Youtube, watching T.V., the radio, podcasts, various books such as verb conjugation books, an English to Spanish dictionary, grammar books, etc...). What I know about cryptography came from hours and hours of podcasts and lots and lots of reading. Yes, when it comes to things like physics and chemistry it helps to have a lab and have the tools that school provides to give you some preliminary experience but one doesn't need a super fancy expensive school for that.
also at a lower cost then US University with out the big loans.
in the US if they wanted to. So why not? Hell, they could partner with the State Department for stateside enforcement on this whole "get educated in the US, contribute to the economy back home" scheme.
I don't think they're talking about the US, nobody wants to be trapped in that hole.
Before Putin, the testing of school graduates had a form of individual exams and essays performed by teachers. Now, in attempts to exclude corruption, the automated formal tests (YEGE - Yedinyi Gosudarstvennyi Ekzamen - The Uniform State Exam) are performed. The graduates just mark the numbers of correct answers.
I am not going to discuss the destruction of rational thinking by training the children to choose the only correct answer, especially when there is a political course such as history. I just inform you that the HIGHEST grades were obtained by peasants from Northern Caucasian republics such as Chechnya, Ingushetia and Daghestan (Remember Tsarnaev?). As a result, since the students are accepted to institutes according to YEGE only, they were accepted to institutes and it became clear that their grades are FAKE. And since it appeared impossible to eradicate corruption in Caucasian schools the only result was that the Russian institutes required the right to reinstate the entry exams, and some leading institutes obtained such a right. All other institutes accept them and just sell the good marks and diplomas.
You didn't just tell Russia that it can't use international law, did you. Are you really daring Lawyers to not be able to do something using the law??
I'm Russian and I came to America originally to study but I'll never go back as long as Putin's in power. Besides my programming job here pays way more than I'd make at home and the weather in California rocks!
Putin will murder your family if you don't return.
Ah, Comrade Putin, he is bringing back another practice of the USSR: defection.
That actually exists, it's the J1 visa. It has a 2-year period where you can't get another US visa (from certain categories, like J1 and H1B), and the only way to get an exemption is with approval from your own country.
Putin is confident they will be "properly motivated"
Those students are going to study abroad with money provided by the State. Anything you do with someone else's money, you have to pay back. Those people are offered the chance to have a better professional future in their homeland or, should they afford to pay for it, elsewhere. The alternative is a miserable existence. What do you expect, money for free?
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
Same thing happened in Romania. Students had to return and were supposed to work in the public administration, but no agency would hire them. It was unclear wether they had the right to take a job in the private sector, and benefits in Romania last only 6 months. They made some scandal in the press two years ago - haven't heard of them ever since. Prolly they went into the EU to get decent jobs and never looked back.
The Russian students will go to places like Deutschland, the U.K. Austria, and so on. I very much doubt they will be going to the U.S. People who have been to the U.S. know exactly what I am saying. Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Institute of Literacy Research Date: 4.28.2013 U.S. Illiteracy Statistics Data Percent of U.S. adults who can’t read 14 % Number of U.S. adults who can’t read 32 Million Percent of U.S. adults who read below a 5th grade level 21 % Percent of prison inmates who can’t read 63 % Percent of high school graduates who can’t read 19 %
This was also tried by Pakistani government starting from 2006. The government funded pupils to go abroad for higher studies (Masters and PhD), but again the catch was that they would need to come back and serve the country for several years. IMHO, it was an excellent initiative but not all of them return back to their homeland, and then with the change of government in Pakistan the funds were put on hold for the students who were already abroad.
Because there's no jobs.
No Family or Friends to threaten, then no go.... Is this what they mean by "properly motivated"?
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Just say you're gay, and they know about it at home, and if you go back to Russia the government will do bad things to you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Pinochet did this in Chile, and it worked out very well. The Chicago Boys were a product of this program.
Learn to judge your own self worth and achievements and the hell with everyone else.
There is always something someone can "hold against you". I am a southern white male who works in IT. I routinely work with people all over the US and even in other countries. Occasionally people think a southern white male must be stupid. I just do my job and prove them wrong.
Take that mom!
They thought I actually liked you when I left. ;)
It's perfectly reasonable. Lots of countries,usually small ones, do just this. They provide scholarships for overseas higher education with the stipulation that you return to the country and work there for a period of years. Thereby allowing the nation to receive some benefit for its investment in you.
It is a great system. It's great for the country and it affords the student an opportunity that they would never otherwise have.
It seems to me that the entire discussion is missing the point. The point being that Russian mentality is oppressive. Part of it may be revealed as to how the West handled Germany, Italy and Japan after WWII and Russia handling its own allies. Corruption of government officials as well as the fact that citizens expect the government to take care of them may also play a role. The general society rule is that the stronger controls the weaker, but Russian environment seems to have unique undercurrents.
It seems to me that the entire discussion is missing the point. The point being that Russian mentality is oppressive. Part of it may be revealed as to how the West handled Germany, Italy and Japan after WWII and Russia handling its own allies. Corruption of government officials as well as the fact that citizens expect the government to take care of them may also play a role. The general society rule is that the stronger controls the weaker, but Russian environment seems to have unique undercurrents.