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Getting Into College the Old Fashioned Way: With Money
Businessweek (in a story spotted via Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution) profiles ThinkTank Learning, a college-admission consultancy founded by Steven Ma, and largely catering to ambitious Asian immigrants like Ma, and their offspring — kids who'd like to go to elite schools, and can afford to have Ma's firm help them navigate the path to getting in. It's a statistics driven system, and backed by a money-back guarantee, so long as the applicant meets certain requirements: ThinkTank will refund their tens of thousands of dollars in fees if they don't make it into the sort of school that the ThinkTank algorithms say they will. Basically, they've reverse engineered the admissions policies at schools, particularly elite schools like MIT, Stanford, and the Ivies, and done so well enough to know which factors in a student's portfolio can be tweaked to increase their odds of getting into the big-name schools. A slice: [Ma's] proprietary algorithm assigns varying weights to different parameters, derived from his analysis of the successes and failures of thousands of students he's coached over the years. Ma's algorithm, for example, predicts that a U.S.-born high school senior with a 3.8 GPA, an SAT score of 2,000 (out of 2,400), moderate leadership credentials, and 800 hours of extracurricular activities, has a 20.4 percent chance of admission to New York University and a 28.1 percent shot at the University of Southern California. Those odds determine the fee ThinkTank charges that student for its guaranteed consulting package: $25,931 to apply to NYU and $18,826 for USC.
Universities are pretty much McUniversities these days. Arguing whether MIT is better than a state engineering school is like arguing whether Applebee's is better then Burger King. The food all comes frozen in a box, is cooked up by grill monkeys, and served by service droids. Having a degree from a state school hasn't hurt me as I am close to making upper management wages at a prestigious McCompany. And don't kid yourself, there are only McCompanies and McJobs left these days.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The internet liberated knowledge. So long as paid education doesnt retard development MITOCW, Coursera and many many others, I see no problem.
or potential human/alien hybrid
Out-of-state tuition is generally higher. If a college has more students from other states, does that mean colleges give preference in admission to out-of-state students because they pay more?
A score related to their probability of admission? And tutoring plus some help in filling out the paperwork? Is that worth $10-$20K? How about doing it the old fashioned way and submitting applications to half a dozen top schools plus some second tier institutions as a fall back.
TFA described the plight of a fuck-up who's parents have loads of money. For him, $700K to $1.1 Million. Do they really provide 100 times the tutoring of the top ranked student customers? Or will part of this find its way into some universities general fund?
Have gnu, will travel.
Its about the connections, and fellating egos.
Meanwhile, in Canada, I paid around $9,000 (significantly less if you also count the scholarships I got) for my full BSc. at a university that usually ranks towards the low end of the top 100 - perhaps not as prestigious as MIT, but more than sufficient for most people. If you're poor, you can also get a lot of financial support, enough to make university basically free.
Competition and expense at elite colleges is really tough for my kids. Today, I don't think I would have gotten into the colleges I attended 30 years ago. And I hear most of the parents of my generation griping about competition from incoming foreign students.
No, I say this is good. The USA college tuitions have been going up 3 times the rate of inflation for three decades. While much of the increased annual fees go to "need based" tuition scholarships, the university endowments have funded an arms race on "country club" campuses complexes, the maintenance of which draws from the same tuition and fees. Students are paying for the lavishness. MOOC (massive online open courses) have been proposed as the solution, providing the education without the cost of the colleges' overhead.
As this would trend, the smaller and middle reputation colleges would fold and get privatized (which has not worked well at all). Colleges like, say Hendrix in Arkansas or St. Mike's in VT, are fine schools with good professors, and they'd be the victim if it weren't for an increase in students who can afford to pay the full tuition. If the country club and reputations of US colleges didn't attract foreign full-tuition paying students, the only solution would be more college debt, which is already unsustainable. So if my kid (with better grades, scores, and languages than I had) didn't get into the "A-List" college I attended, I'm satisfied she'll find more people as smart as she is at the less prestigious school, and that all the foreign tuition coming into this program will float all boats.
The only two things most people remember about college are 1) the interesting people they met (friends, faculty, etc) and 2) the debt they leave with. MOOC's only address the latter. More wealthy foreign students paying full tuition addresses both.
Gently reply
I really despise the way college admissions in the US works (I have a Ph.D. from an Ivy, but did my undergrad in Europe). The problem is that all your hobbies are turned into some form of merit that you use to apply for college. In order to get some documented evidence for this, everything has to be officially done through a club or some other nonsense, where you can find someone to write a recommendation letter for you. As a Finn when I was in high school, we used to hop on the train with some friends and go up to Northern Finland to hike through the wilderness. Once during Winter break in -30 degrees (C) for a week in pitch black darkness on skis. I value much more having to plan for everything independently.
Would you rather be surrounded by smart people or by normal people?
Better schools give you smarter peer groups, and you learn from and with smarter peer groups.
No problem at all. You pay me 10k and I'll tell you what you need to do to get into the college of your dreams. And if it doesn't work out, you get those 10k back.
How I do it? Not at all. A few of the bozos that fall for my con will make it in anyway and I'll keep their 10 grand, paying back the others.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I attended college in California about 30 years ago, studying biology. Back then, the student body was an ethnic mix of whites, Hispanics, blacks and Asians. Yet most of us were third or more generation Americans. We were born and raised in America, our parents had been born and raised in America, our grandparents had been born and raised in America, and only then did we start getting to ancestors who came from overseas. We spoke English as a native language, and culturally we had a lot in common. Most of our professors had a similar lineage and background, as well.
30 years later, my nephew (American born and raised) is attending the same college I did, and he also chose to study biology. What he describes is completely different from what I experienced. He's told me about how many students there are wealthy foreigners who have absolutely no ties to America, and often a very limited grasp of the English language. This is even true for some of the professors, apparently.
He's told me horror stories about group work he's been forced into, where there will be maybe two American-raised students forced to work with several foreigners. In one case he said that he and an American woman had to work with Chinese, Somali and Arab students on a project. The foreigners struggled to communicate with one another, and with the Americans. Some of the foreigners apparently just didn't even bother to do any work, since they were there just because their wealthy parents had sent them over, and didn't have any initiative whatsoever to succeed. In the end, the project was a near disaster for the two American students. They ended up doing the bulk of the work. They considered complaining to the professor and administration about the situation, but decided not to as they feared being labeled as "racists", even though the American woman was black.
I understand that colleges benefit financially from accepting these foreigners, especially when they can charge them many times what an American student is charged. But it sounds to me like this is absolutely destroying the learning experience for the American students. The American students are forced to work with sub-par foreign students who are only there because their parents have money. Then these middle-class American students need to take on the work load of the foreign students, in order to avoid failing group work assignments. It shames me to think how bad my nephew's experience is with the same college I attended, in the same field I studied, a mere 30 years later.
Statistical analysis is useful, but the interview process itself has enormous weight and is not easy to numerically manage this way. My interviewer for MIT was someone who'd known me since I was one year old, and wanted to make sure I was at least 1000 miles away from his daughter. No sane Ivy League or top notch school should have taken me on my numbers: they had to look past that to the piece of paper from the state that said "emancipated minor", realize I had *no* money or family support, and take me anyway on the grounds of "lord, if he's survived all this craziness, what could he do with *encouragement*".
It worked out: I built for NIH and MIT at least 3 patent worthy hardware inventions. (NIH grants don't cover the fees for patents, and it's all effectively public domain anyway, so I never got patents. I'd have liked the patents, even if I paid for the legal fees out of my own pocket. The lab wouldn't let me do that, darn it.) But if I'd been spending my time "working the numbers" for maximum college entry success, I'd have never learned to *explore* science, and equipment, and done some of the politically dangerous work but reviewing equipment and finding farcical measurements from other people's labs. And lord, did it pay off when I found old data that was misanalyzed because it was misrecorded or miscompared. Scientifically, and and in engineering terms, it was invaluable.
Anyway: micro-analyzing the odds and cooking the numbers would have wasted my resources, and guided me, as a student, away from actually learning vital subjects. Who would have anticipated that taking medieval history would have led me to the SCA, and the networking for weird science and engineering jobs among that geeky medieval re-enactment crowd?
get rid of student loans / make them income based / make the schools have to eat part of the costs for default and then you see costs come down / school teaching more real skill needed to do jobs.
"He's told me horror stories about group work he's been forced into, where there will be maybe two American-raised students forced to work with several foreigners. In one case he said that he and an American woman had to work with Chinese, Somali and Arab students on a project. "
SHOCK HORROR!!!
You racist fuck. Make your kid do some fucking group work with people that are different to him and get the hell on with things.
In case you're thick as pig shit, let me rephrase your words in a non-racist way, just so you get the point:
"My son has had to work with other students in his group work who are neither as bright, nor as motivated as he is."
Welcome to group work sunshine, we've all had to do it, and we all continue to do it throughout our professional lives. Kick your son in the fucking arse and tell him to get on with things.
but its not racism. Racism is only practiced by white people.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Seriously, I don't see how you can say that MOOCs are the solution to the problem of making education more accessible.
Have you ever taken a MOOC course? The videos will probably be decent, but everything else is total shit. The other "students" are the worst part, by far. I really hesitate to call them students, because that's exactly what they aren't.
If you've taken a MOOC course, you'll probably have looked at the discussion forums. And you'll have noticed that most of the topics were posted by "students" with Indian, Arabic or Asian names asking when they'd get their certificate of achievement, sometimes even before the course had officially started!
If you stuck with the course, you'd find these same Indian, Arab and Asian students asking for all sorts of special treatment. They "couldn't study" for the open book timed exam because of "religious holidays", so they feel they should pass the exam without even taking it.
Then after they ultimately fail the course, even admitting to not watching any of the videos, not doing any of the reading, and otherwise not studying or learning the material, they still insist that they deserve a certificate of achievement merely for taking the effort to click the button to register them in the course.
The worst part is that the people running the MOOC courses will sometimes give in to these absolutely idiotic demands, and retroactively adjust the course standards so that these complete failures end up just passing enough to get their precious certificate of achievement. This craps all over the legitimate students who actually put in some effort.
MOOCs are a joke. I don't see how your or anyone else can think that they're anything but jokes.
His scam was to guarantee that you would win at the horse track if you took his advice; if you didn't win you didn't own him anything. Of course his picks weren't any better than the next guy's; he collected his share from half of his victims and walked away with nothing from the rest.
Back in my day, NYU is where you went if you dropped out of Cooper Union.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Ever notice that many of the get-rich-quick techies are Ivy League dropouts?
I think if Zuckerberg went to Ithaca State and did exactly the same thing, he would never have been noticed by the money people that handed him his winning "lottery ticket". He may have had a business, but he would have been crushed by the other guys.
Its racist to acknowledge language barriers? ITs racist to expect that people attending an American university be able to speak English to participate in group assignments? Or do you expect the American students to learn Arabic, Mandarin and Somali?
Good-bye
Almost all financial aid is already need based (income and savings). The big problem is that students (and parents) don't make rational decisions when it comes to taking out those loans. Instead of a modest priced state school and sharing an apartment with three other students (which worked for me), they send Junior to an expensive school and make sure he lives in a private dorm room.
Back in past we did not have this big college for all push and we had more people going to trade and tech schools as well more places having in house training.
Now we are pushing to many people to college just for lot's of them to get big skill gaps and big loans to pay off.
forced dorm rooms are a big issues where some schools force you stay in one with room mates and sheared floors at a cost that is much higher then renting on your own.
Oh if only there were a "Mythical Man Month" book to point to for showing how group projects go bad.....
The approach mentioned here may get you into college, and it may cost money, but it is not old-fashioned. The old-fashioned way to get into colleges with money goes something like this: "My dad is a trustee at Princeton, so I knew I would get in." If you have 2 million dollars to spend, endowing a faculty chair at a university is a much better bet than paying for high-priced consulting services.
They do this because living on campus is part of the college experience for these schools - you are embedded with your fellow students, affording a much greater opportunity for out of class learning and facilitating collaboration.
I had a similar experience when I was in school a few years ago.
Group project with two German foreign exchange students--copy/pasted their part from another website. I caught it early and after some "clarification" from the professor, they redid it.
Another group project--with a white guy, white girl, African immigrant, and a Chinese exchange student. White girl didn't contribute anything at all, Chinese didn't contribute anything (informed us "I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do" two days before the report was due), and the African immigrant contributed one slide (the project was a slide and a paper). White guy and I ended up writing the entire paper, and we were not pleased.
I was the group leader for both projects. The lesson I learned wasn't that foreign students are worthless, but rather that people needed to be treated differently. For any project, I map out the pieces and dependencies that need to be completed in a shared spreadsheet, and let team members choose what they work on. This works out very well for motivated students, and functional procrastinators since the dependencies are also worked out. Unfortunately, simply telling everyone what needs to be done is not a one-size-fits-all solution. If I had assigned tasks to specific individuals early on and followed up regularly, I would have obtained better results. If output was poor or non-existent, we could have adjusted expectations ("you need to turn this in earlier so we can correct for ESL") or escalate to the professor if necessary.
If you are an "A" student, working with other "A" students is the easiest way to keep that A. Learning how to get the most of B and C students is likely more valuable than a slight downtick in your GPA.
Basically they're providing insurance that pays out based on the odds that you don't get into a college they say you can get into. The fee they charge is the premium for that insurance. It doesn't affect your odds of getting accepted in any way compared to if you'd applied on your own. The only thing the information they provide you may change is which schools you decide to apply to. It's actually a pretty clever way to monetize on the risk and uncertainty of applying to colleges, though I suspect the steep price to play will discourage most applicants.
To put it another way - they're letting you place bets on whether you'll be rejected by a school. And like all good bookies, they've crunched the numbers to make sure that statistically they come out ahead. But based on those odds they've crunched, you can drop or add schools you apply to to increase your ratio of acceptances to rejections, making it a marginally useful service whereas just plain gambling would mean on average the client loses.
but why does the cost have to be so high? The experience is nice but not at today's prices.
Umm... no. Those types would normally be fired, at least in any decent company. Did you even read the premise of the article: buying your way into college? At least my class mate took advantage of the situation, charging $300 to complete each EE design project for some Saudi fucks.
step 1: take people with a 50-50 chance of getting into elite universities.
step 2: charge them $20k each.
step 3: refund those who don't get in
step 4: profit!
Were is the incentive to actually do anything other then promote the success stories?
And you believe your nephew? American students are the ones failing their classes because they have no work ethics and spend all their time partying and smoking weed.
Not to belabor the obvious, but full-ride tuition is what? 20k at some schools. 60k+ at others. Suppose instead of going into debt up to your eyeballs, you put all that money into the market (stock/bonds). At an 8% return, you'd be a millionaire before your 40. You could retire very comfortably and very early in life. Can you say the same for what happens after you get that college degree and start serving coffee for a living?
That sort of interaction is EXACTLY what makes the education at that school an education. Try to imagine what your education would have been like if you had gone to a university where you had difficulty with the language in which the classes were taught. Those foreign students got into that school with your nephew by being smart and maybe/probably well-connected (i.e. they come from wealthy, well educated families in their home countries).
Does your kid end up doing a lot of the documentation of the group work? Sure- his mastery of English is probably better than the foreign students. That's how it goes. So what? Some of the group members don't contribute much? So what? Do you think that if all the kids in the group were white, English speaking Americans there wouldn't be any lazy asses the other group members would have to carry? Group work teaches productive people how to be productive when confronted with the harsh reality of unmotivated group members.
I'd say your nephew is getting an education.
Sorry, how the fuck do you score. 2400 points on a 1600 point test?
In the US nearly all student loans, over 90%, are given out by the federal government. The government does not do with less, that is why they passed the laws that student debt can't be discharged in a bankruptcy, it wasn't the banks that got that rule passed. Any calls for reduction in student loans is met with political ads against the person proposing something like you did with "he hates kids getting educated".
I personally don't agree with your specific idea, but I do agree with your thought behind it. However, as long as the feds are the ones handing out the loans I'm not sure what can be done, and I'm not sure how to get the loans away from the feds either.
I have a friend who is a registered nurse and evaluates complaints about healthcare delivery. He has to write technical reports that refer to medical terminology and procedures. He is a native born US English speaker and writes well, and takes pride in his ability to communicate complex situations that can have important ramifications. For example, hospitals could loose accreditation or doctors could loose their licenses based on his reports.
His boss is a native speaking Chinese woman. She cannot write proper English sentences. She micromanages and rewrites his reports and turns his careful prose into hard to understand crap. She has a master's degree. She makes him less productive and degrades the quality of his work. Upper management loves her, and she get's paid more then he does. They like the fact that she is always finding fault, because it means that somehow they are the untrustworthy people who do the actual work.
So much for the myth of high quality US business practice.
Why is Snark Required?
I'm not sure how to word this diplomatically, so please don't jump on me if sounds racist, I'm only trying to express my thoughts based on my observations.
Many Asians seem to treat education like a religion and become zealots. It's as if one is going to hell if they don't get into a good college. It's not even about long-term general earning potential it seems, but rather the status of a degree.
Part of it seems to be that as a parent, if your kid gets a big-name degree, you are allowed to feel satisfied that you "did your job well" as a parent in the Asian community. If a child didn't get a good degree yet gradually worked their way up into big money, the parent may not live that long, and so that is a lessor perceived reward even if the kid eventually has 3 mansions and 10 Maserati's: the parent may never get a chance to brag about it.
Table-ized A.I.
Nice. You learned the fundamentals of being a good manager, which are sadly lost on many who are given the position.
GPA isn't really that telling. My sister was a 4.0 student, but lacks the ability to apply that knowledge in RL application. She got a collage degree in Art, then realized there was nothing to do with the degree.
I got a degree in Accounting, got a great paying job, and I only had a 3.0 GPA in school. Unless your going into a knowledge intense field (law, doctor, scientist) don't waist your money on a expensive collage, the collage don't make the difference, your ability to learn and apply knowledge is all that matters.
8% isn't super far off the recent-history 6-7% market return expectation (but yes, beware of market volatility), it just doesn't take you to millionaire quite that easily. And millionaire doesn't mean what it used to mean.
The first obvious problem with the AC's point is that even the high bound of $60k, at 1.08 annualized returns, is considerably less than a million dollars after 22 years compounding (assuming they start at 18 and end at 40). Now I'm not familiar with the American education system and "full ride"; maybe he means that times 4 years. In which case 4 years @20k still can't make you a millionaire but 60k * 4 = 240k would (not so surprising when you start at a quarter million). The million mark happens at ~$45k per year for 4 years.
But if you take that assumption, then the obvious difference with you is that you started 7 years later at 25, and restricted yourself to the 401k upper limit which was $9500 at the time, way less than even the 20k, and even today the contribution limit is well under 20k. Granted, you kept contributing after 4 years, but it actually takes you 4-5 years to match each year's contribution of the guy skipping school, so you're probably about matched on absolute contributions, while the school-skipper has a big edge on the time he contributed that money.
Maxing out your 401k may be sound financial advice, but it's insufficient to retire young and in plenty. My maxed out 401k is less than a third of my savings at 30 (and I'm definitely not a millionaire yet, though I should be by 40 barring something disastrous). I know not everyone is so lucky as to be able to do that.
Mostly connections
Connections are crucial, but, there is a very BIG but, if one solely relies on the connections he or she fosters when the individual was in the college, then that individual is a loser
I did what I did, from a refugee, into someone who have thousands of co-workers all around the world, partly because of the connections that I have fostered through all the stages of my life
The kicker is, over 90% of those connections that I rely on are the connections I've made _after_ I came out of college
Connections I have from the Silicon Valley enable me to enjoy a certain "respectable" position when I am in Asia, which open a lot of doors for me, even the doors to foreign governments
Which is why I am always amused by those who stress so much on the connections that they foster through their alma mater --- life does not only evolve around college
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
When I landed in the States I found myself amazed with all the grizzly things and I found myself, a refugee fresh from communist China, being the dumb one, as everybody else was smarter than me
Later on as I enrolled into college, I found that my professors were very smart, because they knew things that I didn't know
And more later on when I got out of college I found many other people, people of the company I worked for and people outside of the company but still in the same job field, were much smarter than me because there were so many things that I could learn from them
I have worked with some legendary programmers in the more than 30 years I have been in this field, and yes, there were all much smarter than me
So, how do you define "smart" ?
For me, that goal post of "smartness" kept on shifting, as I grew from a stage of my life to another - For example: those Americans whom I found so smart when I first arrived in America, in hindsight, were not smart at all. They were lucky to be born in this country, that's all
Plus I sincerely doubt that the students from elite universities are "smarter" - In my own experience, most of those who came working with me with sheepskin issued by elite universities are not really smarter than those who came without any official sheepskin
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I have been maxing out my 401k since I was 25; I'm now 43 and a 1/2 millionaire, but no millionaire.
Since this is basically a penis comparison, I'll do some spreadsheet math and add some words to this line because of stupid commenting system limits. (I am neither the P nor GP AC.)
401k annual contribution limits by year
1995 9240 some characters per line
1996 9500 some characters per line
1997 9500 some characters per line
1998 10000 some characters per line
1999 10000 some characters per line
2000 10500 some characters per line
2001 10500 some characters per line
2002 11000 some characters per line
2003 12000 some characters per line
2004 13000 some characters per line
2005 14000 some characters per line
2006 15000 some characters per line
2007 15500 some characters per line
2008 15500 some characters per line
2009 16500 some characters per line
2010 16500 some characters per line
2011 16500 some characters per line
2012 17000 some characters per line
2013 17500 some characters per line
2014 17500 some characters per line
Total years 1995-2014 (inclusive): 266740.
S&P 500 annual gain (including dividends) from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500#History
1995 1.3758 some characters per line
1996 1.2296 some characters per line
1997 1.3336 some characters per line
1998 1.2858 some characters per line
1999 1.2104 some characters per line
2000 0.909 some characters per line
2001 0.8811 some characters per line
2002 0.779 some characters per line
2003 1.2868 some characters per line
2004 1.1088 some characters per line
2005 1.0491 some characters per line
2006 1.1579 some characters per line
2007 1.0549 some characters per line
2008 0.63 some characters per line
2009 1.2646 some characters per line
2010 1.1506 some characters per line
2011 1.0211 some characters per line
2012 1.16 some characters per line
2013 1.3239 some characters per line
2014 1.0862 some characters per line
Maximum possible gain at end-of-year if the whole contribution limit were paid-in at the beginning of the year:
1995 $12,712.39 some characters per line
1996 $27,312.36 some characters per line
1997 $49,092.96 some characters per line
1998 $75,981.73 some characters per line
1999 $104,072.28 some characters per line
2000 $104,146.21 some characters per line
2001 $101,014.77 some characters per line
2002 $87,259.51 some characters per line
2003 $127,727.13 some characters per line
2004 $156,038.25 some characters per line
2005 $178,387.12 some characters per line
2006 $223,922.95 some characters per line
2007 $252,567.27 some characters per line
2008 $168,882.38 some characters per line
2009 $234,434.56 some characters per line
2010 $288,725.30 some characters per line
2011 $311,665.56 some characters per line
2012 $381,252.05 some characters per line
2013 $527,907.83 some characters per line
2014 $592,421.99 some characters per line
(I had to add some characters per line to get around the commenting nanny )
Is it feasible to be a half-millionaire in the 401K after the last 18 years? Yes. But if the 401k is all you got maybe you spent some money? Anyway, my penis is bigger....
*lose
you're right. At public Universities, no. That's not what happened. Prices at public schools were low up until the late 90s/early 2000s. I know. I was in school paying tuition out of pocket.
Now, public Universities are rapidly becoming profit centers, but they started that trend in the mid-2005s. Well after the cuts went in.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'm not dick swaging, rather my comment was to show that you can't retire at 40 with $1M with basic investing from a normal job. As I said, I'm only half there, despite saving a lot more than the typical worker. I need $4M in my 401k at 67 to keep the same living standards for 20 years. I doubt it will get there. Thanks for the table though.
No, but it is silly to claim that an foreign undergraduate's gradual pursuit of English proficiency is a disaster for university education nationwide.
It's pretty common across the world for universities to accept that foreign students will take a couple of years to become proficient in the local language, and Americans benefit from that too. I did my university degrees first in Spain and then in Finland, and in both countries my lecturers and classmates understood that I needed some time to learn Spanish and Finnish respectively.
As someone who studied Chinese and tried to get as much exposure to the language as possible, I would have definitely enjoyed working with a Chinese student so that I could hit him up for free language practice, which normally costs a high hourly rate. Learning Somali may not bring many advantages for Americans (though interestingly enough, Somali skills are in high demand now in the Finnish state sector), but Mandarin and Arabic are major world languages, some knowledge of which can only help.