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Foreign Students Have Begun To Shun the United States (axios.com)
In a potential threat to future U.S. innovation, new international enrollment at U.S. colleges is down for the first time in more than a decade, according to a new report. From the report: It is the first hard sign that the Trump administration's rhetoric may be frightening away some of the world's best and brightest who traditionally have been drawn to settle and work in the U.S. Why it matters: "The Chinese whiz kid, if he can find a way to America, he'll come here. If you're good, you can make a lot of money," Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce, tells Axios. "That whole set of incentives has always been tied to the immigrant stream, and we're severing that connection." By the numbers: The findings are from the Institute of International Education's annual Open Doors report and its smaller joint "snapshot" report on international enrollment. It found that new international student enrollment dropped by 3.3% for the 2016-2017 academic year, and by a far higher 6.9% in the Fall 2017 semester.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with the exploding cost of education, it must be all Trump's fault.
To us over here, going to the US now is like going to Germany in 1937 or something.
- I don't want to end up in a concentration camp ("black site") when flying over.
- Nor do I want to be anally fisted at touchdown. (The 9/11 terrorists did not land, now did they?)
- Or live among hyperselfish pschopaths. (I am basing this statement on research.)
- Or risk dying because I do not have $500,000 for a pill or simple operation.
- Or pay $500,000 to get an education that is free in my country.
Yes those are hyperboles. ... Sometimes. :P
I don't think there is any political system in the world that allows the 'best and the brightest' to rise to the top and run things in a way that benefits from their superior way of viewing the world. They are ultimately doomed to failure, too many corrupt toes to step on.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You can say that about the US. You could take an American who is studying in Germany and blame them for the worst incarceration rate in the world or the atrocities done in Iraq. However, that is pointless. One needs to separate the person from their government. Someone may be of the Han race, but not a Chinese citizen.
And as we close the door ever tighter against the rest of the world, they'll discover that they don't really need us, anyhow. They'll walk right past us and wonder how it ever was that people used to risk their lives to come here.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
We need the brightest people we can get from everywhere in the world. Making the path easy and affordable for the best foreign scholars makes good sense. Every week we see major breakthroughs in science and technology announced from American research universities. Usually we see teams of three or so scholars being credited with the work and almost always the foreign names dominate the announcements. We need these people. What we do not need is an idiotic congress and senate being paid to accomplish nothing who are simply paid off traitors by special interests.
The alternative to globalism is protectionism. Protectionism has been tried many times, and it doesn't work. If anything, it's even less likely to work these days, now that we have the internet and global supply routes.
The way to deal with globalisation isn't to close our borders, it's to deal with the specific issues.
Education is too expensive, but would be even more expensive if it wasn't for foreign students. The fix is not to turn away that source of revenue that is subsidising local students, it's to deal with the high cost directly. In a lot of European countries university is free for citizens, and costs the government a fraction as much while still being world class institutions.
Jobs are going overseas. That's unfortunate, but if they didn't they would only be automated away anyhow. If not today, then tomorrow. We should help people adapt, to get new high end manufacturing jobs or move into services. Again, Germany has done that, Japan has done that.
The real solutions are hard, and blaming immigrants and globalisation is easy. That's the problem.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Because their countries/societies are shit not the people.
America house a lot of the global economy plus taxes aren't the worst in the world and it's a pretty free market so it make sense there's opportunity there for those who got something to offer.
Even if a country housed people who by average only reached up to 80% of the skill level of the average American you'd still got the outsiders and the occasional very talented person.
Since Trump's election I intentionally avoid al business (or holiday) travel to the US. At least we Europeans got to vote with our wallet. No need to support corrupt politicians, and their hateful followers. Many other pretty places in the world to visit and make friends.
Beyond Trump, maybe it's the general mood of Trump-haters and angry activists of all kinds versus Trump supporters and angry defenders of all kinds.
Why come to a country where everyone is angry all the time?
Why come to a country where no one can ever be happy?
Why come to a country where all the stories are about catastrophic environmental destruction?
Who wants to come here to be told they're a victim every day based on something that happened before they were born in their own country?
Why come to a country where succeeding financially is considered evil?
Why would a young person join a group that only talks about historic grievances and never about future opportunities?
Why come to a country where the leaders and entertainers and celebrities all seem to be among the worst examples of humanity?
Why not go to a country with good people and a good social atmosphere instead?
This view is deeply flawed.
Take Google as an example. You take it for granted that the Google HQ is in the USA, and hires Americans, but what if Sergey Brin was never welcome into the US or Standford, and instead he ended up going to a university in Russia or China or the UK or whatever, and creating his company there? What if Larry Page came to that same university in Russia (or whatever) because it was known as one of the best and most foreigner-friendly university in the world? Had that happened, the Google HQ would have now been in Russia, not California.
This may look absurd to you, but it can easily happen in a generation or two: the best students in the world are not welcome in Stanford, so they start choosing an almost-as good university in some other country, which gets better as more of the world's best students choose it. These students start to create companies in that country (if it welcomes them as immigrants), and suddenly it's no longer a "default" that every successful company needs to be in America. The American employees, which until now had an easy life when the world's best companies all flocked to America to employ them, will now need to start looking for jobs in other countries where these new companies are located.
Much of America's success in the last 100 years is due to its lax immigration policies, which meant that the best scientists in the world came to work in it and create new companies in it. I live in Israel and remember this happening in the 1980s: All the best scientists I knew were studying in the US, working in the US, or just visiting there. All their knowledge funneled into American universities and companies, and created jobs in America, not in Israel. I don't see how in any sense of the word, America suffered from this situation.
Can anyone say "false dichotomy"? I knew you could.
Put up walls, block out the rest of the world. It means you're limiting your society's access to knowledge and resources to those that are available inside those walls. This means you tend to develop socially and technologically at a slower pace than larger populations, and you tend to grow xenophobic which makes future interactions with the rest of the world more likely to be unfavorable.
Obviously the US isn't disconnected from the world entirely, but you guys certainly seem determined to blow up as many bridges as you can.
Good now maybe the American students can actually start learning as there are fewer bad accent Teaching Assistants...
This was a serious stumbling block for me when I went back to school. Try being out of college for 10 years and then take calculus with an Indian professor & Chinese TA's. I have no doubt about their competency in the subject, but most of them were not very good at teaching because they couldn't communicate clearly. I had to hire a tutor in order to get a decent grade.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
"I could stand in the middle of fifth avenue and shoot someone, and people would still vote for me."
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of man the people of the United States freely, willingly and knowingly chose as their President. That actually says a lot more about the people of the United States than about Trump himself.
Can you blame anyone in the rest of the civilized world for being freaked out by the fact that half the people of the country he's supposed to go live in for a few years clearly show signs of serious mental health issues ?
If our education system ran off of immigrant dollars, that was never sustainable or good, and we should celebrate its departure.
I suspect that any celebration of the departure of your education system will ultimately turn out to be a very short-lived one once the consequences of not having one start to hit home.
We tried globalism. It meant that everyone else was more important than we were
This is the most delusional description of US foreign policy that I've ever read in my life.
Indeed. And most are too smart to go into politics in the first place. But the best and brightest can make a lot of money nonetheless, if conditions are right.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If our education system ran off of immigrant dollars, that was never sustainable or good, and we should celebrate its departure.
Baltimore City isn't self-sustaining. It has to bring in food from outside farms, since it doesn't have the climate to farm everything. It has to bring in material from outside quarry, as it doesn't have rich mines for every type of mineral. It has to bring in product from outside manufacturing, as it doesn't have every type of skill and factory. Even if we tried, we'd end up expending far more labor and producing far less per person than the folks all over the country and the world, meaning we'd work long hours for little wealth.
It also has to bring in outside money to not be poor, as what we buy into the city goes out of the city and up the supply chain.
When the major industry and commerce left, Baltimore collapsed. If Amazon put a secondary HQ here, we'd have $2.5Bn-$5Bn more of yearly wage income flowing to the city, being spent, and producing more jobs and more tax revenue. We'd be running off foreign money--non-Baltimore money coming in from all over the US east coast.
That's called trade.
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Well, you could always fund education from taxes, but that would be socialism (ducks)
I still read the alumni magazine my alma mater sends me. I read about amazing students and professors doing great things in their chosen fields and even starting businesses. Usually those businesses are in the US employing Americans.
And quite often these people come from other continents..
The school I went to is looking for the best students they can get and if they come from a foreign land that's okay. In fact, I'd be upset if they told some prospective student who was intelligent and had a good work ethic that they couldn't be admitted because they already had too many foreigners.
We should want smart immigrants who are willing to work for an education to come here. My ancestors just a few generations back were immigrants and yours probably were too.
Of course we could turn these students away along with all their potential. Maybe they'll go to Canada or Europe or maybe they'll start their own universities in Asia or South America or Africa which in a few decades will make our schools look merely average or worse because we told the best students to stay out of our country.
I find it sad that, after half an hour, no one has challenged this:
If all these people are so smart, the "best and brightest", then why are their home countries a gigantic cesspool of filth, poverty, illiteracy, crime, violence and general misery?
Neither the article nor the intro says anything about which countries are not sending so many students to the USA. Which forces me to conclude that the AC believes that the entire world beyond the USA is "a gigantic cesspool of filth, poverty, illiteracy, crime, violence and general misery".
Unfortunately, all too many US citizens seem to agree. But it really isn't true. I live in England, which - while of course far inferior to Scotland - is a pretty decent country apart from its politicians. (And even they aren't nearly as bad as their American equivalents). Most of Europe is quite pleasant to live in (again, of course, were it not for the politicians and the ever-spreading blight of US corporations).
If you would take the trouble to read up on modern China, or Japan, or Singapore, or Russia, or Iran, or Brazil, or Mexico, or many other places, you would find that standards of living are soaring and people have a far more optimistic view of life than most in the USA.
By and large, the only countries that could accurately be described as "gigantic cesspools of filth, poverty, illiteracy, crime, violence and general misery" are those that the USA has attacked and completely, or partially, destroyed.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I'd say it's probably the latter. See, whiz kids get scholarships. Even the international ones can get scholarships and stipends.
Fu Er Dai (kids of nouveau riche) however, need to pay full price, and often do it with a newly bought American house paid in full with cash by their parents. Now, with US housing prices at historical highs, coupled with the Chinese economy cooling off, not as many families find it a good investment.
Add to this the growing perception that overseas degrees aren't worth all that much (mainly due to the fact that every dumber-than-a-brick Fu Er Dai has gotten one), and you can easily find explanations to the dip in numbers without alluding to Trump's rhetoric. And that's even without pointing out the fact that the trend started before last year's election.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
As someone who works at a university, I assure you, US students already are preferred - that's the law and it's just cheaper [no visa hassles] to deal with US students. International student's don't qualify for Federal financial aid either. The only undergraduate internationals we want are the full-pay students.
The problem, and this is especially acute at the graduate level, is that U.S. student's don't want to work too hard. Given the choice between STEM graduate degrees and MBA's, the U.S. students are opting for the MBA's. You got a Chinese TA in class because no one in the U.S. wanted the job.
We just did a faculty hire in physics. Based on surnames and whatever information was in the resume, we estimated that only a third of our applicants were from the U.S. The rest were born outside this country and came here for school. That's the current reality of higher ed.
We don't need no smart foreigners, we got Trump - he's the smartest guy in the room - just ask him, he'll tell you! He's so smart he can do the thinking' for all of us and have brain cells to spare!
That's the best outcome. Who can say America deserves to be world leader anymore? It's a cruel arrogant country that heartily enjoys bullying the world. The best revenge would be the world passing up the hated oppressors and rendering them impotent, left to stew on their own continent. No more bombing, no more ridiculous IP patent system to lock up ideas, no more police brutality and racism. It's for the best.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
First of all, this article has a very biased viewpoint.
Foreign students have begun to shun the United States
That is stating that foreign students are making the choice to not attend schools in the United States. The data says no such thing. It is likely the same number of students desire to be educated in the United States as before, but there there are other factors that stand in their way (like having to enter the country through the legal processes).
Further, the article states "worth noting" (IE if they didn't state it they would be too blatantly guilty of expressing their bias without proper facts) that the big schools are affected "much less" than smaller schools that do not have Ph.D. programs. So considering the "best and brightest" are usually those seeking Ph. D. programs at the bigger schools, well, this isn't affecting the "best and brightest" at all.
The effect was much more pronounced in the Midwest and Texas, she said, especially at schools without Ph.D. programs, and at community colleges.
Ahh, now we get to the truth of it. This is about illegal immigrants from Mexico, which were attending smaller schools like community colleges. Isn't this to be expected? If it is harder to illegally enter the United States, and immigrants actually have to follow the policies that have been in place for decades, then less immigrants will be coming in, and thus we would see a drop in foreign enrollment at these kinds of smaller colleges in that specific region of the country.
Better known as 318230.
As a science student in a large, public, US university, I see very little "SJW stupidity" as you put it. Most of the students and profs are pretty apolitical on a day-to-day basis.
You're researching schools because you want to study well and succeed.
Are you put off by:
A). What Trump said about illegal immigrants from Mexico and about Muslims?
or
B). Viral, million view videos of activists storming libraries, disrupting campus, screaming at professors, screaming at fellow students?
Now imagine yourself as a parent who will be footing the bill. Are you put off by the former or the latter?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Reading the posts here just seems like a perfect picture of today's divided USA. Like all the Trump followers, I sense the descent of the US empire, just that they blame it on foreigners and I see it in the inability of Trump followers to grasp the reason of the power the US had for about a century. It was the center of the world in terms of science and talent. And in fact they did not get Nobels because they ended up in US, that is a pretty stupid point of view. Just check the roster of most top Universities.
What US controls is ::::). It really doesnt make sense though, spend more than you earn, and just print the rest.
1. Massive military leadership (which probably China will challenge soon, and lends a lot to science leadership)
2. Ability to keep dollar as the international trade currency (it does it through military means if needed. What is that great friendship to saudi royal family anyways
3. Science leadership which the protectionists try to demolish.
No leading nation kept it forever throughout history. It seems US has its turn about to be over. I actually hope it doesnt happen soon. There are more evil nations out there waiting to get the lead. Lets wait for the next election and see what happens.
Apparently there's protectionism, free trade, and fair trade. I've been talking to the unions, so I've had to learn about fair trade.
True, but let's look at those options.
Free trade. This can mean one of two things. You can have a situation like the EU, where the member states agree to have equivalent rules and regulations so that one doesn't have a big advantage over the others. The US kinda has it but states have more freedom to set taxes to any level they want, which results in citizens getting screwed as they compete for business with subsidies and tax holidays.
Fair trade is just globalisation or protectionism again, depending on what you deem fair. Either you have barriers because people in China work for a fraction of what Americans so (protectionism), or you accept that there is an imbalance and work with it like Japan and most of Europe do (globalisation).
Of course there are degrees, for example Europe does have some tariffs and barriers in place but generally the policy is to have developing countries either join the EU or have a relatively liberal trade agreement in the expectation that as they develop they will want to buy high quality European goods.
Either way your 1950s style manufacturing jobs are not coming back, evolution is the only option.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It seemed so pathetic that it wasn't worth confronting. Still - well said. Couldn't agree more about the Scotland bit ;)
standards of living are soaring and people have a far more optimistic view of life than most in the USA.
Don't believe anything you hear or read about Americans from the media. Or the internet. Especially Slashdot.
Funnily enough all the comments about SJW stupidity are posted by ACs. You might get the impression some group was trying to keep a meme going.
The China argument is really strange. People talk about slave labor or something, and ignore that China's exports have allowed it to generate revenue to purchase new technology. That technology is expensive, and they wouldn't have been able to pay their workers well or buy it without exports to other countries: Europe and the United States have been funding China's rapid development, which has resulted in over a decade of growing wages and social insurances, while economic efficiency increases at a pace such that the fractional cost of wage per product manufactured has come down (e.g. with these new tools, the product costs the same if you pay the Chinaman $3.50 instead of $1.20, but they pay the Chinaman $3.20 and now it's cheaper!).
We got wealthier taking advantage of a wage gap; China got wealthier taking advantage of that wage gap, too. The wage gap is getting narrower as a result.
Fair trade tries to accelerate the growth of wages so as to raise standards-of-living in the developing country while slowing the loss of jobs in the importing nation, near as I can tell. It has its own disadvantages, for example by encouraging the mixing of low-quality product (which sells below fair-trade prices) into fair trade product. It also only slows the outflow of jobs; we need social insurances to carry those workers who lose their jobs until they can find a new opportunity--slowing it only means we don't have to care about those workers for our own comfort, since we don't collapse the economy at large.
Hard problems.
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Noone says all foreigners are smart but any student who makes it to the US is amongst the top students in their country and on average will be smarter than the average American student. Thats just statistics. Its way easier for an American student to get admission to an American college and pay for it (Student loans guaranteed by the federal govt are not available to foreigners).
If you met a few folks whose idea of research was different from yours it could be result of a different school system. Try and embrace the differnt styles of work instead of dismissing it as bad job skills.
**Life is too short to be serious**
30% of US college funding (about 9 billion) comes from international students. They make up about 12% of the student population.
Now imagine a world where all international students were banned from US universities. Yes there would be 12% fewer students, but also 30% less funding. So either fees would have to go up, or courses would be dropped due to lack of funding.
If you want more US students to go to university you need to look closer to home. The things that stop US students getting a university education is the cost and the lack of government support to pay those costs. No bright American student has ever been denied university access just because of universities taking international students, in fact just the opposite
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Foreign students are more likely to not qualify for financial aid, and therefore to pay sticker price for college. That, in a small but real way, subsidizes the cost for US students.
Detroit wasn't wrecked by immigration. It was built by it, and will likely be rebuilt by it. What wrecked Detroit was good, old-fashioned, locally-born corruption, racism, and differences in labor rules between states (aka race to the bottom).
Not sure about your Oxford example (not that the punishment of domestic grad students isn't heinous in itself). If the Oxford/Rhodes student stays out of the US most of the year, they'd be entitled to take the foreign income exclusion, which isn't going anywhere fast and is something like $100k/yr.
This being said -- this has the mark of authoritarianism on it. One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is going after the educated and those who want an education, both in word and deed. Words: "like a professor" and "ivory tower" are apparently insults among the Trump set. Deeds: see also, the tax "reforms."
I'm sorry, but what has Google contributed to society that's apparently so unique and unreproducible that we need to act like Sergey Brin and Larry Page are gods? Long before Google we had dozens of Search Engines. Perhaps without their "help" we would have a thriving Internet ecosystem instead of a monopoly on so many online services. We should be honoring people like the Wright Brothers, not some university grads that put together yet another copycat website.
I don't think the Google founders are gods, but the reason we don't have dozens of search engines anymore is because Google was way better than they were. I remember the days of Lycos and WebCrawler and AltaVista, they were terrible at giving relevant results. Google became the biggest search engine because they were the best. It wasn't just a "copycat website", it did the job way better than the existing companies. Perhaps without their "help" (nice scare quotes!) we would still only have terrible search engines and walled gardens like AOL.
Enigma
You don't seem to realize what college is actually for. It isn't a trade school that teaches only immediately practical things.
I don't know any real estate classes, so I don't know what you're talking about there. Business classes are to teach you about business and give you a sound background. Once you understand those, you can learn how to do the paperwork yourself. Science classes teach the science, not the application. Arts class give a good background in arts.
The idea is to help you learn to think about what you're doing. Get the basics so you can more easily understand the details.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
How many of that 3% drop are actual degrees (STEM) and how many are liberal arts/studies (not a real degree)?
That's not THE single dumbest statement I've read today, but it's up there. Thanks for sharing.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
we've pretty much got everything needed for a modern economy. Even the rare earth minerals. The only reason we're getting them overseas is they're willing to abuse their population more than we are resulting in cheaper prices. China isn't better at manufacturing, they're more ruthless at it. Same with Mexico.
OTOH the rest of the world _does_ need us. China can't feed their population without our grainery.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It's not about health care. Health care for the needy is the sales pitch. The taxes get collected. The money doesn't get spent on health care for the needy, it gets spent on other stuff (like government worker pensions). The needy still need health care, so the sales pitch is repeated. More taxes. Not spent on health care for the needy. Needy still in need. Sales pitch. Taxes. Misspent. Needy. Sales pitch. Taxes. Etc. Etc. Etc.