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Chinese Companies Are Buying Up Cash-Strapped US Colleges (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Chinese companies are taking advantage of America's financially strapped higher-education system to buy schools, and the latest deal for a classical music conservatory in Princeton, New Jersey, is striking chords of dissonance on campus. Beijing Kaiwen Education Technology Co. agreed in February to pay $40 million for Westminster Choir College, an affiliate of Rider University that trains students for careers as singers, conductors and music teachers. The announcement came just weeks after the government-controlled Chinese company changed its name from Jiangsu Zhongtai Bridge Steel Structure Co. The pending purchase rankles some Westminster faculty and alumni, who question what a longtime maker of steel spans knows about running an elite school whose choirs sang with maestros Leonard Bernstein, Arturo Toscanini and Seiji Ozawa. Alumni are among those suing in New York federal court to block the sale, saying it violates Westminster's 1991 merger agreement with Rider and will trigger the choir college's demise.
The prosperity of US is built partly on the fact that its considered a safe haven for investments. Doesnt matter if you are a corrupt Chinese bureacrat, a Nigerian scamster, a Rwandan genocidal warlord, a Korean monopolist Chaebol kingpin, a south American drug kingpin, a corrupt Indian politician, an inbred European ex Royal with ill gotten Nazi loot; The US welcomes all investments.
The US does not grab your property for personal crimes. It only confiscates property belonging to nation states it has disagreements with.
So once you have made your money and would like to go clean you invest it in USA and retire to the US.
This reputation is hard won and many a constituional and moral principle has been sacrificed for this key pillar of prosperity.
You dont want to endanger it just to feel some Schadenfreude over the Chinese losing money on their investments.
Rather you should keep rooting for a booming US economy with constant inflow of foreign money. A booming economy lifts all boats.
**Life is too short to be serious**
... but this comes from the brain dead idea that everything is privatized.
You can't buy a german or french university. Well, we have a few "private schools", too. Sure. But I don't even have one in mind while I write this.
Since the company that is trying to buy this school is (Chinese) state-owned, does that mean the school is no longer a private university?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The root issue is that colleges and universities are offering amenities and classes that colleges and universities never did before.
Campuses are now littered with 'activity' centers to entertain and amuse students, and an ever-increasing percentage of students enter college with deficient math or reading skills. Why are colleges and universities taking in students that can't read or write at a 12th grade level?
How can a college defend charging $500 or more per credit hour to sit in a room with 20-100 other students?
Ken
Steel is one of the reserved State-Owned Enterprise segments of the economy, where the Chinese Government maintains complete control over the players in the industry. Just like banking, telecom, aviation, and a few others. Private control is basically forbidden - it's the Central Government, provincial Government, and other Government-employed players only who can own or control a steel foundry. That said, China really isn't Communist, so much as it is a fascist oligarchy, with extreme Government control over key industries and extreme control over Government by a few hundred families in Beijing.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
If you think China is Marxist communist, then you don't understand either. Rhetoric isn't reality.
OTOH, Confucianism also doesn't have anything to do with communism (of any sort!) which makes the picture in your link quite peculiar.
That said, I'm sure they will use their access to push beliefs favorable to them.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.