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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.
At least someone is investing in education.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
So many of the students at US colleges are already Chinese, so buying some schools out would be a logical next step.
But wouldn't it be wondrously ironic if a Chinese buyout is what it takes for our liberal arts schools to return to their traditional role of passing on the history and culture of Western civilization? It would be acceptable to teach the works of dead white men once more.
Colleges are also going to want to ask themselves: in this era of blisteringly high tuitions, why are so many of them "cash-strapped?"
Colleges today are such a social justice mess, little wonder the communists want to take them over 'officially'. Ironically they had to let capitalism flourish/reign to gain the wealth to do it... Then use state powers to take those companies over(How many billionaires in China have disappeared/been re-educated?)
How does a school which charges $40,000/yr in tuition end up cash-strapped?
The good news is that the institutions being bought are small ones generally that don't matter... colleges that can burn out and vanish without even being noticed.
Ideal end game with this sort of thing is that the Chinese get what the Japanese got when they pulled the same move in the 1980s... Ash. Japanese bought a lot of things... paid top dollar for damaged assets... and when time told on the wisdom of the investments... they lost their shirts.
I bare no hostility to the Chinese, but just like they don't want their country controlled by the US... I'm not interested in getting mine entangled with China.
Good fences make good neighbors etc.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
When the world was on the gold standard, running a trade deficit was a big deal. If the deficit was not addressed quickly, gold reserves would run down, and the country could quickly find itself in a position where it did not have enough hard currency to buy the things it needed. Regular folk on the street could easily see the impact of not producing enough goods to sell overseas as you needed/wanted to import. Countries had industrial policies. Politicians lost power on account of not managing the trade deficit.
When the US ended the gold standard (because it ceased generating trade surpluses) and currencies floated, it gave politicians a number of new tools to manage (fudge) trade deficits. The first was that countries like the USA, which held global reserve status, could inflate away the value of their currencies and hence any debts owned in those currencies. You could just give a foreign country a bunch of dollar bills, then print the value of those away so when the foreigner came to buy some goods from you a little while later you didn't have to give them as much stuff.
As you can imagine, foreign countries didn't really like this (nor domestic savers) so politicians had to find other ways to balance the deficits. The biggest trick they found to doing this was in the form of liberalized international capital flows. Basically, this now meant that you could buy a bunch of goods from a foreign country, and instead of having to trade them back some hard goods, you just sold them part of the capital assets of your country. Houses (either directly, or in the form of ever growing mortgage debt), businesses, infrastructure. Even the future earnings of your children in the form of treasury bills (future tax obligations) and student loans. Politicians could just flog this all off so that the flow of cheap shiny toys would continue without their voters having to build the factories or perform the labor to earn them.
Of course countries like China are also playing a dangerous game, as US voters could eventually decide to default on those payments (e.g. foreign buyer bans), which is why China is rapidly trying to reduce its dependence on US trade. But for now most people are happy to trade their house and children for cheap manufactured goods, while simultaneously moaning that the Chinese want something in return.
Most US citizens do not pay the full tuition. Only foreign students pay the full tuition and these students subsidize the resident students who get a much reduced tuition as well as scholarships, assistantships and loans subsidized by the taxpayer.
With Trump turning the US into an unwelcome place the number of foreign students has fallen this year. The colleges see the trend and in another 2-3 years will start running into real cash flow problems so they are selling while the assets still have value.
**Life is too short to be serious**
If it was an _American_ bridge building company, then they would've just been happy someone was investing in them.
Music College on /.?
You have lost your way.
... 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.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Betsy DeVos, is education secretary, sister of Erik Prince, and big doner to Trump.
Erik Prince was the ex chief of Blackwater, the private military contractor.
Erik Prince is currently setting up a worldwide para-military unit for China, called "Frontier Services Group". China is buying schools in the US, and doesn't expect any obstruction from Betsy, given the deal with her brother and the two's special* links to Trump.
*Erik was also the man who proposed a similar unit for Trump, and visited the Russian bankers in Seychelles.
I for one welcome our chinese overlords,
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
change the student loan rules to mess them up let's say chapter 11 and 7 comeback to student loans. Then the schools will be forced to cut costs and make the degree lead to real job skills.
The board members of a Chinese steel company know exactly as much about running an American school as the American administrators who turned it into a degree mill for Chinese people and a daycare for American Boomers' "adult" children.
...at least they'll never want for tubular bells.
Colleges are also going to want to ask themselves: in this era of blisteringly high tuitions, why are so many of them "cash-strapped?"
The tuition is high because state funding has dried up substantially and because there is something of a bidding war for talent between universities. A research professor can bring in a LOT of revenue to the university but they don't come cheap. Universities make a lot of money off of research patents courtesy of the Bayh-Dole Act. Plus for a lot of schools we have one of the major parties that tends to oppose using any tax dollars to educate people - especially when the people hired with that money tend not to vote for for them.
Current administration is handing the world to the chinese.
granted, I of course haven't read TFA, but considering that, as a general rule, tuition rates have increased far faster than, say, professor pay scales, why are there cash-strapped higher education institutions? Or is it that there do exist higher ed institutions that are financially responsible and have reasonable tuition, which in turn drives away students who want to spend tons of "free" loan money at more interesting colleges, and this is a group of investors looking to "fix" that "problem"?
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
The pending purchase rankles some Westminster faculty and alumni, who question what a longtime maker of steel spans knows about running an elite school
Really? Considering that it's up for sale, the question should be what do the people in charge of running the school know about running the school?
If Chinese companies can buy US universities, then American companies need to be able to buy Chinese universities. Why isn't this reciprocal? China outright prohibits foreign companies from owning educational institutes, except in rare occasions. We need to mirror their policy. If they don't like it, then they can change their laws to be fair. Enough of this one-way B.S.
Not that you would need to. Because just like the US, every single politician is a lobbyist already.
Bribery and lobbyism is so last century.
If you are in Germany, I just have one case in point for you: Gerhard "Gazprom lobbyist and federal chancellor as a side job" Schröder.
"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."
Well, considering the school was bankrupt, I'd ask the Westminster faculty and alumni if THEY know much about running anything either.
-Styopa
During the 90â(TM)s, loans were cheap and easy to get for college. That helped the boom of students and the colleges and universities got way greedy with their budgets. Suddenly colleges were looking more like 5 star hotels. Administration salaries growing like mad.
Tuition went up, lending got harder and much more expensive and here we are now. The fat cats that run these schools are overpaid, especially at the tier 2 and 3 state schools. Audit the fuck out of them
Hey, graduate you got PhD advisor? University?
Yeah, we might study. How much?
200000
What'll we get for 100000 dollars?
50000 dollars is all my mom will cosign for.
What do we get for 100000 dollars?
Every degree you want.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You do realize that student loans are federally-insured, and every student that defaults or goes bankrupt incurs a cost to the American taxpayer, right?
The reason student loans can not be discharged by bankruptcy is that it used to be very common for students to take out student loans, declare bankruptcy after graduation, then simply rent an apt until their bankruptcy was 'over' so they could buy a house...
Ken
Why did state funding dry up? Because the federal government came in to save the day.
What country are you living in? That's certainly not the case in the US. State schools are supported by state funding and that funding has been falling. Federal funding has not kept up so tuition has had to rise to at least partially offset the falling state support. State funding has dried up because certain members of the populace don't like taxes even when those taxes actually benefit them.
Why does education need to be funded at the federal level?
Because education is a public good that benefits us all. We live in a single country and can cross borders freely so claiming education funding and support should be restricted to the state/local level is idiotic.
Seems like education pre1980 wasn't as bad as it is now and post1980 has been characterized by disregard to meritocracy, title 9, increasing costs, and lower quality.
You might want to take off your rose colored glasses. I got much of my education pre-1980 and so I think your argument is a bogus strawman.
private student loans not the federally backed one
To easily get (and sell) fake student visas for any Chinese "customer"?
You can BUY US-schools?
Wow... I guess something went wrong way before the Chinese appeared on the scene... That's the problem with selling something: It means giving it up. You can't sell a cake and eat it.
Or as they say: Us universities offer the best grades your money can buy.
bickerdyke
It's just a kleptocracy using its dictatorial control to purchase functional things in the free west, away from potential unrest at home where they dictate so they can kleptocratize...ohhhhhhhhhh I see how this works.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Except the private student loans are from federally-backed institutions, so they're still federally backed.
How does a school which charges $40,000/yr in tuition [rider.edu] end up cash-strapped?
Are you kidding? Have you walked through a university campus and looked around? All those huge, beautiful, buildings aren't going to cover themselves with ivy.
Well, actually, they are, but I think where you see where I am going with this.
Constructing a building costs millions. It is even more expensive when you make it look like some thing that you expect to see on a college campus. You have to build a lot of these, or students aren't going to show up. You have to hire a bunch of top academics. Some will be really expensive to retain. (Ai CS specialists yes, ancient Latin experts not so much). In order to keep them around, you have to give them whatever they need to do 'cutting edge' stuff. (Supercomputers, Lasers, and Libraries, oh my!). You don't have tens of millions in cash, so all these buildings you bough, you bought them on credit, so there are loans to be serviced. Also, you gotta pay people to keep them looking nice and in repair, as a bunch of snot nosed special little flowers try to shit all over them. (I saw one genius in the dorms where I went to school using the ceiling sprinkler pipes as monkey bars...)
And then you have to pay a few top administrators the big bucks, because they are essentially doing the work of a top level CEO, managing budgets, dealing with the press, inking deals with the private sector to get more funding and help to keep your research cutting edge, shaking down rich alumni, and keeping all the asylum inmates / students from killing each other.
All that 'free' money you get from the government? They don't just drive a dump truck up and empty it in your personal scrooge McDuck money bin. You have to jump through hoops to get it and employ a small army of accountants and office workers to do accounting and manage financial assistance programs, because the majority of students attending universities aren't named Gates or Zuckerberg.
It adds up quick.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I think an obvious reason for China to do this, is so the Chinese kids that come over here on a student Visa will have it made clear to them that it's 'preferred' they go to the Chinese-owned schools, where they'll still get the benefit of Western education -- but with the oversight of the Chinese owners (government, no doubt), who will ensure that they're not getting 'Westernized' (read as: make sure they tay within Party boundaries).
I am not comfortable with this. Something should be done to discourage or prevent it.
FTFA: It's an opportunity for chinese schools to upgrade their art education.
"Xu Guangyu, chairman of Beijing Kaiwen and a choral singer in college, said the two institutions can operate in harmony. He runs K-12 schools in China and said Westminster could provide the knowledge to help upgrade arts education for his students. Xu said he won’t cut Westminster’s budget or staff. Westminster’s programs include master’s degrees in choral conducting, sacred music and organ performance, and notable alumni include Dorothy Maynor, founder of the Harlem School of the Arts, and Yannick Nezet-Seguin, incoming music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
“They can set up our entire music curriculum and bring all kinds of exchange opportunities,” Xu said. “It’s pretty difficult to find these musical resources.”
if the trend continues
glorifying Chairman Mao.
Why do your terms make no fuckin sense ever?
"Republicans" and "Democrats" are both actually Fascists (with negligible differences). ...
"Liberal" means something bad when actually it just means somebody who doesn't restrict freedoms.
"Freedom" is your term for having the "freedom" to walk all over other people's freedom from you.
"Government" and "Democracy" somehow became terms for a corporate oligarchy dictatorship.
"Copyright" is actually an artificial monopoly privilege.
"Social"-anything somehow has become a bad thing, and linked to Nazis and dictators too.
I'm too tired to even list the full tip of the iceberg.
Why is your society so FUBAR? Like a thousand galopping Nyarlathotep-riding Azathoths! Any path leads to complete and utter madness.
Do you think that foreign audiences are completely ignorant of the leftist activism that is turning campus spaces into riot scenes? That they do not see the viral videos, and that they have no access to news sources?
There is nothing to keep them from associating all American universities as hotbeds of political driven disorderly conduct where even freedom of speech is under constant assault. Why would they want to spend a fortune and risk wasting their kid's chance at higher education.
I'll blame the idiots that are actually ruining the once prestigious institutions of higher learning and making them something to be ridiculed.
This is just the result of the Chinese push in soft power policies around the world.
Snowflakes are so naive and impressionable. Glad our commie brothers are stepping up to mold them into their own images.
I have a much simpler answer which doesn't involve being a douche, and is more effective. Don't go to a school of higher learning. Funny thing is, that's exactly what the public has already figured out, hence the school for sale.* The big question is will the Chinese lower tuition costs bringing in more students?
*Same logic as any consumer good. The large amount of student debt and defaults says no. Buy cheaper, or do without, shame one can't apply piracy to education (you wouldn't download an education?)
Colleges should "loan" students an education and in their following oh say 10 years after the student pays back X% of the money they make. If their education was any good then the students job placement will reflect that and the college will make money, if not then the college will sink due to lack of proper education and subsequent lack of funds.
Sorry guys, you are realizing this too late. Chinese conglomerates are buying everything that's cash strapped and might have some use for them in the future.
In the particular case of schools, I'm not even sure if chinese government interference is as bad as american government interference anymore... at least the first one is not completely guaranteed, and there will be some pressure for regulation on the neutrality of educational material. The second not only is currently set to destroy the entire system, it's also often trying to butt in with religious crap and let the market work it's way kinda mentality.
. A booming economy lifts all boats.
Great. If you have a boat. If you are standing on your tippy-toes barely keeping your head above water, then no, what lifts Warren Buffet's boat is not going to be good for you.
Lousy metaphor, that, but often used by those rich enough to have boats.
AC
Welcome, student of the arts and we appreciate your dedication to the cause.
Copyright actually is a manufactured monopoly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law
Mostly it isn't the schools that make the loans.
...if the college is in dire straits enough to let someone buy them....sounds like the demise is already there. Why should they complain.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
Do the intro to piano courses have to stop teaching chopsticks now?