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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?"
How does a school which charges $40,000/yr in tuition end up cash-strapped?
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.
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**
Good fences make good neighbors.
Now that's an ironic statement when talking about a country fighting for sanctuary cities and utterly defiant on applying that logic to Mexico...
... 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.
retire to the US
All totally true, except most don't want to retire here. A neat thing about US investment compared to other countries is that it can be done with very little local presence. You don't need to physically come here every month or three to protect your investment from others. Also, pretty much every country graciously accepts the US dollar and many times won't even charge you much in taxes or exchange fees.
So you can live where ever you want and pull just enough low tax/fee income for your monthly expenses from your safe US investments.
Somehow interesting that those two species are practically indistinguishable.
At which point it makes sense to ask - why differentiate? Better to ignore in either case.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
I think what he means is that the Chinese are about as communist anymore as the ISP market is a competitive free market. Sure, in name it still is, in practice, though, ...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think that more people are becoming aware of how its almost essentially impossible to discharge student loan debt and that even if you're getting a discount, paying back $80,000 in loans when you have a degree that isn't going to guarantee an ability to pay that back anytime soon is a losing proposition.
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.
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.
I guess you've never heard of "civil asset forfeiture", which is quite popular with many law enforcement departments these days. If the police just "feel" that anything you have might somehow be related to drug money, they can (and often do) seize it. Then you have to take them to court and prove it's NOT, often spending more than what what seized. No proof, arrests, or real "due process" is needed from them to keep your stuff. Carrying cash to go buy something? You might be going to buy drugs (even though your record is completely clean and you've never been involved with anything like that before) and now your cash and car is theirs.
References: (this is just a few, there are hundreds if not thousands of these types of abuses every year now)...
nationalreview.com
forbes.com
forbes.com
metrotimes.com
newschannel5.com
onlineathens.com
vox.com
washingtonpost.com
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?
All the best tech gets sent to China as its created. Nothing discovered is allowed to stay to the USA.
From the US lab to China. The faculty is now the intellectual property of China. So are all their projects and results.
The campus goes full Communist.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Pfft. That's for poor people who can't fight back.
If you're the sort of rich person who has "investments" and can afford lawyers, you'll probably be fine.
Log in or piss off.
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"
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.
I generally agree this is good. If you're in Mexico and your family is sending you money every month, that is good both for you, and for Mexico in general. If your company is on the ropes and an overseas company buys it when no domestic firm would, that is good too. But in other cases it is not good.
Property prices in several cities are skyrocketing in part due to foreign buyers who neither rent nor reside in them. This makes housing less affordable to people who would actually live there.
College ownership by Chinese companies is problematic as well. Ostensibly, the companies are only motivated by profit, and nothing changes. But what if the college has courses that the Chinese government doesn't like? What if the Chinese government puts pressure on the Chinese company to change the curriculum? Having foreign organizations in our education system is too potentially problematic to be acceptable.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Actually China today has more of a nationalist dictatorship than a communist one.
And those revering Mao and Stalin should feel right home, especially now that Xi has essentially become dear leader for life.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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
Exactly what role would the US Secretary of Education play in the sale of a small university to a foreign concern?
Is Westminster Choir College a strategic national asset?
The US Dept of education has no regulatory or oversight responsibilities in colleges or universities, public or private.
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
I think that more people are becoming aware of how its almost essentially impossible to discharge student loan debt and that even if you're getting a discount, paying back $80,000 in loans when you have a degree that isn't going to guarantee an ability to pay that back anytime soon is a losing proposition.
It's an education; they shouldn't have used a loan to pay for a useless degree.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
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
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!
Rider is a private institution and has a flat fee for everyone. They charge $40K to start - regardless of where the student comes from.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
In your first two sentences, you had two grammatical errors. Someone needs to go back to college!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Most private universities also provide need based financial aid to residents
**Life is too short to be serious**
Civil forfeiture isn't "grabbing the property of people who commit crimes." It's grabbing property WITHOUT proof of a crime. Much worse.
I'm not talking about doing anything. I'm talking about bad investments not paying out.
A lot of small universities are going broke. The big ones are doing very well but the marginal ones are dying left right and center. They're bad investments.
So I'm not cheating the chinese. I'm not doing anything. Bad investments are bad.
As I said, the Japanese did the same thing in the 1980s. They went crazy with their money and made a lot of really bad investments. When their money ran out, Japan went into a decades long national recession.
We didn't do that. They did it to themselves.
All I would do is simply not sell them things that we're not comfortable being owned by a foreign power. This isn't a special quality, no nation is going to do that.
So beyond not selling the crown jewels... I'll just let them do what they want... which seems to be pissing their money away on lost causes.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Your pathetic hate boner for me is made all the more poignant by your terror at being identified as you cower behind your AC tag.
I'm quite certain you post under a known name on this forum. But when it comes to e-stalking and trolling you hide behind your AC tag.
What do you believe? hmm?
See, what you're doing is using the fact that I use a trackable name to establish a record on me. But what of you?
See, I could do the same thing, post under the AC tag as well... and then who could you pathetically stalk?
Your entire methodology is hypocritical. Please either forgo bringing up someone's post history or post in a manner that you have a post history yourself.
You won't do this as we both know... Because if people could track your bullshit it would render any criticism you could level at the likes of me laughable.
I've interacted with you enough to know you're dishonest, have poor reading comprehension, and are stupid. If we had some post history on you, I'd have more ammunition than I'd ever need to scare cockroaches like you back under the fridge whenever you dared scuttle out.
But as I said, you won't post under a non-AC tag... So the best I can do is point out your evident degeneracy and hypocrisy as it comes. Pity.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Most of the research is happening at the big universities which china can't buy. I fair number of them are not even private entities.
China isn't buying a UC school, MIT, or any of the Ivy Leagues...
The underlying problem with china is integrity. They don't honor patents. Not just US patents but any patents. They don't honor their own patents. Until they start honoring patents in practice and fact I don't think Chinese technological supremacy is a serious concern.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
That matter is obviously controversial within the US. Some desire one outcome whilst others desire another. We'll see how it works out. Push as you can see is coming to shove.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
Or it could be that we as a people have evolved organically over the years to be a bit more mindful of those who traditionally have not been in power, rather than just thinking that they belong in the gutter we've always consigned them to.
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.”
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.
I see your mistake: You're looking at the definition put forward by socialists. Not the history.
There are no socialist societies that meet your definition, and there never will be. Socialism requires a command economy, because absent price signals and markets it can't self organize. Command economies require excessive concentration of power, that power than corrupts, Which leads to claims of 'not true socialism', but that's not true. That's exactly 'true socialism', just not what the reds wish it was.
Can't be fixed, junk the idea.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
'No true Scotsman' is the defense of socialists. Claiming the constant stream of failures 'isn't socialism'. My position is that it IS and that it's baked into the philosophy.
I also wish for your death to be soon, but no 'ill will'.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This is 100% wrong. Unless you are extremely poor, you DO pay all the tuition - at least, my sister's kids did. Unbelievable. (AND they got fluffy degrees, woohoo).
Mostly it isn't the schools that make the loans.
"The US does not grab your property for personal crimes. It only confiscates property belonging to nation states it has disagreements with."
You must be kidding. The US govt now steals more via civil asset forfeiture than is stolen via ordinary burglary. https://www.armstrongeconomics...
If you read the Robert Frost poem that feature that line, you won't find it exactly ironic, as much as an interesting literary reference.
The poem is called, IIRC, "Mending Wall". And it's about a disagreement about precisely that point.
"Something there is that doesn't love a wall..."
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
1. I agree you don't have to honor patents to get the tech that is patented.
2. I agree that not honoring patents does offer short term benefits. I think there are long term problems with not honoring patents that suppress investment in new technology because you won't own things you invested to create. Instead, you invest and your competitors profit because they get the fruits of your investment without any of the work to develop it.
3. As to it not being china's problem, theft isn't a problem if you don't punish the thieves. So I agree with you again here unless theft is punished in which case it will be a problem for China.
4. It is an assumed quality of international trade that you can forbid entry into your ports of various goods if they violate trade rules. Given that the countries that produce patents tend to be the best markets to sell goods, there is enormous leverage that patent creating countries have on non-patent producing countries. If that is used, China will have to comply with patent law or its entire economy will shut down.
5. As to weapons, see 1~4
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?