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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.