Heavy Recruitment of Chinese Students Sows Discord on U.S. Campuses

Edit: I am not generalizing to all international chinese students, nor do I know how uncommon or common my perspective is, but this is what I experienced among undergrad and graduate international chinese students where I was studying in the US.

More importantly, universities should not be allowing this sort of behavior in the first place.

I'm surprised that this article didn't bother to present anyone else's perspective (the other students, more faculty, people who live near college campuses. More than discord, I bore witness to many international Chinese students instances demonstrating a lack of basic morals. Rude to waiters, aggressively driving around pedestrains, not bothering to pick up trash, no qualms about abusing or destroying resources or cleaning up after themselves. Pushing people off sidewalks. Cheating on tests, homework, sneering and trying to bullshit their way out of it. Large cheating rings. I've seen so much shit from international chinese students, not kicking them out or punishing them for what they did negatively impacted everyone's college experience, and will continue to dilute the reputation of my degree.

You've always seen the occasional BMW or Merc at the Greek houses but these cars are insane.

My half-brother, who came to the U.S. at the age of 18, is a totally different story. He's smarter than I am, being a math olympiad competitor and got himself an internship at Google as a Freshman and all that jazz. However I noticed that he's done a much poorer job at integrating with the American culture. He doesn't browse Reddit, or HackerNews, or TechCrunch, even though he's into tech and startups. He loves Anime but watches them subbed in Chinese. He watches Chinese streaming sites instead of Netflix. As a 20 year old he doesn't know most of the popular memes on western social sites. He doesn't use Facebook, at all.

Some of that has to do with personal motivation, as in why would I go out and make friends with Americans when 20% of my high school classmates are now in the same Ivy-League school as I am? Some of that is due to technology advancement. Due to the internet it's very easy to live in a personal bubble of your preferred language, culture, and acquiantences, even if it's 10000 miles away from home. He doesn't know whether he even wants to stay in the U.S. after graduation, and I'm sure he literally feels much more at home when he goes back to China.

The last factor may also be the state of the Chinese economy. Early immigrants came with the impression that "if you wanna make it, you have to participate in the American rat race", but in the case of my brother and his friends, they are interested in tech startup, but they have very little interest in the Silicon Valley tech scene. Due to family connections and other backgrounds they think they can do something much more meaningful if they move back to China and raise money and achieve success. Just 10 years ago that kind of thought is unthinkable.

Personally I don't want to see American colleges, which I think are still on average the best in the world, to just turn into diploma mills. I really wish that these young Chinese students can grasp the opportunity and actually learn about some of the deeper culture of the country they are (temporarily) staying in. The world economy is only going to become more intertwined, we need more people who can bridge the gaps.

I currently have four Chinese students (out of 45 total), all of whom go through the right motions. They sit in the front of the class, they ask questions after lecture, etc... The types of things your mother would tell you to do so the professor "knows your name".

All four exhibit a significant language barrier. Although... I don't think that is the only thing hampering their performance.

I personally know how hard it can be to learn in a different language environment (I took a university class held in Finland and it was tough to say the least). Luckily, it was a math class and I was able to eke out good marks.

At the risk of sounding cynical, and not wanting to paint a picture of all Chinese students, I get the vibe from mine that they are really just there to get a degree, not to learn AT ALL. Hey... so are many of my WASPy students, let's not kid ourselves. But it's something about the way my Chinese kids want accommodation solely by going through the motions, as if just showing up to class and sitting up front guarantees you an A. I just don't see the real effort on their behalf.

Having a heavy mix of people from places with other aspirations and values will dilute this system.

Of course: the language issue is a big deal. I've had fellow-students that couldn't speak or understand a word of verbal English - in graduate school!!! But their written was adequate. I don't believe they should have been accepted - they should have been kindly redirected to their national universities. Most international students don't have this issue, of course! Most are very fluent in English, even if they have an accent.

One very tangible aspect of the situation is that international students often pay cash and are charged out the ying-yang to attend. Perhaps if our fine federal government mandated public universities have equal costs for national and international students, universities wouldn't feel quite so incentivized to attract the (often extremely talented!) international students.

The great recession didn't just create a lost generation from un/under employment among millennials. It also denied many access to an education at all, and saddled the rest with mountains of debt.

California policy makers must assess the risk that California resident taxpayers simply lose their willingness to support these institutions or to support tax increases to support these institutions.

Maybe the existing trend to accept additional "full freight out of state" students is a sign that California residents have already lost their appetite for higher-ed supporting tax increases, a sign that the system has no choice but to start selling these class slots to the highest bidders.

I parse this article as a very typical pair of complaints:

a) There's too many foreigners here.

b) Their English is bad.

On (a) the population of China is 1.3 billion, the world population is 7.4, so one out of every 7 people on the planet is Chinese. You should expect there to be more foreign people from China than anywhere else, outside China. It should be surprising if there aren't.

The same goes for India: its population is 1.2 billion. And, surprise-surprise, you hear the same complaints about Indians, particularly in IT workplaces, but also in universities.

Note that because everyone else has less than 1 billion population, there's less than one of every other ethnicity for each Chinese and Indian person, so the stand-out effect is even more pronounced.

So, not any serious complaint here, just people who haven't looked at the numbers and think they live in a different historical period where international travel was harder.

As to (b) I personally find this distasteful. Everyone else except native English speakers has even worse trouble communicating in English with non-native English speakers, yet you don't hear as many complaints about it. I have trouble getting what Chinese students are saying in English, as they have trouble getting what I say in English. Well, duh. Human communication is a bitch. If there is a God, he's got a lot to account for with the Tower of Babel malarky and whatnot.

But listen, this is how communication works: you meet the other person halfway. You have to make as much of an effort to understand what the other person is saying as they have to, to make sure you do. That's true even when you both speak the same language natively. It's amazing -no, it's a bloody miracle- that we can communicate at all. Anyone who's studied human languages is struck dumb by the mind-boggling improbability of it. It's crazy that we can even get our point across with a lot of effort, let along effortlessly.

So yeah, quit complaining and just learn to understand what others are saying, in spite of the language barrier. That's what an educated human does.

Isn't that a problem with admissions?

That said, I've also found a massively higher level of barefaced cheating, including things like copying and pasting code that previous students had inadvisably put on github, and that after I specifically said I'm aware of the existence of that code and will check for it. Or homework answers that are perfectly correct - if you were answering the homework given to a previous quarter's version of the class, rather than the current version with changes to the specifics. Or looking up answers on smartphones in the middle of a test, and then attempting to ignore the fact that they had been caught.

And it isn't just the cheating: it's the indignation when confronted about it. It's almost never denial, but rather something along the lines of "I did this because I have a lot of work to do. Just don't worry about it this time, I won't cheat on the next one."

It's especially upsetting because the kids aren't incapable of doing the work, they just seem to think that's it's totally acceptable to cheat their way through classes when they feel like it. While it's no more noble or allowable for kids who are in over their heads and unable to do the work cheat, it's at least somewhat understandable. Cheating out of some combination of arrogance and indifference is far more alien to me.

There's a second major problem very specific to Chinese students, that I assume is related to the first: shocking lack of English language skills. I say shocking because these are students who have theoretically scored very high on the SAT or GRE. While I'm in a technical field, we still insist on at least decent verbal scores plus high TOEFL scores for admissions, and yet I regularly get students who have major trouble parsing even very simple written English instructions. I've never noticed the same issue with students from other Asian countries, so I have always wondered if there's some "system" for Chinese students, consisting of either outright cheating on the standardized tests or else some rote memorization techniques that result in acceptable test scores but little-to-no actual English learning.

I'm not a crazy outlier in my department, most faculty who aren't either in or hope to be in leadership positions that require lots of under-the-table footsies with the administration have voiced similar concerns. The administration can't get enough of those inflated foreign tuitions, though, so they aren't likely to do anything substantive on the issue. They've tried to do outreach to get the point across that cheating, both before and after entry to the university, is not acceptable behavior, but from everything I've seen it's water off a duck's back.

Finally, I'm not some closet racist who wants to bring back the lily white college campuses of the bad old days. As I noted, foreign students are, on a whole, much more studios and less likely to take their education for granted when compared to domestic students. And "on a whole" in this case includes Chinese students! The problem isn't that Chinese students (or students of any nationality) are inherently bad: it's that we are sorely lacking in tools to adequately evaluate them for admissions and to get them to understand and respect academic integrity rules.

Now China has more rich people than the US?

In other words, the article merely restates the problem. The real question is how to do it more effectively.

Study Abroad as a Path to Equity and Justice

https://medium.com/the-development-set/study-abroad-as-a-pat...

Follow the money. Education is a business model, no matter the economic model of the country.