How Chinese Students Saved America's Colleges
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
All in all, one gets the feeling that, while all those Chinese students aren't going to suddenly go home, the big enrollment increases are probably over. Then again, one might have thought that three or four years ago, too -- and been totally wrong.
This piece contains minimal data + analysis, and no real argument or opinion. It's just a blog thinkpiece with a clickbaity/controversial title. Don't waste your time.
Oh and they are often racist. Really racist.
But YMMV. It's really pointless to point fingers. Americans cheat by abusing ADHD drugs, heck there's a shortage in most states and a $20 prescription (~20 pills) goes for $20 a pill on the street.
And really, everyone is racist. It's practically innate. It's going to take a while to get over this. I mean as animals we always distrust those who are different from us. Some are just more expressive of there racism than others
Not only are the Chinese students crowding out qualified Americans from the few top spots in some of the world's best universities, it is a well-known fact to the FBI that Chinese (and other foreign) intelligence agencies recruit citizens studying in the US to steal research information that the hackers in Shanghai can't as easily get from afar.
My father was a researcher for a major university for decades. He fought tooth-and-nail for every dollar in grant money he could get to create the knowledge that underpins the basic electronics that run our devices. And he would get tens of thousands of hacking attempts from China every single day.
He also spent years building a hardware test environment, and a Chinese grad student that worked in the same lab took the designs and replicated them in China for a tenth of the cost - all without as much as a decent thank you.
But the Chinese pay full price so the few American students who can get in save a little on tuition, so it's all ok.
/rage
Am I blaming the average Chinese citizen? No.
But the Chinese government IS composed of millions of people, who are either complicit (in that the information stolen benefits them directly or the local businesses whose growth helps the bureaucrat's rankings) or actively working to steal every byte of information that American researchers worked damn hard to create.
And before anyone comes back with the predictable "but America stole information to grow their economy in the 19th century too!" response, first tell me why abundant land, natural resources, and immigrants weren't as big a factor, unless you seriously think forging steel is as significant as manufacturing high-precision electronics.
It is one thing to have a total surveillance program for the purposes of national security. Every reason exists to do so.
However, I believe that one must either commit to being despicable and brazenly stealing industry secrets to benefit one's own nation's, or to keep those secrets within the confines of intelligence agencies.
Now - and this is where ethics get a bit fuzzy - one could very easily argue that economic advantages allow one nation to enrich itself at the impoverishment of others, and so it is a long-term matter of national security to ensure that national economies are "topped off" with secrets that help them compete against foreign corporations.
But to follow that line of thinking, industrial espionage is an act of war.
This article ignore a few opinions/facts:
1. Chinese are taught the US is their enemy, and that they should come here to learn our strenghts and weaknesses and take them back to China. 2. Chinese poeple have a history of stealing intellectual property through universities and everywhere else. The lack of moral and ethical judgement is stunning and sad. 3. Chinese have manipulated their currency including tieing it do the dollar, which is on par with just printing fake money for your citizens. Therefore citizens are now 'new rich', and can afford to buy what hard-working citizens of other countries can't because their countries don't manipulate their currencies. 4. US lets in anyone willing to pay in cash, mostly. Anchor babies, investment citizenship, expedited services for the wealthy, etc. 5. US has race quotas as a legal precendent, where the universities can set the amount of Asians, etc that are accepted, regardless of qualifications. Not up to par? Who cares, let them in, they got the cash... 6. US has the best colleges in the world, and has for some time. Do you think the Chinese want to study in Tibet?
Espenshade and Chung found that African-American and Hispanic applicants would see their acceptance rates go down noticeably if affirmative action were ended:
> According to the study, without affirmative action the acceptance rate for African-American candidates likely would fall nearly two-thirds, from 33.7 percent to 12.2 percent, while the acceptance rate for Hispanic applicants likely would be cut in half, from 26.8 percent to 12.9 percent.
White students' numbers wouldn't be affected much, but 4/5s of the "missing" African-American and Hispanic students would be "replaced" by Asian students:
> Removing consideration of race would have little effect on white students, the report concludes, as their acceptance rate would rise by merely 0.5 percentage points. Espenshade noted that when one group loses ground, another has to gain -- in this case it would be Asian applicants. Asian students would fill nearly four out of every five places in the admitted class not taken by African-American and Hispanic students, with an acceptance rate rising from nearly 18 percent to more than 23 percent. Typically, many more Asian students apply to elite schools than other underrepresented minorities. The study also found that although athletes and legacy applicants are predominantly white, their numbers are so small that their admissions do little to displace minority applicants.
I care about fostering merit more than equality of outcome. Lowing standards for emotional reasons isn't something I care about, or even think is moral.
PS: Rich white students tend to do far worse at school, but look better at admittance and do better after graduation.
Poor students are vastly less likely to have motivated parents that push and pay for activity's to look good on collage applications. If test prep can add 100 points to a standardized test and two students both have the same score but only one did test prep then the other likely has higher innate intelligence.
After the first year innate intelligence makes up a larger role than pre-collage preparations for students motivated enough to get into an Ivy.
After school social networks play a larger roll in success than small gaps in innate intelligence. Richer students tend to form more valuable social networks.
You can justify any bias in such an ad-hoc manner. Rich students might to better because they had better preparation. (Which I had heard but I discount in the absence of evidence.)
I would expect the most populous country to send the most people to the US for education. Especially one with a rising middle and elite class. The only thing that's holding India back is the poverty, middle class isn't growing as fast as China. Most Indian immigrants I've met here already have degrees.
There are 20.2 million kids in US colleges (12.2 million college students below the age of 25. There are another 8.2 million over the age of 25).
Source: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_105.20.as...
Of these students, 974,000 or about 1 in 20 (round it to 5%) is a foreign student. The important thing about foreign students is that, except for a few cases of truly spectacular talent, they pay full freight and effectively subsidized US students.
Now of those 974,000, about 1 in 3, or about 300,000 are of Chinese origin.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/16/china-us-colleges-educat...
That is about just under 2%. I hardly consider that crowding out US students.
(Please also note that some US students who go to China and learn from their schools, though I assume this is tiny.)
So in terms of fear of "crowding", I think this is overblown.
In terms of taking IP over to China, its important to understand that the vast majority of this IP is free stuff that anyone can learn. We are talking about math and science up to the graduate level.
When you talk about the truly advanced PhD level stuff, well they are "stealing" it, but they also "create" it by working on experiments, interacting with other people, and so on. They contribute it as much as they "steal" it. At least, in my experience, you can't really learn at the PhD level without engaging other people.
So if someone here believes the Chinese government has a secret plan to send over their best and brightest to toil for years in top academic institutions and take back the knowledge they helped create, all I can say is: this plan is going to backfire and help the US as much as anyone.
Well, if you studied engineering, science, medicine, accounting or law. You'll eventually probably make good money. If you can't land a job in the US, you can go abroad and your American degree will be valuable in other countries just for the fact that you studied in the US.
Spending a few more years in school and taking on more debt to get a graduate degree might have helped, but I make as much or more now doing IT work than most of the people I know who have Masters degrees in the field.