Using International Students as Cash Cows Does No One Any Favours

what's interesting for people with an non-xenophobic eye, is the contrast between the students, those whose parents or sponsor paid for everything and those who are really trying to turn their destiny around.

It really mimic the American side of thing with the prep schools, the legacy admission, the fraternities vs the first gen students or even the students born in a reservation.

(2014), not that anything has changed.

The article is about Australia, but the content applies to pretty much anywhere that accepts international students for money -- grade inflation is very much a thing in the US too.

It was interesting to see the breakdown of country of origin for students at my alma mater. The undergrad program was by and large Americans, the masters program mostly students from China and India, while the PhD program was roughly 50/50 students from China and the US. Sorting by price, the masters degree was by far the most expensive, undergrad was fairly pricey but with tons of financial aid available, while the Ph.D. students were all paid a stipend of 30K a year. At ~50K a year in tuition for the masters program, the CS department was making bank by inflating the size of masters cohort. Seemed kind of unfair to the masters students, from my perspective.

Look at its correlate locally: forcing everyone to have a degree even to work at Enterprise car rental.

I am just about halfway through an MBA program at an Australian University. On average most of my essay assignments are 2000 words +-10%. I was writing 2000 word essays in high school 20 years ago, this is not what I expected at all.

Having said that I didn't do an undergraduate degree, and really want that piece of paper so I can open some new doors.

So many of the other students in my group work shouldn't be passing high school classes let along a postgraduate degree from a "world class" university.

One thing I want to make clear is this is not xenophobia, I speak (a little) Mandarin, Korean & Japanese. I love working in multicultural teams. I don't care where you are from or how hard it is to speak English any more than people in China, Korea & Japan care how badly I mangle their languages. I care if you don't try, don't practice and play the racism card when a lecturer fails you because you clearly don't understand the premise of the subject.