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Foreign Student Dependence

insidehighered.com

36 pointsluu36 comments

An old professor of mine had a conversation with someone at MIT about a student trying to get into their PhD Econ program, and he relayed to me an interesting, paraphrased quote:

"Of the 30 person cohort they take in every year, only about 4 or 5 of them were domestic. I don't understand why that seems so odd to people--isn't it presumptuous to assume that every year, more than 20% of the top 30 students in the world are american?"

In other words, it really shouldn't surprise people that for universities that compete on an international level, a majority of students are international.

I would also argue that there's substitution effects too. Many Americans capable of getting into the top Econ Phd programs can get salaries post-undergrad that would rival their post-Phd salaries. This is less true of students in many other countries.

It would be odd if more than50% were Chinese. If we are talking about worldwide populations ans statistics.

Slightly, but not entirely. I wonder how many Chinese people want PhDs per year vs Americans? I'd expect the former is larger, partly due to sheer population size and partly due to the must-get-credentials culture that I've not seen in the US as much.

Chinese Uni's are PhD mills. Every student who attends, and can put up with indentured servitude for n years gets one. That's not to say that there aren't some very smart Chinese, and some good Uni's in China, just that the average Chinese PhD is meaningless. edit: (not meaningless, but that the avg Chinese PhD isn't equivalent to one from the US, Europe, Russia, etc.)

source: Colleague with a PhD from China, and living/working in China for a couple of years on a research project.

This is quite true. The best students go abroad to get PhDs anyways, or...maybe some very special institutes in China that are up to Western standards (e.g. Andy Yao's lab in Qinghua).

Smart students still come out of these schools in spite of the PhD programs, but there are plenty of wasted opportunities.

Good universities in the US are really very, very good - it makes sense for them to recruit internationally. But bad universities, man, they are just plain awful.

I think the graduate program at Dead Squaw College, IA should close its doors today instead of keeping its head above water with foreign students. With that kind of doctoral degree they hand out there no one finds employment, either in the US or abroad.

For many countries any sort of American degree is a huge credential for any candidate returning home. Even if people bother to check the reputation of the course, which they usually won't, study in America indicates some level of aptitude in English (and for those developing countries further establishes them as being from a wealthy, high status background and capable of getting past US immigration.)

And yeah, I'm confident that the PhD from Dead Squaw would get them senior academic roles in the top national universities of some backwater countries.

I think the assumption is that top universities don't compete on a perfectly international level. For example, not everyone can speak enough English to attend an English university.

(Yes, insert jokes about how your TA was unintelligible- I mean the students who do not speak a single word of English. I would bet they are less likely to attend English universities.)

You would be surprised. I have a fair few fellow students who speak English well enough to hold basic conversations but the moment you need to talk about more than the weather they lack the understanding of the language to put the sentences together (like someone who can piece together code suddenly being asked to synthesize a new program from scratch). A few fair better in technical subjects but at least for one English university, this doesn't appear to be a barrier.

(As an aside, I had a pair of Portuguese TAs who spoke very good English, but had a slight issue with the letters of the alphabet. And a couple of the English letters share names with different Portuguese ones which made for interesting Elementary Logic tutorials.)

I can totally talk about the weather in Chinese but as soon as we start talking about work, I have to switch to English.

Thankfully, my Chinese colleagues have much better English than I do.

For what it is worth, I worked for ten years for the physics dept at one of the universities for which statistics were listed in the article. I got to know a lot of professors, a few deans, administrators, you know, the people who decide which students get admitted. I've had, and overheard this conversation with them a few times. It always comes down to money. American students won't live six deep in a one bedroom apartment in the low-rent part of town, like many of their foreign counterparts who come from a developing country. I got downvoted yesterday for saying it was about the money, but it's about the money. If your family is well off and doesn't mind footing the huge bill for you, then you can do it. Most of the kids who are smart enough to do post baccalaureate science work, can see that they will never get out of debt, so they don't. Other American students who I have seen make it to a PhD in Physics, had a supportive spouse, and often enough go into geophysics since there is money there.

PS It's about the money.

As an American Electrical Engineering Master's graduate from one of the mentioned schools, the program I was in was flooded with international students (mostly from India, some from China, a few from Turkey).

What I found interesting is most of the Indian graduate students came for a masters, most of the Chinese graduate students came for a Ph. D. There were too few Turkish graduate students to make a generalization about.

I think this is good because most of the time, American's can earn nicely with their Bachelors in Electrical Engineering, so there's little incentive to pursue higher education. Having got a Master's in Electrical Engineering, I wouldn't recommend it as a way to further your career. The classes were interesting, but so far I haven't found a job that needed those specialized classes.

But what about all the jobs that require, absolutely require a Masters, and 5 years experience for an entry level position?

Well there's a good chance that those job postings are created after they have the H1-B visa candidate already selected. List exactly the candidates "qualifications" so that no one is eligible. That way they can claim that there are no local engineers that can do this very specialized work.

/ns unfortunately...

And to nobody's surprise it becomes obvious why college labs are always TA'd by people who can't speak English. (Which in turn leads to more frustrated students quitting STEM fields...)

At good places you sometimes run into professors that you have difficulty understanding. At bad places they won't recruit professors that you have difficulty understanding because the darling students will complain.

That complaint of yours - it says more about the fellow who makes it that it does about the TAs.

I had a calculus TA at Berkeley whose English was so poor that she would respond to questions from Chinese students in Chinese.

When she didn't understand your question in English, she would make a blind guess as what you were asking about and then answer that, speaking as fast as she could so that you couldn't interrupt her to tell her that she wasn't answering your question. This would continue until you gave up.

I had a similar experience in an Algorithms class, where the TA had a firm grasp of perhaps 70 % of the material she was supposed to teach. This person was an American citizen, though.

When I was discussing the quality of TAs with the Instructional Director in our department this episode came up, and she was deliciously cynical. "The students are resilient", she said.

This is true. At university you are supposed to work yourself and to create learning networks with your fellow students yourself. It isn't highschool any longer, especially not at Berkeley.

Right: it's my fault for not learning Mandarin to take calculus.

And by the same logic, it's my fault for not figuring out how to cheat on all my exams.

Schools are for learning, not hazing. This kind of neglect can't be excused as some kafka-esque "character building" exercise.

The point of a university is to master the subject by any means necessary, which includes building up your professional and social network. This point was impressed upon us in our first week at uni. We were encouraged by profs and TAs to set up informal learning groups, if we didn't we weren't going to cope with the pressure. I keep telling my students the same.

I hate to say this, but it must be said: anyone who calls dealing with an incompetent TA "hazing" when he is at a genuine university like Berkeley has missed something. Didn't you have fellow students to talk to to be able to pass Calculus?

I know there are not-universities, and anyone who passes through these is cheated, but Berkeley isn't among the not-universities.

If you don't want to get it, I can't explain it to you.

I sympathize very strongly with your viewpoint (and had my own horror stories with both domestic and foreign instructors, some tenured, some TAs, as well as some very good ones).

That said: among the most powerful and valuable lessons I learned in college, and ones I really wasn't prepared to even understand were part of the "curriculum" involved dealing with combative instructors (getting screamed at, in the locker room showers, while both of you are nude, by your professor is ... an interesting experience), or complete foulups in financial aid disbursement (calmly telling the woman who told me I'd have to call another department, which had just closed for the day, after I'd realized where the check I should have received a month before had ended up, what my demands were, and picking up their distribution the next afternoon, felt pretty good). Relationship ups and downs. Deaths in the family, of family of other students, of other students and friends.

It's not like college was a war zone (though it had elements of that), but there were definitely some learning experiences.

And a few skills I picked up, many of them outside my core coursework, or even any coursework, which I still practice daily now to great profit.

However, when the same TAs are responsible for grading and explaining assignments, it doesn't really matter whether a student is 'resilient.' No matter how much effort the expend, it's not getting reflected in actual knowledge if the TA is grading mostly on rote format because of language barriers and the students fail to grasp any significant content because it relies on a broken intermediary to be communicated. It becomes an exercise in showing up to lab, sitting there, doing the the things the TA says, putting the exact tables they specify in your report, and being oblivious to what the lab was supposed to be accomplishing. Or at least that's what I witnessed.

What you say is somewhat true for classes with regular textbooks or a prof to go back to, but when it's a lab where all content comes from the TA running the lab, often times you end up going through wrote procedure that's potentially even completely disconnected from the intended lab material because it's been intercepted by three layers of translation and language confusion.

What you are describing is a clue problem, not a language problem - the root cause is that the TA does not understand the assignment, if they can see it and still don't understand it isn't the language that's the problem. What you are describing is familiar, it is just like in that Algorithms class I sat through.

The original comment was about TAs with poor command of English.

>"The students are resilient"

translation: These are the TA's we can afford.

> These are the TA's we can afford.

Almost. It's more like "At Doldrum Hills State a fair amount of undergraduates are decent, but their graduate program is shit, and everyone in there is awful."

I'd translate it as: All I actually care about is getting to sit in this chair from 9-to-5 until retirement.

As far as I know and observed applications to TA positions are fairly democratic. I know of a recent instance where the professor had to accept the only TA application he received because no one else applied. If you still have a problem there are many readdress systems in colleges to challenge such situations.

It would be more constructive to provide proof to your claim.

Do US Universities not have a language test/requirement at entry?

UK Universities do I think [1] is just the first example I came across

[1] http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/international/english/postgradu...

Some universities do, but it's not a nationally mandated thing as far as I know.

I'm a domestic graduate student at a university that requires TOEFL scores (http://www.ets.org/toefl) and my department is rumored to have a policy of calling international students they are strongly considering in order to double check they can hold an intelligible conversation in English. That said, you can still get students who aren't very strong in "conversational/professional speaking level" English who pass through these requirements.

Is the situation really that bad? When I look into admission requirements for most universities in the West, most requires some kind of minimum score in TOEFL/ IELTS.

I can confirm that people sometimes mysteriously pass them without being able to speak a single word that an average native speaker can understand.

Do they have an actual spoken portion, or are they all written?

I think this is perfectly fine as long as foreign students are paying full non-resident tuition when at publicly-funded institutions. Private schools may do as they wish of course, but it's not a responsibility of US citizens to pick up the cost to educate foreign nationals.

In the sciences, almost everyone - domestic or international is paid a stipend. It's more accurate to think of PhDs are paid researchers rather than students. Taking classes is not the point of doing a PhD so it's not education in the sense that doing a Bachelors or Masters is education

For Masters, everyone pays tuition - unless one can find a research assistanship where the professor is willing to fund part or all of the cost, scholarship, etc.

They aren't. Most or at least some of tuition is waived. Students get a stipend, since you are often prohibited from taking employment. If they take employment, it is often paid by grant, and related to research in the field of study. Some get TA work. As I said in another comment ITT, American students won't work for the meager stipends that most schools can offer.

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