'American Universities Are Addicted to Chinese Students'

[eppur_se_muova]

Matt Schiavenza May 30, 2015

A startling number of Chinese students are getting kicked out of American colleges. According to a white paper published by WholeRen, a Pittsburgh-based consultancy, an estimated 8,000 students from China were expelled from universities and colleges across the United States in 2013-4. The vast majority of these students—around 80 percent—were removed due to cheating or failing their classes.

As long as universities have existed, students have found a way to get expelled from them. But the prevalence of expulsions of Chinese students should be a source of alarm for American university administrators. According to the Institute of International Education, 274,439 students from China attended school in the United States in 2013-4, a 16 percent jump from the year before. Chinese students represent 31 percent of all international students in the country and contributed an estimated $22 billion to the U.S. economy in 2014.
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But the symbiotic relationship between cash-strapped American schools and Chinese students is not without its problems. Demand for an overseas education has spawned a cottage industry of businesses in China that help students prepare their applications. The industry is poorly regulated and fraud is rampant. According to Zinch China, an education consulting company, 90 percent of Chinese applicants submit fake recommendations, 70 percent have other people write their essays, 50 percent have forged high school transcripts, and 10 percent list academic awards and other achievements they did not receive. As a result, many students arrive in the U.S. and find that their English isn’t good enough to follow lectures or write papers.
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“American universities are addicted to Chinese students,” Parke Muth, a Virginia-based education consultant with extensive experience in China, told me last year. “They're good test takers. They tend not to get into too much trouble. They're not party animals. The schools are getting a lot of money, and they, frankly, are not doing a lot in terms of orientation.”
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more: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/05/american-universities-are-addicted-to-chinese-students/394517/



Not a very in-depth article, but it hits some interesting data points.

[daleanime]

1. bookmarked

[HassleCat]

2. Cultural differences

In some cultures, college is something to be completed to gain an advantage, not a place to gain knowledge and develop skills. Of course, many Americans approach college from this perspective, so we should stop for a moment before we feel all superior. I have friends from China who attended university here in the US, and their English is not so great, even though they are deadly smart. The Chinese government pays their way, so it is a good deal for the university.

[Starry Messenger]

3. The article seems to suggest that colleges should be

reluctant to expel students for cause, because of the money they'd potentially lose. That is kind of crappy.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. I took it more to be "this is what they're setting themselves up for" ...

i.e. a warning to break the dependency -- "addiction" is not used in any positive sense here.

[Starry Messenger]

5. That makes more sense.

Sidebar, interesting film on this: "Verita$" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2073702/

Some of the film ranges into CT a bit, but the film-maker is S. Korean, and goes a bit into the high value Asian cultures put into a world-class education (or degree) at places like Harvard. It examines the role that wanting huge endowment funds for the college has had on distorting the mission of colleges like Harvard, causing them to seek full-tuition students from abroad.