[Vision2020] Local Issue?

[Art Deco]

The practice described below is alo an issue at WSU and UI.  Can anyone
present accurate statistics?
__________

 [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>


------------------------------
February 4, 2012
Taking More Seats on Campus, Foreigners Also Pay the Freight By TAMAR
LEWIN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/tamar_lewin/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

SEATTLE — This is the University of
Washington<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_washington/index.html?inline=nyt-org>’s
new math: 18 percent of its freshmen come from abroad, most from China.
Each pays tuition of $28,059, about three times as much as students from
Washington State. And that, according to the dean of admissions, is how
low-income Washingtonians — more than a quarter of the class — get a free
ride.

With state financing slashed by more than half in the last three years,
university officials decided to pull back on admissions offers to
Washington residents, and increase them to students overseas.

That has rankled some local politicians and parents, a few of whom have
even asked Michael K. Young, the university president, whether their
children could get in if they paid nonresident tuition. “It does appeal to
me a little,” he said.

There is a widespread belief in Washington that internationalization is the
key to the future, and Mr. Young said he was not at all bothered that there
were now more students from other countries than from other states.
(Out-of-state students pay the same tuition as foreign students.)

“Is there any advantage to our taking a kid from California versus a kid
from China?” he said. “You’d have to convince me, because the world isn’t
divided the way it used to be.”

If the university’s reliance on full-freight Chinese students to balance
the budget echoes the nation’s dependence on China as the largest holder of
American debt, well, said the dean of admissions, Philip A. Ballinger,
“this is a way of getting some of that money back.”

By the reckoning of the Institute of International
Education<http://www.iie.org/>,
foreign students in the United States contribute about $21 billion a year
to the national economy, including $463 million here in Washington State.
But the influx affects more than just the bottom line — campus culture,
too, is changing.

While the University of Washington’s demographic shifts have been sharper
and faster — international students were 2 percent of the freshmen in 2006
— similar changes are under way at flagship public universities across the
nation: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and University of California campuses in
Berkeley and Los Angeles all had at least 10 percent foreign freshmen this
academic year, more than twice that of five years ago. And at top private
schools including Columbia University, Boston University and the University
of Pennsylvania, at least 15 percent of this year’s freshmen are from other
countries.

All told, the number of undergraduates from China alone has soared to
57,000 from 10,000 five years ago. At the University of Washington, 11
percent of the nearly 5,800 freshmen are from China.

A few places have begun to charge international students additional fees
besides tuition: at Purdue University, it was $1,000 this year and will
double next year; engineering undergraduates at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign had to pay a $2,500 surcharge this year.

“We’re in something akin to the gold rush, a frontier-style environment
where colleges and universities, like prospectors in the 1800s, realize
that there is gold out there,” said David Hawkins, the director of public
policy at the National Association for College Admission
Counseling<http://www.nacacnet.org/>.
“While it’s the admissions offices butting up against the issues most right
now, every department after them, every faculty member who comes into
contact with international students, is going to have to recalibrate as
institutions become more international. I see a cascading list of
challenges.”

They have already begun here at Washington’s flagship university, where
orientation leaders last fall had to explain, repeatedly, the rigorous
campus recycling practices, reinforce no-smoking rules and, at the
make-your-own-sundae bar, help people get the hang of the whipped-cream
cans.

But there are deeper issues, like how much latitude professors should give
in written assignments.

“We recognize that people from other countries often speak with an accent,”
said John Webster, director of writing at the university’s College of Arts
and Science. “If we’re truly going to be a global university, which I think
is a terrific thing, we have to recognize that they may write with an
accent as well.”

For example, because Mandarin has one word for “he,” “she” and “it” and
nothing like “a” or “the,” many Chinese speakers struggle with pronouns and
articles. And English verb forms, like past participles, gerunds and
infinitives, can be difficult to master, since Chinese verbs are
unchanging.

Given that Chinese students’ writing will be “accented” for years, Mr.
Webster believes that professors should focus less on trying to make their
English technically correct and more on making their essays understandable
and interesting. But he knows this could be a controversial issue,
reminiscent of the Ebonics
<http://www.lsadc.org/info/ling-faqs-ebonics.cfm>debate decades ago.

The international influx is likely to keep growing, in part because of the
booming recruiting industry that has sprung up overseas. That includes the
use of commissioned agents, who help students through the admissions
process — and sometimes write their application essays. Amid controversy
over such agents, Mr. Hawkins’s group has named a commission, to meet for
the first time next month, to formulate a policy regarding recruiters.

Nationwide, higher education financing has undergone a profound shift in
recent years, with many public institutions that used to get most of their
financing from state governments now relying on tuition for more than half
their budgets. But legislators and taxpayers still feel deep ownership of
the state institutions created to serve homegrown students — and worry that
something is awry when local high achievers, even valedictorians, are
rejected by the campuses they have grown up aspiring to.

“My constituents want a slot for their kid,” said Reuven Carlyle, a
Democrat state representative from Seattle. “I hear it at the grocery store
every day, and I’ve got four young kids myself, so I get it.

“We are struggling with capacity, access and affordability,” he said. “But
international engagement is part of our state’s DNA. We have a special
economic and social relationship with China, and I am happy to have so many
Chinese students at the university.”

Still, Jim Allen, a counselor at Inglemoor High School in Kenmore, Wash.,
an affluent suburb north of Seattle, said: “Families are frustrated. There
aren’t as many private colleges here as in the East, and a lot of families
expect their children to go to U.W.”

Unlike many other state universities, the University of Washington did no
overseas recruiting before this academic year, when it staged recruiting
tours in several countries. So the rapid growth in international
applications — to more than 6,000 this year from 1,541 in 2007, with China
by far the largest source — was something of a surprise. Last spring,
another surprise was the percentage who accepted offers of admission: 42
percent decided to enroll, up from 35 percent the previous year.

“As best I can make out, it’s just word of mouth,” said Mr. Ballinger, the
admissions dean. “We’re well known in China, we’re highly rated on the
Shanghai rankings, and we have a lot of contacts.”

Applications from abroad present some special challenges. Because the SAT
is not given in mainland China, the university does not require
international students to take it. Although it does not pay recruiting
agents, Mr. Ballinger said he knew many applicants hired them, so the
university does not consider Chinese applicants’ personal essays or
recommendations. (Yes, he also knows that some affluent applicants in the
United States get extensive help from paid private counselors.)

Some in-state students said they had trouble knowing what to make of the
fact that international students, on the one hand, help underwrite
financial aid, and on the other, take up seats that might have gone to
their high school classmates.

“Morally, I feel the university should accept in-state students first, then
other American students, then international students,” said Farheen
Siddiqui, a freshman from Renton, Wash., just south of Seattle. “When I saw
all the stories about U.W. taking more international students, I thought,
‘Damn, I’m a minority now for being in-state.’ ”

Actually, nearly two-thirds of Ms. Siddiqui’s classmates are from
Washington, but her inaccurate sense of the population was echoed by all of
the three dozen freshmen interviewed — including those from other states
and from China. Most, like Ms. Siddiqui, estimated that half to two-thirds
of the class was international.

Ms. Siddiqui cited a psychology class in which the professor asked the
600-plus students about the nature of the families they grew up in. With
clickers recording the responses, Ms. Siddiqui said, about 60 percent said
their families were “collectivist,” rather than “individualist,” something
she perceived as more Asian than American.

Alison Luo, who grew up in Chongqing, a major city in southwest China, had
mixed feelings about the trend that she is part of.

“Before I came, I saw the online chatting in China, with hundreds of people
coming to the University of Washington,” Ms. Luo said. “I was kind of
worried about that. I paid to study abroad, and it was almost like I was
studying in China.”




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20120205/88546229/attachment.html>