US Universities Increasingly Seeking International Enrollments
06-18-2017, 02:31 AM
I'm on my phone, so I can't quote individual posts. But I do want to comment as someone who has experienced US higher education institution as a foreign (F-1 visa), both for undergraduate and graduate degrees (bachelors, masters and PhD in engineering) and has attended both public and private institutions (big well-known engineering school for undergraduate, Ivy for graduate).
1. Regarding taxation proposal to reduce number of foreign students:
It won't work as the taxes will simply get passed down to the students. And foreign students will, reluctantly but surely, accept the additional tuition hikes. When I was an undergrad, the financial crisis hit, the state slashed my university's budget and tuition increased by 40% in the 4 years I attended. It wasn't fun but my parents covered it.
There is only one way to reduce the number of foreign students: cap the number of visas. H1B is capped at 80,000 visas a year. Thank God as an unlimited number of H1B visas would've have flooded the US with even more Indian IT workers.
Cap the number of F-1 visas and cap it hard. Ultimately, had I not been able to attend a US institution I would've been fine. I effectively already had admissions to the best engineering school in my country. It might've also spared me the misery of interacting with Indian-American feminists...
2. On cheating by foreign students:
I can attest this is true. When I was a sophomore I took a class that got embroiled in a cheating scandal. Turns out a lot of the Indians (straight from India) got access to the midterm ahead of time and cheated.
Every Indian person who did well got investigated (whether they were American citizens, straight from India or grew up somewhere like myself). Some people complained about racism. I was just shaking my head and telling them: "Obviously some of you guys cheated. What did you expect?"
It's funny though. I got the second highest grade on the midterm. I was surprised these two Indian girls (best friends too) got a better grade than me, seeing as I knew they weren't that sharp. Turns out they both cheated. I ended up with the highest grade after all.
Tying in with my F-1 cap proposal: any student who gets caught cheating should have their high school blacklisted for a few years. Some universities already do this, but this should be done through the federal government. Consistent violations (a three-strike rule) should have high schools permanently banned for having any of its students ever get a F-1 visa.
3. Mandatory leave after graduation. The J-1 visa, uses for visiting researchers, has this particular rule. Once your visa expires/you graduate, you have to leave the country for a set minimum period of time. Too many people attend U.S. universities with the hope of immigrating to the U.S.
I have friends, who perhaps should not really stay in the US, yet got H1B visas or are on their OPT (optional practical training) extension hoping to get a H1B. This is despite the fact that when we apply for F1 visas we are suppose to show proof of stake in our home country, implicitly agreeing to return once we're done.
I won't say too much here since I am obviously biased. But the U.S. may want to decide on exemptions based solely on national interest. The United States does not have enough native doctorates in engineering to fuel its own R&D. This may be the one exception the US might want to take. Perhaps also prioritizing F1 visas for PhD students. I would also posit that companies and national research labs that want to hire foreign-born PhDs to pay up a hefty price (e.g. $100K) to show they really cannot find American citizens for the job. But again, I'm biased here. It's really Americans' decision to make on who and where to make exceptions if any.
4. On alternatives to higher education:
Starve the beast indeed. I think many degrees can be taught online. It's perhaps even arguable that even the doctorate system is outdated. It's certainly an argument proposed by Freeman Dyson. And looking at the scholarly work done by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and our very own Quintus Curtius (in contrast to Zuckerberg), PhDs as a credential of valid scholarly work may be a thing of the past.
The one exception I can think of are STEM majors. But even then, it would not be inconceivable to me to have young men and women do year-long engineering co-ops while taking online classes. Accreditation of co-ops and online classes would provide an interesting challenge. The biggest impediment will most likely be the current crop of companies and engineers who aren't sure what to make of these new hybrid-style educated engineers. Ultimately it may end up as an immutable problem and perhaps STEM will remain as the only thing standing when the entire higher education system comes falling down. Not least since I find basic STEM research done at universities hard to transpose in another format that does not require some form of higher ed institution.
I do look forward to seeing what Jordan Peterson comes up with. He's very excited about the project he's working on to provide a high quality online liberal arts education at 10x or even 100x less the cost.
5. On HCE's comments regarding parents being low-information cucks for sending their kids to Harvard, Yale and the like:
I can see why that sentiment may appear. However these schools provide one of the best return on investments in life. Even at a sticker price of $300K, it's well worth the price as the ROI can be staggering.
These schools are the gatekeepers of the globalist elite. I don't find the quality of the education better. Having taught a few courses as a grad student I can say with confidence they don't have a special sauce other schools don't have.
But man, the opportunities you get exposed to are insane. Already in my life, I have met Nobel Prize winners, billionaires, Fortune 500 company CEOs, and some of the most powerful 'intellectuals' in the world. Pick your tech billionaire. I bet I'm at most 2 degrees of separation away from him.
Attending these universities is the modern day version of being bequeath an aristocratic title. That pedigree never leaves you and it opens doors for you that you would never have access to otherwise.
These schools have a few purposes:
1. Connecting the kids of the global elite to each other. For example, Rahul Gandhi, the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family that runs the Congress Party in India, attended Harvard. The camaraderie these people develop makes it hard for them to break away from their elite programming. Emotional investment at its finest.
2. Connecting the global elite to each other. Say your Chinese kid went to Stanford. And now Tesla is coming to China. Well what a lucky coincidence your kid did his undergrad thesis with the professor who sits on the Board of Trustees of the Stanford Engineering school with Elon Musk. Now you get first dibs on lucrative deals, maybe your kid gets to run Tesla China. Of course, that's after your kid did his stint at McKinsey China for a few years. Or heck, you want to get in on the carbon cap'n'trade shtick in your country. Good thing your kid's undergrad advisor was one of the lead authors on the IPCC report and knows every player in the climate change world.
3. Filling up the ranks of the elite. Every movement (regardless of how evil) needs to perpetually get new blood. Especially the elite, since they usually don't produce enough kids to maintain their own size. Get some super smart Jewish or 2nd generation Indian or Chinese kid into these schools. Let peer pressure take care of the rest: they're typically insecure overambitious kids. And in a bid to not be outdone many of them end up signing up with the Wall Street firms and elite consulting firms. And nowadays with the Silicon Valley companies as well. You're a Harvard-educated Goldman Sachs banker. Your college roommate is a Silicon Valley tech VC kid. Your third roommate is the scion of some royal family in the Middle-East. You may not started off as a globalist elite, but you sure became one. Give it a few decades and these kids, despite perhaps their parents intention, are now fully immersed in elitist thinking and behavior.
Ultimately though, you do have to sell your soul at some point to end up working at McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, BCG, D.E.Shaw etc long-term. Does it surprise anyone on this forum that Jeff Bezos attended Princeton and then worked at D.E. Shaw for 8 years before starting Amazon and using some dubious business strategies to get where he is? Not to mention using WaPo to malign the president? It almost always starts from the elite schools: Gates, Zuckerberg (Harvard), Musk, Elizabeth Holmes, Larry Page, Sergei Brin (Stanford), Bezos, Eric Schmidt, that Asian female CEO of Reddit, Paul Krugman, Ben Bernanke (Princeton), and so many countless more. Shit, every US president in recent history has attended an Ivy.
I don't think I could have sold my soul like that, despite being offered the chance. Making money off the backs of hard-working folks like my parents just seems wrong to me. But I've seen many kids get turned by the dark side. The marketing these schools and other globalist institutions have is insidiously good: status, money, set up of life. What's not to like? The amount of times I've heard: "Genghis, you're getting your PhD from X school and if you work at company Y, you'll be set for life". True...but at what cost though? My consciousness and my humanity? No thanks.
Quite a few of the parents, perhaps unaware of the full implications, even encourage the behavior. Although some parents, like the hedge fund dad of that gay Muslim kid who got into Stanford, know exactly what the score is.
Today it's the elite universities that act as training grounds for the next generation of elite douchebags. Maybe that's always been the case, especially with the Ivy Leagues. Tomorrow it may be something else. But the elite will always find a way to distinguish itself from the rest of humanity. Even with a collapse of higher education at large, these universities will probably be unaffected. Most have billion dollar endowments and can fund even bullshit degrees with ease on their own. Harvard already can offer free tuition to all its students if it likes to. The other elite schools aren't too far away from that.
Make no mistake, it's not low-information parents sending their kids to these schools. And neither is the quality of the education or the cost of attendance the issue. When you start seeing these schools as the incubators of the elite, a lot of things suddenly make sense.