Completely agree. The sad part is that I know many Chinese people who have studied in the United States and want to stay, but we do not make it even remotely easy to do so.
Their solution to brain drain from foreign educated students in the 90s was in fact to send even more students to the States.
It’s actually worked very well for them as now they have a huge number coming back after studying abroad. And as our immigration policy becomes more restrictive, China will be getting even more of their best and brightest right back.
there is also the fact that as seen from a lot of people in China, American universities are a way for bad students with money to get a degree they wouldn't get at Chinese universities.
In the past, only the brightest and best Chinese students could come to US, mostly by scholarship for their master/PhD, most of them stayed after the study.
These days, the majority students from China are those ordinary kids(or even worse) with a rich dad, most of them are the only child in the family which was likely spoiled, these combined produced a quality issue, so we're seeing them on the news, that they cheat, they committed crimes, they do drugs,etc.
In the meantime, many universities are in need of cash, which is another reason in the mix.
So all in all, it's all about money, one needs that, another one has that but not much more than that, thus all kinds of related issues.
It could of course also be that the five fold increase is because China itself is becoming more competitive. I'd be a lot more worried if there was a five fold increase of American scientists leaving for China and sending their children there to study. But that does not seem to be happening. American universities are still quite prestigious, also inside China. Depending on the field Chinese universities can be quite prestigious as well, but given the choice of studying in the United States or China many people from other countries would given equal opportunity still choose the United States.
It is true that US immigration is horrible, but that goes for may other countries as well. I don't know what the cause is or whether it is something that you should even want to repair.
What I am saying is that as China grows in affluence, Chinese students are able to go to university in rapidly growing numbers. Many both want to and can afford foreign schools, and the USA is one of their top choices. This is a rapidly evolving trend. If I remember correctly enrollments grew about 6% in 2006, 20% in 2007, and the preliminary numbers I saw suggested that 2008 saw substantially faster growth than that. I've also heard suggestions that 2009 is seeing about a doubling in applications going abroad.
Absolute numbers are currently fairly small and the final market size is hard to estimate. But the addition of large numbers of highly motivated students who are willing to pay top dollar should increase selectivity at good universities.
That's not as good for China as these students building businesses within China, however.
We all see the benefits of China preparing its students better. China isn't fully on the same page yet.
Since reopening trade relations with the US in the 70s after Kissinger's visits, they've only gradually benefited from increased relations. Their growth is constrained by the government's stranglehold on the internet and media. People are constantly jailed for speech that would be considered innocuous in the West.
Many native English speakers will go to China to work as English teachers, but there are not enough teachers to cover all of China. There are so many Chinese people that huge swaths of them will never be directly educated by a native English speaker. Some of these kids enter into American schools, and this post and thread is the result. Students cheat as they realize they're in way over their heads, and the rest of us get annoyed at the devaluation of our degrees and industries. Industries are hurt when unqualified folks are hired based on a supposedly legitimate degree.
The number of Chinese students is already already in decline for various reasons [1]. It means less money for the American universities. It also means less tensions between students in the future. I don't think it's good news for the US though.
Look at the growing number of Chinese student returning home, something is pretty damn wrong.
You know for my parent’s generation, being able to study and immigrate to US is their unreachable dream. Nowadays it’s faded and quite a lot people just came to gain the experience.
I'm not sure I understand the argument of the article. Yes my graduate classes have many Chinese students in them, but why exactly is it bad that they are furthering their education and doing research in the US? The biggest issue I see is that many of them want to live and work in the US after graduation, but basically have to leave it up to luck in the visa lottery system.
Just my personal anecdote but a vast majority of the Chinese students I've known do not want to stay after their degree. A couple have rattled off the statistics on the huge advantage they have in the job market back home with a degree from the US.
Not that I'm arguing against immigration reform, though. Just playing devil's advocate.
Also, literally every student I've met in China wants to go to the US. Undergraduates want to do their Master's there, Master's students want to do their PhD, I guess PhD students want to become professors at a US university.
Hundreds of thousands of Chinese international students have been coming to the US every year for the past decade. I'm sure they've seen homelessness as well as the middle class lifestyle in the US. So far so good
Over 350K Chinese students in the US every year which implies only three years of churn to reach one million. Increasingly more of these students are in K-12 and in public systems. But private institutions benefit from tax dollars and are often drivers of regional economies which then ties back to tax dollars. Moreover, the top schools across the country have limited seats for both international and domestic students. If these institutions then prefer and accept more Chinese international students who almost always end up paying full tuition instead of domestic students in need of financial aid then it is easy to make such an argument. Anecdotally, go to any nice neighborhoods with good schools and you will more than likely find a house with a single Chinese high school student living in it. I am not saying international (and Chinese) students do not add value to the education system here in the US but when there are so many of them flooding the market effectively pricing out well-deserving domestic students then we clearly have a problem.
This is an excellent point - if you've got a US education, the US should do everything possible to help you stay to use that education in the US.
As China becomes more developed, presumably the draw of going to the US to study will diminish (probably rapidly). If the US can't attract and retain top-talent from other countries, the US will fail to reap the benefits of a global economy.
The most concerning quote: "About 80 percent of Chinese students who get degrees abroad now go back — up from about 33 percent in 2007, according to China’s Ministry of Education. Some 15 percent take jobs in China’s booming tech sector."
Attracting top global talent has always been a competitive advance for America, and it's not a good sign for our economy if we can't retain people that we are educating here.
China actually has government resources dedicated to this. I met a fellow (I won't go into more detail but he was pretty high up in the food chain) while ago whose job was to go to the US and "encourage" Chinese students to return post-graduation.
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