This is total nonsense, and typical of American chauvanistic thought. The reason that there are plenty of foreign-born people at such places is that the institutions in question understand some fundamental truths:
Americans are not inherently better just because they are American,
A diverse campus, institution or corporation is a good thing, and
People from generally poor educational systems (example, India, Pakistan) can excel at a subject, making them a useful addition to the workforce/student body.
Grad schools don’t go looking for foreign students because there are no qualified American students to fill their spots; they fill their spots with foreign-born students because they bring diversity to the campus, and because they are equally able as American candidates are. The result is an expanded pool of total grad students. It is simply hogwash to assert that American college graduates are unable to find graduate slots or jobs.
Count me among the local-control advocates. I dithered for years over whether the feds shouldn’t just set the curriculum, fund it and get the local districts off the hook. Then my wife served on the local school board. The biggest problem (and we Democrats created this decades ago!) is that the feds require a lot of services of local schools that the locals districts wouldn’t dream of providing if left on their own. These are called “unfunded mandates,” and the feds get local districts to dance to the tune by providing money for other things (but never nearly enough) that the districts think they want. This turns the local districts into money junkies – and they can never get the federal monkey off their backs! Like a drug addict, they have to have increasingly large amounts of federal funding just to stay afloat, and they are forced to do increasingly ridiculous things to get the funds.
Even state funding of public schools has pretty much been a disaster here in Colorado. The School Finance Equalization Act has been tweaked so much, with constitutional amendments and legislative monkey-doodling thrown in, I’m not sure there is any equity at all in school funding. I think if the state and federal governments would let us finance our own schools locally, we’d do a better job overall than the mess we have now. It would allow us to simplify the curriculum, teach kids who can be taught in an ordinary classroom setting, and set reasonable standards of achievement. If the state and federal governments want to get involved in education, they can fund programs and set standards for special-needs kids. As it is, neither the special needs children nor the mainstream students are well-served.
Maybe it isn’t that Americans are incapable of participating in programs, but the foreign born students realize that American universities on average are better than their own so not only are American student competing with Americans, they are competing with the rest of the world (literally). How many American engineering students go to India or China to study engineering versus the number who come here? Simple statistics would tell you that you would expect to find a disproportionate amount of foreign born students in American universiites then.
I have no evedince to refute your assertions about grad schools, but foreign workers need to get green cards before they work in the US. High-Tech companies can ask for H1B visas for foreigners to work if they have skills that are not available in the US. There are lots of hoops to go through and the companies must show that there are no workers with the required skills available. High-tech companies do look for diversity in terms of women and minorities, but they can not recruit foreigners for reasons of diversity.
Pure bullshit. Sorry, but I’ve worked for a company that recruited foreign-born help, usually graduates of American colleges, but not always. Finding a way around the requirements for H1B visas is not tough. Paperwork never is.
I will also point out that no one has yet offered an explanation of how a fully federalized education system would be better at educating Americans. :smack:
If they recruited foreigners because they were cheaper than Americans, (which was the assertion as to why there are so many foreign high-tech workers) they broke the law. I hired many foreigners on H1B visas and each time we needed to show that there were no suitable American applicants.
Why would a national educational system be better than what we have now? Here are some reasons:
[ol]
[li]Economy of scale. Text books could be printed once.[/li][li]A consistent curriculum so that transferring students would have an easier time.[/li][li]A more equitable funding system not based on each region’s tax base.[/li][li]A chance to nuke the current system which is f*cked up beyond belief.[/li][li]Because it works in every other country on earth.[/li][/ol]
MIT is the second choice for Indians who can’t get into the India Institute of Technology. But no one is disputing that American Universities are good, it’s the K-12 system that is the most screwed up. You don’t see India and China trying to send their kids to public high schools in the US.
Never, ever going to happen in the U.S. There is no way well off voters will vote to either raise their taxes or (essentially) cut funding to their local schools. It’s just not going to happen.
With all due respect, you’re full of it. Doctorate programs are chalk full of foreign students because (1) It makes little sense for an American to go to grad school, and (2) it makes a ton of sense for foreigners to come to America and do a doctorate. Unless you have an undying love for whatever it is you are studying or have your heart set on being a University Professor, there is no reason to go to grad school. You will make more money (even in the long run), have an easier job, and a lot more free time if you go into industry out of school, especially in the hard sciences.
On the other hand if you are Chinese or Indian and get into a doctorate program in the U.S. you will start off making more as a RA/TA than you would in a job in your home country, and when you get your doctorate you will make many times the money you likely would have in China/India. It’s not ability, just a simple cost-benefit analysis. There are a ton of American undergraduates that would easily be able to move on to Doctorate programs, but they are gonna choose the 60k salary with full benefits and a retirement package over a 15k stipend.
Who knows better how to run your office or solve the problems at your place of business – you and your co-workers or the feds?
What guarantee is there that the people making the decisions at the federal level know the first thing about actual hands-on teaching?
LHOD, I’m sorry that you are having to see for yourself the sad consequences of NCLB. The plan was outrageous. It needs an exit strategy.
I support raising standards for teachers and students and putting more power into the hands of classroom teachers. I also support hiring people to do the clerical work that takes so much of the teachers’ time. When I was teaching, I would have been willing to bypass a raise in order to have some of these things in place.
The National Education Association does not exist solely for the benefit of teachers. Take a look at their website sometime. It was not a union when I was a member and I doubt that it is now.
It’s funny that you think I’m full of it. I worked in high-tech research for over 20 years, have 6 patents (with several more pending), and authored a technical book. I have done recruiting for one of the big high techs. Not only were they only interested in new college graduates with masters degrees or better, they only recruited at the top schools. A bachelors in a hard science is almost worthless. Your resume will be filtered out before the hiring manager will even see it. I came up when you could just get a job as a hacker. I’m a college dropout that ended up in high-tech, but most of my younger colleagues had masters degrees. In the research division, PhDs were the norm.
Sounds to me like this has nothing to do with education, you just don’t like having centralized govt programs in general
Probably a little better than the guarantee that the people making the decisions at the local level know the first thing about actual hands-on teaching.
I agree 100 percent here. It is really bad to have teachers taking attendance, grading true/false and multiple choice tests, supervising the playground, etc. They are trained professionals and should have the same kind of support that office workers do. It seems as though it might even be cost effective to have lower oaid workers doing the routine work and freeing up teachers for teaching.
You’re one company, and you may be right about research, but most graduates don’t go into research. Your Physics, Chemistry, and Biology majors are competing against other Liberal Arts majors like Sociology, Psychology, and History for generic cube dweller jobs, and they easily win that competition.
Economy of scale. Text books could be printed once.
/quote]
Good luck selecting the appropriate book. What happens if you get stuck with a bad one? Is there going to be any incentive to write good books once you’ve already gotten the contract?
How difficult is it at this time?
How do the Feds plan on taking over education in the first place?
So you say.
“Because everyone else is doing it” really isn’t a reason.
Thank you. The assertion was that a national education system can not work well in the US, and my response is that it works well almost every place else.
Size matters. “Everyplace else” is typically the size of one of our states, not our nation. Let me know when the EU takes over education of all of Europe, and is able to create a unified standard for European history.
Demographics matters. There is as much of a spread between San Diego and New York as there is from London to Berlin.
Politics matters. We REALLY like sticking our noses into education in the US. Research the attempt at the national history standard, and Lynn Cheney’s comments about it. Look into the problems in textbook publishing - there are complaints about how California and Texas dominate, forcing certain attitudes into history books.
A national office will be constantly flipping around based on which party is in office. Much better to force the control as local as possible.
Again - a national standard for tracking reading and math is a great idea. Adding in science should work as well, aside from the evolution “theory” arguements that will be debated on the floor of Congress. History would be a HUGE mess.
This probably depends a lot on the field and the school. I went to grad school for a PhD in chemical engineering. I didn’t apply to any of the really top schools, but several in maybe the top 20. There were no interviews and I was flown to each school for a visit where they tried to sell their program to me. There seemed to be competition amongst the schools for a limited pool of qualified American candidates and foreign students were used to fill out the ranks, since they were expensive to support.
