Recently a co worker of mine was complaining that “anyone can come here from all over the world and go to our colleges free of charge”, while hard working Americans like herself are denied aid. This sounded a bit suspect to me, or at the very least an exaggeration. Anyone ever heard this complaint before? I’m curious where this information came from (she “heard it somewhere”)and what the facts of the matter are, one way or the other.
She’s wrong. Some schools do offer financial aid to foriegn students just like they offer financial aid to domestic students. Other schools offer no financial aid to foriegn students at all, meaning those students pay full tuition. I would guess that the average foriegn student pays more than the average domestic student.
Maybe your co-worker is thinking of graduate students. In my college experience, most foreigners were grad students and many full-time grad students work as a teaching assistant, lab tech, etc. and end up getting most or all of their tuition paid. Of course, this works for US citizens, too.
-Rob
I’ll second that. The joke amongst my peers in grad school was that if you had to pay to go to school, you didn’t belong there. However, if you consider state universities (undergrad or grad), foreign students often end up paying a lot more. A US citizen may get stuck with out-of-state tuition for the first semester or year, but you can generally establish residency in the state within a year. A foreign national gets stuck with out of state tuition for the duration of their studies.
Recalling a number of my foreign-national friends from school, many of them were very strapped because they got the same aid packages as the rest of us (merit, assistantship, whatever) but paid a lot more in tuition. On the other hand, many of them got scholarships from their home country or from US groups with the same ethnicity to assist them.
Whatever the foreign students paid, they weren’t sucking up any resources that would have otherwise been available to a US citizen except maybe an enrollment slot, so grousing about hard-working Americans denied aid seems groundless (in general, though I’m sure you could find specific cases to crow about).
Note that working as a TA or RA for the degree is not the same as getting a free college education (as with a scholarship or fellowship).
FtG
[hijack, maybe?]
Hmm…so that explains why many TAs I’ve met are foreigners…heck, that explains why there are TAs!
Sorry, I am a freshman and I’ve only been in (mainland) US about 2 months(since late August). I thought first that TAs were volunteers or else forced-by-a-class to (try to) teach. I thought they were studying to be teachers, and we were their labrats. (Heck, that is the definition I have of TA where I am from, education students giving classes as a practice.) Later, I learned they were paid…but failed to make the association of money=financial aid.
Oh, yea, about what batsto’s coworker said. Does she calls foreigners those people that are from the US territories? Ok, they have US citizenship, but many (like me) has never really lived in one of the 50 US states. Seeing as I have never lived in the US before, sometimes I think of myself as a foreigner. And yes, practically I am studying for free, thanks to a scholarship. A merit scholarship, won by my (hard) work in high school, my notes, my SAT. I worked for it. It is not a scholarship that “anyone” can get.
But I think that for a foreigner(or in case of state universities, any non-resident) it is more harder to enter an university that it is for a resident students. Universities give priorities to the students living in their states, and few slots are given to out of state students. Those students that are accepted are as hardworking as their US counterparts. Many of those that I know are paying full out of state tuition, which is way more costly than state tuition(about double), plus housing and food.
I just wanted to add, that on the application forms, foreign students must PROVE they have the means to pay for all costs, including living costs. A daunting proposition for a lot of students. (A friend from Bulgaria was practically in tears reading that part of the application).
Well, batsto, everyone else here seems to have answered your question pretty well, but I’ll add a note from my own experience as a foreign student in the U.S. Some American universities do not offer any financial aid to international students. Out of those that do, most do not extend their need-blind admissions policy to international students. This means that a student’s admission form is reviewed in conjunction with his application for financial aid. If the student has asked for financial aid, he is less likely to get admission than a student with similar qualifications who has not asked for aid. So foreigners are discouraged from asking for aid unless they really cannot afford to pay and are willing to risk not getting admission at all because of it. There are some universities which, in their efforts to promote diversity, do admit international students on a need-blind basis - I believe M.I.T. is one of them - but even in these I don’t think that international students have it easier than Americans.
Foreign students visiting the US for their education are often paying their way with money from their family, or money from their home country.
For example, a country may need civil engineers to help build bridges and such. They pay for students to go to American universities to learn civil engineering and return to their own country. However, a lot of graduates quickly learn that civil engineers in the US make considerably more than their counterpart in their home country. After they have their degree they apply for citizenship and enter the US job market as a skilled worker. I am not sure if all countries have gotten wise to this trick, but evidently it had been pulled a lot in the late 1980s.
From my college friendships with students around the world, often they were from rather wealthy or influential families in their home country. For many of them, their fathers were prominent physicians in their home country. They found it rather odd that as the son of a steelworker, I would get into a quality university.
At my school, some of the foreign students are here on athletic scolarships. Where I go to school, many of the athletes here are from other countries (esp Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Nigeria, Canada, France, ex. Soviet Union-Kazakhstan), almost all are women.
There was an editorial in the local paper a few weeks back grumbling that Title 9 (I think thats the name - requiring equal funding or support for men’s and women’s varsity sport) benifited “foreigners” as there weren’t enough home grown women accepted into those sports. By contrast the men’s sports are pretty much all American - except for the kickers…
Perhaps it was also criticising American women for not being athletic enough (I don’t think that’s true). But the point is that Title 9 paved the way for many foreign student athletes in womens’ sports to come in.
I don’t know how comprehensive a tennis or volleyball scolarship is, but thats one route for a foreign student.
HelloAgain is right–foreign students have a considerable burden to show that have significant resources before being allowed to get their visa, much less come to school.
It’s amazing to me (oh, heck, why should it be?) that your coworker could say something so untrue and uninformed. Where do they get this crap? It hardly says a lot for what she’s getting out of her education if she takes something she “heard somewhere” and accepts it as fact without bothering to find out more.
My personal experience is a little bit different. When Mrs. ShibbOleth and I were in college, before we were married, we both applied for financial aid. As background, she was at the time a resident alien, e.g., had a green card, and had lived in the USA for more than 10 years. I am a U.S. citizen. When we applied for financial aid, she was given many grants and loans for which I did not qualify. I would normally be categorized as white male, she would be asian female. Not sure which of these tripped the right flags. The irony of the situation was that I lived on my own and paid my own way for school. She lived in a dorm room on campus and most of her bills were paid by her parents. Her father is a physician who had a sizeable income at the time. How this all worked out I couldn’t say for sure. In the end I have anyway paid off her loans plus mine, so I guess I lost twice. 
But after experiencing this I see how this concept could originate. Many alien residents will at least qualify as minorites which can be an advantage for some loans and scholarships. Of course there is a difference between someone who is a long term resident and a foreigner with a student visa. Unless you know the person you can’t tell though.
thanks for you help everyone…I guess what I was really looking for was a citation of some kind to refute her ridiculous statements. She’s been complaining to everyone in the builing about it, usually in the midst of Arab bashing while watching the news. If anyone knows of some more specific statistics with citations regarding the number of foreign students receiving aid etc in this country I would find that helpful.
Evidently this is not an uncommon perception…someone recently forwarded me a “joke” which I immediately deleted, but the gist of it was in the form of a warning to the Afghanis that if they don’t meet the demands of the US we would “kidnap their children and pay for them to go to college in America” etc etc, presumably implying that this is what the United States has been doing.
This is only true for non-immigrant foreign students. Foreign students admitted as immigrants (“green card holders”) are considered out-of-state students for the first year of residency and then in-state students after that, provided, of course, they’re attending a school in their state of residency.
There are only two types of financial aid that I have heard of international students receiving. Firstly, loans from the university. These are usually much harder to get as a foreign student than as an American, for obvious reasons. Also, they have to be paid back. Secondly, scholarships which are given to students of a certain country in order to enable them to study in the United States. The most famous of these is the Fulbright scholarship. This is awarded to only two or three people per country, usually for graduate study. Afghanistan does not participate in the program. I haven’t heard of any other U.S. funded scholarship programs in the region. The Fulbright scholarship enables American students to study abroad as well. Since the establishment of the program in 1946, 84,000 students from the United States and 146,000 students from other countries have benefited from this scholarship. I suppose your co-worker would prefer that they all sit at home watching MTV all day long.
I stand corrected. Does a student visa count as an immigrant for these purposes? I’m almost sure I recall several Asian friends in grad school paying non-resident tuition for their entire stay. I don’t think they had permits to get real jobs outside the university, which is what I think of when I hear “green card”.
Having a student visa means that you are only permitted to stay in the United States for the duration of your course (e.g. four years for undergrad). It isn’t like having a green card. It is just like a tourist visa except that it lasts longer and is usually multiple-entry. It is usually an F-1 or J-1 visa and the INS limits employment of F-1 visa-holders. Normally, a foreign student needs to apply for special authorisation to work off-campus and can only do so after one year of being in the United States. In addition, no foreign student is permitted to work more than 20 hours either on or off campus during the school year. During school holidays, one can apply for special permission to work additional hours, but only on-campus.
By “foreign student” here I am referring to an F-1 or J-1 visa-holder, not a student with a green card.
Does anybody really imagine that top American Universities PREFER having huge numbers of foreign students in their advanced science and engineering programs? That they deliberately shun American students, and give preference to foreigners?
It’s unquestionably true that a huge percentage of the top graduate students in the elite science and engineering programs in the U.S. are Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Iranian, or Arab. But I have to ask, whose fault is that?
If you MUST blame somebody, blame the lazy American students who prefer not to pursue the most challenging math and science courses. Or blame the elementary and middle school admonistrators who churn out students who lack the math and science skills to succeed in top graduate programs.
Well…A number of Middle Eastern countries do give their nationals who attend universities in the U.S. and Great Britian (and I imagine Canada as well - but I don’t know for sure on that) basically full rider scholarships.
I taught for a while in a small liberal arts college in Denver, Colorado and we had a number of students from the oil rich countries of the Middle East who were on these programs.
After a set amount of time they were supposed to return to their homeland and share their expertise with their countrymen. Many of them did not leave.