Number 6, Straight Dope.
What about the facts that:
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It’s probably way too early to establish a statistically strong trend on something that requires this much planning and lead time, but …
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Does anyone doubt that a significant number of students, especially from the disfavored countries, will in fact exhibit some reluctance to come to a country where they will likely be discriminated against either at the border and/or the whole time that they’re there? Do these people not watch or read the news? And …
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Not only can one reasonably anticipate fewer foreign students, but at least anecdotally, some who are already here want to get out.
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The various planned and anticipated cutbacks in science funding aren’t likely help, either.
OP didn’t say it was a lie, more specifically a “lie with statistics”, which is using statistics to draw misleading conclusions or to steer your audience into drawing misleading conclusions. This is a good example of that.
The claim they want the audience to take away from the headline is misleading. Clearly the narrative they’re trying to promote is that Trump is scaring away foreigners, but the actual statistic they provide when examined critically does not, without further substantiation, support that view.
Using something like “40% of universities saw a dip in foreign enrollment” is a very flawed statistic in itself. It doesn’t tell much of a story. If you’d expect every year that some universities have slightly more enrollment, some have slightly less, and some stay the same, then you’d expect something exactly like that statistic to exist when everything is perfectly normal and no “Trump Effect” was changing anything. More useful would be - how big was the decrease? How big was the net decrease (or increase) across all universities? Is there some sort of correlation between universities with fewer enrollments corresponding to Trump supporting demographics? Is there actually a “Trump effect” to the net detriment of foreign enrollment?
The people in this thread who are jumping to defend the headline and how it’s technically correct are just being partisan. If you have the better position than your opponents, convince people on the merits of your position, don’t lie or mislead about their positions. This sort of misleading headline does no one any good and only allows people who want to believe it to reinorce their views - which is one of the problems with right wing media.
Be better than those you fight against, don’t join them in partisan-based dishonesty.
Nope…but, how many students actually come to the US from those countries? From what I recall, the largest groups of students coming to the US would be from countries that aren’t on that list. I’d hazard to guess that even among Muslim countries those countries on the list don’t compose the majority of students coming here.
Perhaps all this talk of bad America not wanting furriners will scare some students from those other countries off, but I’d need to see some hard data on that to be convinced…and the data would need to be from more than the first 3 months of President Carrot Tops reign of terror.
I have some friends from India, and after the recent shooting this is a big topic of conversation. So, yeah…it could have an impact, especially all the bad press the US has been getting world wide since the Trumpster was sworn in. Again…need to see more data, and at this point I don’t think you could reasonably say there was a real trend. Come back at the end of this year, minimum, with some data and you might have something. The article glosses over all of that, which is why it’s lying with stats.
You mean in Trump’s budget proposal? 
Seriously…you don’t actually think that has any chance of being followed, do you? Not to say that the Republicans can’t or won’t try and do their own bits of cutting and snipping, but they can’t just do anything they want. Just look at how the recent Trumpcare worked out for them.
First off, those aren’t facts. They are conjecture. Reasonable but conjecture none the less. Fact don’t include “probably”, “does anyone doubt” and “one can reasonably anticipate”.
But mostly, so what? What does that have to do with the NYT reporting on this study? Or are you saying we should just change the subject?
One paragraph from the story:
Seems like the collected data isn’t really telling a coherent story. If the number of foreign students that actually enroll in US schools starts to decline, then something significant is happening.
Not only is it not convincing, it’s counter productive. If the NYTimes or WaPo or NPR do things like this, then it gives fuel to the claim that both sides do the same thing so Fox News is just as good a source as anything else.
Whether it’s a “significant” effect has yet to be established. It’s also “likely” that many of these students may feel discriminated against in their home countries, some of which are not paragons when it comes to freedom of speech, religion etc.
As XT suggests, the vast majority of foreign students coming to the U.S. are not from countries on the Trump Hit List. China*, India and South Korea alone account for more than half the total. And the U.S. gets more than twice the international students of any other country.
Now, if the relatively small minority of students that come from the Middle East (or Mexico) markedly declines, that’d be worthy of a headline. And it’s legitimate to write an op-ed expressing concern that American scientific achievements might be lessened if we get fewer international students from certain countries.
*I doubt Chinese students in general give a rat’s ass about Trump’s beliefs. They’re going to keep on coming as long as their government allows it.
Yet another point that’s unclear here: If the report is accurate, then over a quarter of all colleges showed no change in the number of foreign applicants… but that’s clearly absurd. The number of foreign students at most colleges is probably somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand, which would mean that it’d be very rare indeed for that number to be unchanged. Clearly, what they mean is that those schools saw no significant change in their number of foreign applicants… but just how big a change are they considering significant?
Over a million foreign students come to the US a year, so it’s hard to say what ‘significant’ would mean to any given school. Or how we’d know if there was a real change so early in the year. My WAG on this is that there are probably more foreign students wanting to come to the US than slots available, so if you lump everyone who is Not US into ‘foreign student’ the delta would be more along the lines of ‘those 100 students that were coming from Iran are now coming from India and China’, so it wouldn’t really come up on such a broad (and relatively data free) list. I think the REAL story would be what is the actual delta for individual countries, but that’s me.
That’s SOP for Faux News. It’s unusual when the venerable NY Times does it.
To really see the impact one would need to look into what the trend has been in recent years. If 95% of colleges had routinely been reporting increased foreign interest, then it’s a pretty major story. If foreign applications/admissions typically wax and wane with, say, typically about 30% of colleges reporting fewer, then there isn’t much of a story here.
The magnitude of the decrease also should be taken into account.
I’m guessing that none of that deeper research was easy to do.
I heard there’s a worthwhile Canadian initiative to make headlines less sensationalized.
I agree that the statistic is misleading. But I give less blame to the N.Y. Times. The pdf source itself gives the same spin as the N.Y. Times.
The “big story” is that applications from the Middle East are down. Applications from Africa and Asia-xChina are up, partially offsetting the effect. (And the trend would be informative; a slight decline in applications is more interesting if applications had been rising a lot year-after-year. Were they? The source doesn’t say.) There will be fewer Muslims enrolling in American schools; the newspaper should have emphasized this, rather than the more blanket “foreign applicants” with its much weaker statistical support. Anyway, the survey was made just a few weeks into the attempted travel ban; perhaps a better-informed study will come later.
But I put “big story” in quotation marks. Muslims are strongly discouraged from travel to U.S. and then are … discouraged from travel? It doesn’t seem like a headline story to me.
Some is not too hard to find out. (WSJ published 2016)
And from WaPo 2015
So it does seem that a fairly standard year on year increase may have been halted … not shocking … and that the report and the NYT bit were poorly written.
The media misleads with numbers all the time, like the recent Cato report story that shows illegal immigrants commit “less crime” because rather than per capita statistics it only shows the raw numbers of illegal immigrants in jail (about 120,000) versus the number of native-born and legal immigrants in jail (about 2,000,000), ignoring both the facts that being here illegally is a crime itself and that there are at least 300 million more native-born and naturalized citizens in the US than people here unlawfully.
If you are talking about this study, then you are mistaken. The study compares the incarceration rate for immigrants vs. other native US populations.
Also, illegal immigration is a misdemeanor, not a crime.
I have taught statistics and the college level and would have no problem saying this headline is misleading at best. There may be an element of truth in here but the evidence is lacking.
Fun book. It’s an easy read, but some of the references are a bit dated (I think it’s from the 50s or 60s?)
A misdemeanor is a crime. But being in the USA illegally is not, in and of itself, any type of crime.
A misdemeanor is a crime. A misdemeanor isn’t a felony, but it’s a crime.
And, for what it’s worth, actually entering illegally is a misdemeanor for the first offense, a felony for the second. From 8 USC 1325a:
That being said, not everyone who’s here illegally has committed a criminal act. If someone is here past their visa expiration date, that’s a violation of the law, and there’s a civil penalty, but it’s not a criminal act.
I vote with the OP.
An honest headline would have been something like, “Foreign students down 5%, nationally.”
Lying with statistics isn’t “making up statistics”, it’s using cherry-picked and misinterpreted statistics to tell a lie. This fully falls under that heading.