In my mind, there are multiple unfairness issues here. The first is for the students who come to the U.S. seeking a degree that they are far, far from being prepared to undertake. I've worked with grad admissions before, and I can tell you that it is really hard to assess records on some of these applicants. We could have easily filled our graduate programs just with students from China, if we had wanted to. They often looked great on paper: top GRE scores, grades in undergrad that looked great. Recommendation letters were harder. Often they were translations, and not being a reader of Mandarin, I couldn't tell you if they translations were accurate. Even if they were, the rhetorical strategies and things valued by different cultures are pretty different, so it was hard to tell what a recommendation meant. Eventually, we ended up doing interviews with the student: sending them questions like "What was the most important book in hamsterology that you read as an undergraduate and why" and then calling them to discuss their answers as a way to try to gauge English proficiency and preparation in the field. Departments who didn't do that often found themselves in a pickle when they had eager students who couldn't understand the professor or the readings and ultimately either flunked out or were kicked out because of cheating. It seems unjust to admit students who have no chance of successfully completing the program.
As the article notes, it is also unfair to the prepared students. When a program seems to have two degree tracks - one for students who meet the requirements but receive financial aid and the other for students who get passed through because they can pay, the end is a problem because you can't tell what the degree means. But the beginning and middle are problems, too, as the unprepared students drag everyone else down.
It's also unfair to the faculty. It's reasonable to ask faculty to make extra effort to delineate what, say, cheating is, since that's a culturally determined idea. Allowing students to record lectures so they can review and catch up on fast bits they missed because of a language issues - I'm not thrilled about that, but I'll allow it. But it's not reasonable to ask them to arrange informal tutoring from proficient students or to run classes on parallel sets of standards so students who never should have been admitted can "succeed".
Is this a problem at your institution? How do you handle it?
As the article notes, it is also unfair to the prepared students. When a program seems to have two degree tracks - one for students who meet the requirements but receive financial aid and the other for students who get passed through because they can pay, the end is a problem because you can't tell what the degree means. But the beginning and middle are problems, too, as the unprepared students drag everyone else down.
It's also unfair to the faculty. It's reasonable to ask faculty to make extra effort to delineate what, say, cheating is, since that's a culturally determined idea. Allowing students to record lectures so they can review and catch up on fast bits they missed because of a language issues - I'm not thrilled about that, but I'll allow it. But it's not reasonable to ask them to arrange informal tutoring from proficient students or to run classes on parallel sets of standards so students who never should have been admitted can "succeed".
Is this a problem at your institution? How do you handle it?
When a program seems to have two degree tracks...you can't tell what the degree means.
ReplyDeleteIt's not a problem at my institution, yet.
How I plan to handle it is by reminding my bosses that our ability to attract and retain students depends on the strength of our brand, which in turn depends on our degree meaning something amongst our competitors. If they fuck up the worth of our degree, they will royally piss off our alumni who suffer real damage as a result and will sure as shit not be opening their wallets for annual giving.
Meantime I'll have my CV in at several places.
My former institution, the Northern Institute for Rodent Ranching Studies, had some peculiar arrangement with a thoroughly undistinguished Chinese institution, Orkish Peculiar University, that resulted in boatloads of quasi-literate Chinese students descending on the NIRRS campus, searching of a US college degree--any degree--that they could parlay into a prestigious job back home.
ReplyDeleteAside from the intractable problems posed by assigning credit equivalencies between fundamentally incompatible classes and course-credit systems (no, Ming Wang, your two-credit History of Chinese Communism class really isn't a fully acceptable substitute for the three-credit American Government class), these Chinese students created further problems by drifting into the same major en masse.
Some of these Chinese students were pretty darn smart, and they were great to teach, but most of their compatriots weren't the highest-floating wontons in the soup, so they couldn't hack the lab-based or more quantitatively oriented majors. Gerbil Genetics? Nope. Hamster Habitrail Design? Nope. Guinea Pig Fur Weaving? Nope. But these students--and the various American students who fled, shrieking in terror, from the math involved in Mouse Cybernetics--could manage to bumble their way through Rodent Documentation Studies, so my department was plagued--nay, overrun--by these barely-English-speaking Chinese students who lived, ate, socialized, and studied together, often without speaking to more than three American students per semester.
As far as anyone can surmise, the Northern Institute started up this farcical exchange program with Orkish Peculiar in hopes of charging full-freight international student tuition and opening up a new, lucrative revenue stream. That never happened. The Chinese students figured out they could score in-state tuition by applying to the Honors program, and every single half-literate Chinese student applied for the Honors program, and every single one of them got into it. The Honors program turned into a low-achieving Chinese students' club. By the time I fled, "Honors" meant nothing.
Oh, yes, you asked about a solution... There was no solution. The farce continued until Monster State U. swallowed up the Northern Institute and nullified the agreement with Orkish Peculiar U.
You've just highlighted the problem with treating a university like a business. Business often favors short-term profit over long-term stability, and getting swallowed by a competitor is a viable result, at least for those in power who often receive nice golden parachute payouts in the bargain.
DeleteOh, don't get me started.
ReplyDeleteWe have a sizable population of international students. I assure you that all foreign students are not better than Americans at science. They bring in lots of money but they require a lot of remedial help. We hire more tutoring staff and faculty spend more time helping students. That's OK if our goal was education but it's not. Research funding is the coin of the realm. I'm sure that overall, it's a net money maker but it has lots of hidden costs.
Besides the extra time helping them with course material, the whole experience wears on me. I don't blame the students for the differences in culture between us and them but it falls on the faculty to "work with our students." Faculty aren't given any guidance about how to overcome these problems. Students are told that everything will be hunky dory. And oh, do they complain. Given their high tuition, there's a clear interest in keeping the students happy and enrolled. The whole experience sucks, in addition to being thrown into an ethical dilemma of trying to educate students who shouldn't be there in the first place.
I would say, "drown the bunnies" but, with the world economy in the shitter, this is solving the problem. Our international student population dropped. The problems with students is replaced by the problems of not having enough students. Still, I'd prefer budget cuts.
See what you did? You got me started.
I've been working in the writing center at a university with a major population of international students this academic year, and I can vouch for the needing-more-remedial-help thing. Probably 80% of our "remedial" (we're not supposed to call them that anymore) are made up of Middle Eastern students, and we've had to discuss structuring sections so that native speakers and international students are in different sections since they need different kinds of help.
DeleteOur remedial classes, that should say.
DeleteI can't tell the unqualified-on-purpose ones from the unqualified-thanks-to-graduates-of-our-education-school-who-are-now-teaching-in-local-schools ones.
ReplyDeleteHere at Tuk U, it varies by department, but it seems to be expanding into all of them. There aren't too many international students in the Hamster Husbandry program (though it's increasing), but in my Hamster Husbandry for Criminologists service course, the population is sizeable.
ReplyDeleteI have the opposite problem from Mindbender. The students aren't fleeing math - math is the bit they can do well. The problem is that many of them struggle to understand the spoken English of the lecture explaining all the non-mathematical bits that are needed if the math is going to tell you anything useful ("42" is a famously unhelpful answer if you don't understand how it relates to the question).
And yes, it's completely unfair to the students who pay through the nose for an education they can't access. The Criminology department does seem to be trying to tighten the language requirements. Part of the problem is the TOEFL test itself, which could probably be passed with a mathematical knowledge of the grammar rules. And of course, I do wonder what the international students are thinking - do they not realize how hard it is to learn another language? I know full well that I would fail miserably if I attempted a university program in any other language but English.
And I can't help asking one question: surely cheating can't be entirely culturally determined can it? I can see how there would be different views of collaboration. But I can't fathom the idea that wholesale copying of someone else's answers on a test is compatible with any reasonable comprehension of the idea of learning. But that (to borrow a line from Hammy Hamster) is another Thirsty.
I was an exchange professor in an asian (but not China) country a few years ago for a semester. The way it was explained to me by locals is that helping one's friend has a higher social value than doing one's work, asking the professor for help is shameful because it shows weakness and that it's getting the answer right that matters, not how you got it. Cheating as we would understand it was officially not ok, but generally forgiven with either a "I didn't want to embarrass myself in front of you, professor" or "I was helping my friend" excuse. I had to give all the exams individually and orally.
Deletemy school stopped taking the Embassy's word that the students passed their English proficiency test. That helped a lot. I never entirely understood how they expected to do well in a college class when they barely spoke the language. I suspect they came from privileged families where their status gave them a free pass.
ReplyDeleteWhat exactly is wrong with allowing foreign students to return to their home countries with degrees they may not deserve that may nevertheless improve their employment prospects there? They still get some learning, even if it's just that their English improves a little. As long as they go home, their questionable skills will not be a problem, or it will be their country's problem.
ReplyDeleteBecause they take up space and resources that good students could use much more productively. They are also often a damn nuisance, with inappropriate expectations and attitudes that infect other students, who are in a far inferior position to be able to afford them.
DeleteI see it breed resentment among the American students. They see foreign students - not all but some - slide by based on lower standards.
DeleteYou can't control where the (former) student goes with that degree. For it to mean anything, it must be awarded only to those who have earned it.
DeleteI'm still a bit flabbergasted by this.
DeleteIn 2007, several manufacturers recalled pet food that contained wheat gluten sourced from China. It turned out that the gluten contained melamine, a nitrogen-rich compound that elevated the gluten's apparent protein levels in lab tests. Many pets died as a result of ingesting the food that was supposedly high in protein, but was in fact not.
Let's say we award a degree that says someone has completed a rigorous program in civil engineering, which qualifies them to design bridges over which thousands of people will pass daily. For having completed a far less rigorous program, we'll give somebody else the exact same degree, on the presumption that they're going to a far off country (nevermind how people move about the globe). Let's think about what that could mean for the people who hire that graduate, and the people who use products made by that company.
In the grad program from which I fled, there was originally a vast divide between the American-born, native English-speaking students and the largely Chinese pay-their-own-way students. Native English speakers got the time-sink TA jobs (which also included International students who spoke English as well) while the mostly Chinese students got RA jobs that allowed them to work closely with professors on their research agendas.
ReplyDeleteAfter a time, we started complaining: the English speakers were overworked and out of the research loop and the non-English native speakers had zero classroom experience (which got in the way during job searches). Eventually, the powers that be started splitting the chores... and everyone became overworked. Also, they started having stricter admissions standards and most grad students had to be fluent in English (or good enough to fake it). There seemed to be a sharp decline in the number of students from China. (Those who made it through were rather impressive; I usually had to explain American references to them from lectures. I really should have been able to add a line to my c.v about being a cultural interpreter! hah!)
-Anon y Mouse
I can't speak to the grad level, but we have a still-relatively-new partnership with an outside entity (not one of the ones named in the article) that recruits international students, and (I think) provides some other services to them as well. There seems to be pretty good recognition of the services these students require, as well as some transition time built in for those who need it before full-fledged matriclation. However, we had to lower our overall TOEFL-score requirement (while upping the requirements for some individual components of the test) in order to be more "competitive." The jury's still out on what effect that will have (but since I often teach writing-for-scientists, and a good many of our international students cluster in the engineering/computer science disciplines, I will probably see in the near future, perhaps as early as this summer or next fall).
ReplyDeleteI share all of Dr. Amelia's concerns re: fairness to all students involved, instructors, etc. In addition, I worry that this idea is being oversold to state (and private) schools in the U.S. desperate for revenue streams at a time of waning state support and diminishing student/parent tolerance of rising tuitions. Just as there are only so many people out there who want to, and could, finish their college degrees if they could do so "conveniently" online, there are only so many international students whose families can truly afford to pay full tuition plus travel and living expenses, and there's an ever-growing number of "consultants" and other third parties out there trying to sell each entity to the other, and skim a bit off the top in the process. Ultimately, I fear it may be the skimmers-off-the-top who profit more than the schools, or the students (and they will, of course, move on to something else if and when the bubble bursts, leaving schools with no-longer-needed infrastructure of various sorts, excess faculty with ESL-teaching degrees or certificates acquired in good faith, and at least some international students with unfinished or questionable degrees).
This is, of course, the story of higher ed these days: the only people who seem to be making a decent living off the whole endeavor are the outside consultants (and maybe some administrators, but I suspect there's some overlap in those two pools).
It's also worth noting that many state systems are busy recruiting out of state U.S. students for more or less the same purposes. I actually think it's a good idea to have some cross-fertilization in state systems (diminishes the chance of parochialism and helps to spread the reputation of the school), but when it's easier for a somewhat-marginal student to get into another state's flagship than to get into a second-tier school in his own state, well, something's a bit off (and this arrangement, like many, of course opens up opportunities for more privileged marginal students that may be closed to poorer but stronger though not stellar students who need full financial aid).