This was something that was an instapundit.com link a couple days ago: “Universities Try a Cultural Bridge to Lure Foreign Students” — an article on the fact that foreign students have always been keen on the Ivies, but are now increasingly attending state schools such as the profiled Oregon State University, and joint ventures with private companies are aimed at helping these students integrate into university life, from understanding general cultural differences to the particularly difficult element of class participation.
A while back there was a similar article about the University of Illinois. Not such a partnership, but about the fact that foreign students are increasing in number, and that universities are seeing them as an important revenue source, sticker-price-paying customers who don’t expect any discounts.
So in some ways, this is a Good Thing, right? It’s an export product, a product that America can offer the world. Whenever I read that graduate programs in the sciences have large numbers of foreign students, it doesn’t offer any evidence that there’s a shortage of American graduates. It just means that American universities are offering a product that foreign students want to “purchase.”
But:
1) The more foreign students there are at a university, especially undergraduates, especially students who are still struggling with English, the more it diminishes the quality of education for the Americans.
2) For a university to be pursuing profitable customers — well, it just doesn’t sit right as an action appropriate for a non-profit university. That’s what the University of Phoenix is all about. And for selective universities, every spot taken by a foreign student is a spot not given to an American.
3) Bloggers such as instapundit.com and Walter Russell Mead and team at The American Interest chronicle developments in Higher Education with a storyline that universities have overpriced themselves and will ultimately have to cut costs to compete for students. The marketing of American universities to foreign students is worrisome because that means that the status quo is all the more likely to continue. Sure, universities may say they’re using the profits to enable them to provide more financial aid — but given that their financial aid formulas are all too quick to deem a family able to pay large sums of tuition, and leave students wholly in the lurch when their families make the decision not to fund their tuition bills, it leaves too many students facing ever-escalating tuition.
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