Getting Into College the Old Fashioned Way: With Money 161
Businessweek (in a story spotted via Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution) profiles ThinkTank Learning, a college-admission consultancy founded by Steven Ma, and largely catering to ambitious Asian immigrants like Ma, and their offspring — kids who'd like to go to elite schools, and can afford to have Ma's firm help them navigate the path to getting in. It's a statistics driven system, and backed by a money-back guarantee, so long as the applicant meets certain requirements: ThinkTank will refund their tens of thousands of dollars in fees if they don't make it into the sort of school that the ThinkTank algorithms say they will. Basically, they've reverse engineered the admissions policies at schools, particularly elite schools like MIT, Stanford, and the Ivies, and done so well enough to know which factors in a student's portfolio can be tweaked to increase their odds of getting into the big-name schools. A slice: [Ma's] proprietary algorithm assigns varying weights to different parameters, derived from his analysis of the successes and failures of thousands of students he's coached over the years. Ma's algorithm, for example, predicts that a U.S.-born high school senior with a 3.8 GPA, an SAT score of 2,000 (out of 2,400), moderate leadership credentials, and 800 hours of extracurricular activities, has a 20.4 percent chance of admission to New York University and a 28.1 percent shot at the University of Southern California. Those odds determine the fee ThinkTank charges that student for its guaranteed consulting package: $25,931 to apply to NYU and $18,826 for USC.
Not worth it (Score:5, Insightful)
Universities are pretty much McUniversities these days. Arguing whether MIT is better than a state engineering school is like arguing whether Applebee's is better then Burger King. The food all comes frozen in a box, is cooked up by grill monkeys, and served by service droids. Having a degree from a state school hasn't hurt me as I am close to making upper management wages at a prestigious McCompany. And don't kid yourself, there are only McCompanies and McJobs left these days.
its not about the education (Score:2)
Its about the connections, and fellating egos.
Connections (Score:2)
Mostly connections
Connections are crucial, but, there is a very BIG but, if one solely relies on the connections he or she fosters when the individual was in the college, then that individual is a loser
I did what I did, from a refugee, into someone who have thousands of co-workers all around the world, partly because of the connections that I have fostered through all the stages of my life
The kicker is, over 90% of those connections that I rely on are the connections I've made _after_ I came out of college
Connections I have
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Some folks will do a lot or a litte no matter what their environment is, others will take a lot of cues from the folks around them.
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"than", you ignorant buffoon.
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That's the funniest thing I have read all day.
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Maybe his education isn't in editing you self-righteous gibbon.
Smart People (Score:4, Insightful)
Would you rather be surrounded by smart people or by normal people?
Better schools give you smarter peer groups, and you learn from and with smarter peer groups.
Re:Smart People (Score:5, Insightful)
I did fine. With far less debt. Besides, you are surrounded by "normal" people, if there is such a thing. If you surround yourself with abnormal people you never learn to deal with the rest of the world. Which amounts to a bad education.
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> With far less debt.
You don't seem to be aware that top schools generally have very generous need-based tuition+expense assistance -- so generous that people with families at any point on the income spectrum can generally graduate completely debt free.
Example: Harvard is a full ride if your family makes $65k/yr, and the aid gets prorated until your family makes ~$150k/yr. And yes, they do take into account having multiple kids in school, etc.
https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid
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Re:Smart People (Score:4, Insightful)
I did fine.
Good for you! Want a gold star?
Anecdote is not data. Graduates from many prestigious schools in general have better outcomes. Highly motivated people can generally get ahead anywhere -- if you're such a highly motivated person, then it's not surprising that you did well in life, regardless of where you got your degree, or whether you even had a college degree AT ALL.
With far less debt.
Well, you might have a point if you were talking about some random expensive second-rate private college. But the schools brought up in the summary like the Ivies and your chosen example of MIT have incredibly generous financial aid packages that are generally entirely need-based. Some facts from MIT's financial aid info [mit.edu]:
-- 72% of undergraduates receive either a need-based or merit-based scholarship.
-- 41% of undergraduates have student loan debt at graduation, and the average debt at graduation is $17,900. The median debt for all undergraduate financial aid recipients who graduated in 2013 was $10,948.
For a school that estimates its ANNUAL tuition and fees now come to over $60,000/year (with 4-year cost in the $250,000 range), coming out with just over $10,000 in debt is pretty darn miniscule, I'd say. And that's less than the cost of ONE YEAR of college at many state universities these days. (Lest you think that these numbers are skewed because everyone comes from rich families, note also that at least 1/3 of MIT graduates come from familes with annual incomes of less than $75,000.)
So, sorry -- if you actually get into and graduate from MIT, chances are your debt levels are going to be at the levels of many state university graduates, perhaps lower.
(Note that MIT and the Ivies can do this because they have big endowments. Your argument would be better targeted at lesser private universities that change $50+k/year and don't have the resources to give such generous aid.)
Besides, you are surrounded by "normal" people, if there is such a thing. If you surround yourself with abnormal people you never learn to deal with the rest of the world. Which amounts to a bad education.
Meh. You have a point, I suppose. But there are many, many years and daily opportunities to learn to socialize with people who aren't as smart as you ("normal" people). Even if you go to a place like MIT, you can easily find plenty of opportunities to deal with "normal" people while you're there -- go outside your down, volunteer, join some non-university social groups, become active in local politics or non-profit organizations... whatever. Build up your resume AND learn to deal with "normal" people, all while going to a top-tier school -- what a concept!
However, there are far fewer opportunities to surround yourself with incredibly smart people to get a high-quality education. Not to mention that it's useful to get this training while you're young and your brain is still more malleable. And unless you end up at some really top-tier company, chances are you're not going to be challenged intellectually by those around you.
Sure, it's definitely possible for a well-motivated student to get a great education elsewhere and to do great things in life. But if you have the opportunity to attend a top school with decent financial aid rules, there are few downsides to it, contrary to your implications.
Re:Smart People (Score:5, Interesting)
anecdote IS data. Gather enough anecdotes and you can start to do statistics on them. If you are scientific you will follow up with a well randomized survey. But usually inquiry begins with anecdotes. Or didn't you take Statistics 101?
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Gather enough anecdotes and you can start to do statistics on them.
Sure, you could. If you want to work with a complete unreliable dataset, where all your conclusions are much more likely to be invalid.
If you are scientific you will follow up with a well randomized survey.
"Well-randomized surveys" are not anecdotes. Anecdotes are individual stories, which may all have their individual bias. Since they are reported without context or regard for selection, they are more subject to cherry-picking, confirmation bias, etc.
But usually inquiry begins with anecdotes.
Agreed. You have to get interested in a topic first, and if you've never heard anything about it, you probably would never
Re:Smart People (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I've actually written articles in peer-reviewed professional publications and essays on the topic of the use of statistics.
[citation needed]
Well, sure, if you insist. I actually participated in the founding of the discipline of combinatorics [wikipedia.org], partly to discuss issues of probability and statistics of distributions. See my treatise Ars Magna Sciendi sive Combinatoria (1669) [diglib.hab.de], for example.
If you dig into my earlier treatises, you'll find I actually considered a number of issues in this sort of mathematics even before Leibniz's De Arte Combinatoria (1666) [wikipedia.org] (he was actually a bit of a fan of my work, I exchanged some great letters with him about it back in the day), and well before all those young Bernoulli whippersnappers got involved.
(What's that -- you wanted a serious answer? You want me to give real-world information about myself to a guy who hides as an AC?)
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Says the guy that hides behind "athanasiuskircher". Fuck you you pseudo tough-guy.
Look, I normally don't respond to AC trolls -- but my record of posts is available for you to peruse as you'd like. I've been active here for years, and I haven't hid my knowledge of stats, which I make use of periodically in posts (and even do some of my own calculations to respond to posts from time-to-time).
I have a durable record you can feel free to follow and search. I'm not "hiding" as an AC, and on the rare occasion where I'm unnecessarily harsh to someone in a post, I apologize. You, on the ot
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anecdote IS data. Gather enough anecdotes and you can start to do statistics on them.
There are already plenty of statistics available for college fees, scholarships, and salary outcomes. This one anecdote is meaningless. Attending a top university generally does NOT result in more debt, but is correlated with significantly higher salaries.
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The idea that an ivy league diploma gets you a better salary has been debunked numerous times. High performing students get paid more whether they go to a "better" ranked school or not. That is to say, if you were accepted to Harvard, but instead attended a state school, you will statistically wind up with the same salary as if you had attended Harvard. http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/the-college-solution/2011/03/01/the-ivy-league-earnings-myth
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That is to say, if you were accepted to Harvard, but instead attended a state school, you will statistically wind up with the same salary as if you had attended Harvard. http://www.usnews.com/educatio... [usnews.com]
This is all very interesting, but some details of the study you cite suggest that other factors are at play. From your link:
As with the earlier study, there were some students who did fare better financially if they attended elite schools. The students who fell into this category were Latino, black, and low-income students, as well as those whose parents did not graduate from college.
In an E-mail, the researchers explained these exceptions: "While most students who apply to selective colleges may be able to rely on their families and friends to provide job-networking opportunities, networking opportunities that become available from attending a selective college may be particularly valuable for black and Hispanic students and for students who come from families with a lower level of parental education."
The researchers want to blame the effects on all networking, which is undoubtedly significant, but that's not to say there weren't also other factors present -- like the fact that minority kids, poor kids, and kids without well-educated parents might not have the kind of cultural exposure to the "upper class educated world" that white rich kids with high SAT scores might have. By goi
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This is doubtful. If only because the caliber of student who is admitted to MIT is likely to receive extremely generous merit-based scholarships at most state schools, and especially at lower-tier state schools. There's at least one AAU member school (Arizona) that offer a free ride (tuition + fees + room + board) to any national merit s
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I'd rather be a big fish in a medium pond, than a big fish surrounded by an ocean filled with even bigger fish.
Consider the effect on someones ego by being able to completely stand out. Take a highly intelligent person, they go to MIT/Harvard/Yale/Wherever -- they're suddenly average. That same person at a 2nd tier school is suddenly a rock-star.
That person might get the confidence and notoriety to go on to do bigger and better things, than the average Harvard alum.
How do you define "smart" (Score:2)
When I landed in the States I found myself amazed with all the grizzly things and I found myself, a refugee fresh from communist China, being the dumb one, as everybody else was smarter than me
Later on as I enrolled into college, I found that my professors were very smart, because they knew things that I didn't know
And more later on when I got out of college I found many other people, people of the company I worked for and people outside of the company but still in the same job field, were much smarter than
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Plenty of smart people even at large mediocre state universities, though -- and they tend to cluster.
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Would you rather be surrounded by smart people or by normal people?
Better schools give you smarter peer groups, and you learn from and with smarter peer groups.
Having worked in a University environment, where you would think the right school would be paramount -
It ain't necessarily so. Most of the higly placed people in my unit were from obscure schools. The director was from a school that I had to look up, it was so obscure. Some even committed the cardinal sin of getting their Bachelor's, Masters, and Doctorates from (hold your hands over the children's ears folks, this is going to be brutal........ The same university!!!!!! A mortal sin, we are told.
But he
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In the US to some degree yes. When these kids go back to China or Korea, the degree from a "name" school will open doors that would otherwise be closed. The actual content of the coursework is irrelevant.
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If they made it to the US, why would they go back to a dump like china?
Opportunity. The USA is growing 2% per year. China is growing 8% per year. America has lots of educated people, so a new employee will start at the bottom, and rise slowly in a slowly growing company. China has fewer western educated people, so a new employee can start higher, and advance faster, in a company that is expanding with the national economy.
Re:Not worth it (Score:4, Insightful)
At first I wanted to write off your post as just typical, cynical slashdotterism. But I re-read it and - well, I realize that you are probably right, particularly in the IT field (it could be argued that if you want to work in academia, school names _do_ matter).
Reading your post carefully, I see you aren't saying that "college is worthless, blah blah blah" but rather that the differences between the universities for undergrad ain't what they used to be. As another commenter here noted (paraphrasing) information has been liberated by the Internet so University isn't the only way to attain subject matter knowledge anymore, closing the gaps between schools.
However, I continue to believe that if a person goes through 4+ years of accredited university experience, learns how to follow directions, learns how to deal with smart people & foolish people, and discovers that they have a passion for something (be it computer science or otherwise) is a person better prepared to be effective in the working world than otherwise. And if that's university's main benefit, then dammit I guess I have to agree that it matters less where you do it.
Grad school is probably a different story but for undergrad & the kind of jobs you will be getting with an undergrad degree - I think you got it right.
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My degree has served me well, esp. improved writing skills. But most undergrad degrees are interchangeable. At the graduate level it depends on your adviser.
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At first I wanted to write off your post as just typical, cynical slashdotterism. But I re-read it and - well, I realize that you are probably right, particularly in the IT field (it could be argued that if you want to work in academia, school names _do_ matter).
Reading your post carefully, I see you aren't saying that "college is worthless, blah blah blah" but rather that the differences between the universities for undergrad ain't what they used to be. As another commenter here noted (paraphrasing) information has been liberated by the Internet so University isn't the only way to attain subject matter knowledge anymore, closing the gaps between schools.
However, I continue to believe that if a person goes through 4+ years of accredited university experience, learns how to follow directions, learns how to deal with smart people & foolish people, and discovers that they have a passion for something (be it computer science or otherwise) is a person better prepared to be effective in the working world than otherwise. And if that's university's main benefit, then dammit I guess I have to agree that it matters less where you do it.
Grad school is probably a different story but for undergrad & the kind of jobs you will be getting with an undergrad degree - I think you got it right.
To provide a different perspective, I had the incredible good fortune to attend a top-tier university. In my four undergraduate years, I got to program four of the five computers on campus: an IBM 7090, a Burroughs B5000, a DEC PDP-1 and a DEC PDP-6. After leaving the university, I spent the next 40 years working in the computer industry. I doubt I would have been able to do that had I attended a lesser institution with no approachable computers. Today computers are everywhere, but I suspect there is so
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Having a degree from a state school hasn't hurt me as I am close to making upper management wages at a prestigious McCompany.
Had you gone to MIT or Stanford, you would have been surrounded by students who wanted nothing to do with being a wage slave but were looking to start the next fortune 500 company when they graduated. The lessons learned at college depend on the aspirations and talents of the student body.
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I agree 100% .. my son-in-law hasn't even finished his state-school engineering doctorate and already has 3 big-money job opportunities. He AND his wife were both able to go to college without any debt (she has a BA in molecular biology), and managed to raise a child the last year, buy a house, pay off a car, and not have any credit card debt. He's got the opportunities partly because he is very smart and very personable, two qualities they don't teach in college. While I'm sure his degree gave him the know
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Oh come on. You can do better than that. The quality of ACs has really dropped these days.
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The first millionaire I knew was a cohort of mine. He went to Seattle, started a company, brought in investors, got bought out, and is now in a position buy a Lexus... cash. A funny story he tells which starts out, "I went to buy a pair of gloves one day..." :)
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Your definition of rich is a poor man's definition. Owning a Lexus doesn't make you rich whether you paid cash for it or not. Lexus is, for the most part, a middle-class car brand.
Having a million dollars doesn't make you rich. It makes you middle class, with a loooong way to go to rich. Having a million dollars doesn't mean you can quit working unless you're about 80 years old, especially if you live in the US where the healthcare system is designed to bankrupt you before you die.
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Um, give me a week to shuffle things around and I can easily buy a Lexus, paying cash. I'm not exactly poor (family income well within the top 10%), but I'm not a millionaire. (I intend to retire before 65, but not by all that much.)
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Many "rich" people I know or heard of are in debt. Either they are or their company, or companies, are.
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This
And good luck learning everything from a CmpE degree online. Unless of course you have the money to fork over for an entire VLSI design system, software, and fpgas to run and test on. Thats only a small part of course without all the other uC hardware and projects with no actual vetting of whether or not you did them to some sort of satisfaction of anyone with any clue as to how all this works.
This is what always irks me about people who say 'oh you can just learn all that at home, unis are useless'. Un
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Have money to burn? Burn it (Score:2)
The internet liberated knowledge. So long as paid education doesnt retard development MITOCW, Coursera and many many others, I see no problem.
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Knowledge may be free, but connections required to gain and advance in a highly paid corporate job are still very expensive.
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my point is only that the value of a top school is there, but in this day and age shouldn't be overestimated.
What are they buying? (Score:2)
A score related to their probability of admission? And tutoring plus some help in filling out the paperwork? Is that worth $10-$20K? How about doing it the old fashioned way and submitting applications to half a dozen top schools plus some second tier institutions as a fall back.
TFA described the plight of a fuck-up who's parents have loads of money. For him, $700K to $1.1 Million. Do they really provide 100 times the tutoring of the top ranked student customers? Or will part of this find its way into some
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Because they call it an "algorithm".
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They're buying a service. They can afford it because the parents apparently feel guilt over not spending enough time with their kid.
Right. But daddy is a moron. How he came to be wealthy is a question I'd like to see answered. He could probably have gotten a better ROI from ongoing tutoring and remedial classes starting earlier in his kid's life. So now he has to dump half a million into rescuing a basket case. And the question remains: How much of this goes into actual value added for the student and how much is just greasing the skids at a top level university? TFA said that his father didn't want his son's self esteem to be harmed by
Wow those fees... (Score:2)
Re: Wow those fees... (Score:1)
Yeah, but did your school have a rock climbing wall?
I thought not. You got an inferior education, sucker.
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It probably didn't even have a food court or a Starbucks.
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That whoosing noise etc.
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perhaps not as prestigious as MIT, but more than sufficient for most people.
Sufficient for people who want to become a cog in the machine. Those people who are paying for the application service for top ranked schools want to go to those schools because they don't want to become cogs in the machine, they want to own the machine. It is a completely different mindset from "most people".
That push to get into those schools is the same sort of push they apply to the rest of what they do which is why they end up owning businesses instead of working at one. The ideas that those schools
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Second time I read this sentiment in this thread. It fails on two counts -- one that students at lesser schools want to beco
Parent of University Frosh Twins: "Thank You" (Score:5, Interesting)
Competition and expense at elite colleges is really tough for my kids. Today, I don't think I would have gotten into the colleges I attended 30 years ago. And I hear most of the parents of my generation griping about competition from incoming foreign students.
No, I say this is good. The USA college tuitions have been going up 3 times the rate of inflation for three decades. While much of the increased annual fees go to "need based" tuition scholarships, the university endowments have funded an arms race on "country club" campuses complexes, the maintenance of which draws from the same tuition and fees. Students are paying for the lavishness. MOOC (massive online open courses) have been proposed as the solution, providing the education without the cost of the colleges' overhead.
As this would trend, the smaller and middle reputation colleges would fold and get privatized (which has not worked well at all). Colleges like, say Hendrix in Arkansas or St. Mike's in VT, are fine schools with good professors, and they'd be the victim if it weren't for an increase in students who can afford to pay the full tuition. If the country club and reputations of US colleges didn't attract foreign full-tuition paying students, the only solution would be more college debt, which is already unsustainable. So if my kid (with better grades, scores, and languages than I had) didn't get into the "A-List" college I attended, I'm satisfied she'll find more people as smart as she is at the less prestigious school, and that all the foreign tuition coming into this program will float all boats.
The only two things most people remember about college are 1) the interesting people they met (friends, faculty, etc) and 2) the debt they leave with. MOOC's only address the latter. More wealthy foreign students paying full tuition addresses both.
Re:Parent of University Frosh Twins: "Thank You" (Score:5, Insightful)
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i've seen it said that for less than the amount of foreign aid sent annually to Afghanistan, college tuition in the US could be free for *all* US students.
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That's what we all said in 1982 when Reagan was blamed for cutting the Pell Grant Program (which was replaced by loans). It turns out Reagan may have been right after all. The cost of tuition increases, when all other cost factors (energy, interest rates, salaries, etc.) were controlled for?... Federal Pell grants. The more the feds slopped into students, the higher the college tuition draw. (cue sucking sound).
I suspect that in nations where tax aid for tuition is working, the universities are governm
At for profit Universities (Score:2)
Now, public Universities are rapidly becoming profit centers, but they started that trend in the mid-2005s. Well after the cuts went in.
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Where's this money coming from? Tax increases have a cost too.
Further, I don't think people get that the massive funding in question just wasn't that massive or that different from today. Recall that college costs have increased for decades at a far greater rate [inflationdata.com] than the US economy has. What was ample funding forty years ago just doesn't come close today.
From the above link, education costs increased by a factor of six in a 26
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What I really want to know: where the $EXPLETIVE is that money going? It doesn't look to me like the faculty's overpaid nowadays, research costs don't affect all colleges to any great degree (and are usually from other funding sources), the buildings are not dramatically improved, and in general the education doesn't look all that much better.
Re:Parent of University Frosh Twins: "Thank You" (Score:5, Interesting)
The USA college tuitions have been going up 3 times the rate of inflation for three decades. While much of the increased annual fees go to "need based" tuition scholarships, the university endowments have funded an arms race on "country club" campuses complexes, the maintenance of which draws from the same tuition and fees.
THIS. Whenever the topic of college tuition increases comes up, the assumption is that it must have to do with the cost of instruction (i.e., faculty salaries) or maybe lab equipment or something.
In reality, the biggest factor for many colleges has been this "arms race" (great term) to make sure all the new dorms have a swimming pool and a climbing gym and whatever. New buildings and facilities keep going up, which have ongoing staffing and maintenance costs. You could often fund many endowed professorships with the cost of a new building.
After campus facilities "improvements," the biggest reasons for increased costs are often enlarged administration bureaucracies and sports programs. College administration staff in many colleges has increased by 50% or so at many universities in the past few decades, even as faculty size remains roughly constant. High-profile sports at big athletic schools are often thought to bring in the cash, but actually most schools lose huge amounts of money on them. It's only a precious few that win that gamble.
But, as the parent says, it's great that we can have wealthy foreign students throwing in the cash so our kids can have the new climbing gyms, a boatload of administrators, and great sports coaches that often earn a lot more than college presidents.
Oh, wait? You were concerned about better education? Hah! There's where we need to cut costs. Let's put everything online and create MOOCs, so we can reallocate the buildings with classrooms for more climbing gyms, have professors record their lectures so they can then be dispensed with (along with their pesky salaries -- think of how many administrative staff we could hire by getting rid of that endowed chair!) and have the courses "taught" by adjunct drones who respond to emails, and without those annoying "class schedules" where you might have to actually show up and interact with real people to learn and discuss deep ideas, we can use online classes to meet whenever and have more flexibility to schedule athletic events whenever we want!
I'm being a bit sarcastic here, but these are really some disturbing trends. I'm not saying that traditional college lectures were always the best way to teach information, nor that higher ed couldn't be improved in general. But the pressures which are creating the tuition cost often have little to do with education... but I guess we have foreign students to pay for it (which is ironic since most foreign students are coming to the U.S. because of its educational reputation at universities, not for the climbing gyms).
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Without student loans, colleges would only be able to charge what the market can bear. No entity can violate this ironclad law of economics. If families can't pay the amount of tuition that you charge, you're not getting that amount of tuition, period. Loan availability i
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I don't have school age children yet, but I will soon. I have no intention of taking out loans or making them take out loans, no matter how hard it is to achieve this goal.
That's not necessarily a reasonable policy. I completely agree with most of your post that student loans are out of control and are causing all sorts of price distortions.
But absolutes are rarely good general policies. A good college education is in fact a lifelong investment, and while motivated students can succeed anywhere, a good school and a good line on a resume can really give someone a jumpstart for the first few years of a career and the first few jobs. I am NOT by any means arguing that anyon
Re: Parent of University Frosh Twins: "Thank You" (Score:3)
Re: Parent of University Frosh Twins: "Thank You" (Score:2)
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The only two things most people remember about college are 1) the interesting people they met (friends, faculty, etc) and 2) the debt they leave with.
If those are the only two things you got out of college, you seriously missed out. I had my world-view changed, and learned a lot about computers, history, literature, physics and math. Too bad you didn't. Study harder next time.
What I hate about the American college admissions (Score:5, Interesting)
I really despise the way college admissions in the US works (I have a Ph.D. from an Ivy, but did my undergrad in Europe). The problem is that all your hobbies are turned into some form of merit that you use to apply for college. In order to get some documented evidence for this, everything has to be officially done through a club or some other nonsense, where you can find someone to write a recommendation letter for you. As a Finn when I was in high school, we used to hop on the train with some friends and go up to Northern Finland to hike through the wilderness. Once during Winter break in -30 degrees (C) for a week in pitch black darkness on skis. I value much more having to plan for everything independently.
Hey I can do that too! (Score:2)
No problem at all. You pay me 10k and I'll tell you what you need to do to get into the college of your dreams. And if it doesn't work out, you get those 10k back.
How I do it? Not at all. A few of the bozos that fall for my con will make it in anyway and I'll keep their 10 grand, paying back the others.
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Ha! Nailed it. Once again raising the question of the connection between wealth and needing intelligence to accumulate it.
Impact of foreigners on the education of Americans (Score:3, Interesting)
I attended college in California about 30 years ago, studying biology. Back then, the student body was an ethnic mix of whites, Hispanics, blacks and Asians. Yet most of us were third or more generation Americans. We were born and raised in America, our parents had been born and raised in America, our grandparents had been born and raised in America, and only then did we start getting to ancestors who came from overseas. We spoke English as a native language, and culturally we had a lot in common. Most of our professors had a similar lineage and background, as well.
30 years later, my nephew (American born and raised) is attending the same college I did, and he also chose to study biology. What he describes is completely different from what I experienced. He's told me about how many students there are wealthy foreigners who have absolutely no ties to America, and often a very limited grasp of the English language. This is even true for some of the professors, apparently.
He's told me horror stories about group work he's been forced into, where there will be maybe two American-raised students forced to work with several foreigners. In one case he said that he and an American woman had to work with Chinese, Somali and Arab students on a project. The foreigners struggled to communicate with one another, and with the Americans. Some of the foreigners apparently just didn't even bother to do any work, since they were there just because their wealthy parents had sent them over, and didn't have any initiative whatsoever to succeed. In the end, the project was a near disaster for the two American students. They ended up doing the bulk of the work. They considered complaining to the professor and administration about the situation, but decided not to as they feared being labeled as "racists", even though the American woman was black.
I understand that colleges benefit financially from accepting these foreigners, especially when they can charge them many times what an American student is charged. But it sounds to me like this is absolutely destroying the learning experience for the American students. The American students are forced to work with sub-par foreign students who are only there because their parents have money. Then these middle-class American students need to take on the work load of the foreign students, in order to avoid failing group work assignments. It shames me to think how bad my nephew's experience is with the same college I attended, in the same field I studied, a mere 30 years later.
Re:Impact of foreigners on the education of Americ (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a similar experience when I was in school a few years ago.
Group project with two German foreign exchange students--copy/pasted their part from another website. I caught it early and after some "clarification" from the professor, they redid it.
Another group project--with a white guy, white girl, African immigrant, and a Chinese exchange student. White girl didn't contribute anything at all, Chinese didn't contribute anything (informed us "I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do" two days before the report was due), and the African immigrant contributed one slide (the project was a slide and a paper). White guy and I ended up writing the entire paper, and we were not pleased.
I was the group leader for both projects. The lesson I learned wasn't that foreign students are worthless, but rather that people needed to be treated differently. For any project, I map out the pieces and dependencies that need to be completed in a shared spreadsheet, and let team members choose what they work on. This works out very well for motivated students, and functional procrastinators since the dependencies are also worked out. Unfortunately, simply telling everyone what needs to be done is not a one-size-fits-all solution. If I had assigned tasks to specific individuals early on and followed up regularly, I would have obtained better results. If output was poor or non-existent, we could have adjusted expectations ("you need to turn this in earlier so we can correct for ESL") or escalate to the professor if necessary.
If you are an "A" student, working with other "A" students is the easiest way to keep that A. Learning how to get the most of B and C students is likely more valuable than a slight downtick in your GPA.
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That sort of interaction is EXACTLY what makes the education at that school an education. Try to imagine what your education would have been like if you had gone to a university where you had difficulty with the language in which the classes were taught. Those foreign students got into that school with your nephew by being smart and maybe/probably well-connected (i.e. they come from wealthy, well educated families in their home countries).
Does your kid end up doing a lot of the documentation of the group
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I have a friend who is a registered nurse and evaluates complaints about healthcare delivery. He has to write technical reports that refer to medical terminology and procedures. He is a native born US English speaker and writes well, and takes pride in his ability to communicate complex situations that can have important ramifications. For example, hospitals could loose accreditation or doctors could loose their licenses based on his reports.
His boss is a native speaking
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Re:Impact of foreigners on the education of Americ (Score:4, Informative)
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Oh if only there were a "Mythical Man Month" book to point to for showing how group projects go bad.....
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Good luck with that (Score:2, Interesting)
Statistical analysis is useful, but the interview process itself has enormous weight and is not easy to numerically manage this way. My interviewer for MIT was someone who'd known me since I was one year old, and wanted to make sure I was at least 1000 miles away from his daughter. No sane Ivy League or top notch school should have taken me on my numbers: they had to look past that to the piece of paper from the state that said "emancipated minor", realize I had *no* money or family support, and take me any
get rid of student loans / make them income based (Score:2)
get rid of student loans / make them income based / make the schools have to eat part of the costs for default and then you see costs come down / school teaching more real skill needed to do jobs.
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forced dorm rooms are a big issues where some schools force you stay in one with room mates and sheared floors at a cost that is much higher then renting on your own.
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but why does the cost have to be so high? The experience is nice but not at today's prices.
It's not what it is (Score:3, Insightful)
but its not racism. Racism is only practiced by white people.
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No it's not racism. Why would it be?
It's a private business that makes its service open to everyone, but most people who take advantage of it are Asian immigrants. The horror.
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I guarantee that if you, a white person, walked into that business and offered to pay $25,000 if they could get your kid into NYU, they would happily accept.
Reminds me of Jimmy the Greek (Score:2)
Didn't realize NYU was so competitve (Score:2)
we need more Old Fashioned alts to college as well (Score:2)
Back in past we did not have this big college for all push and we had more people going to trade and tech schools as well more places having in house training.
Now we are pushing to many people to college just for lot's of them to get big skill gaps and big loans to pay off.
Not the old-fashioned way (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't paying to get accepted to a college (Score:3)
To put it another way - they're letting you place bets on whether you'll be rejected by a school. And like all good bookies, they've crunched the numbers to make sure that statistically they come out ahead. But based on those odds they've crunched, you can drop or add schools you apply to to increase your ratio of acceptances to rejections, making it a marginally useful service whereas just plain gambling would mean on average the client loses.
Education as a Religion? (Score:2)
I'm not sure how to word this diplomatically, so please don't jump on me if sounds racist, I'm only trying to express my thoughts based on my observations.
Many Asians seem to treat education like a religion and become zealots. It's as if one is going to hell if they don't get into a good college. It's not even about long-term general earning potential it seems, but rather the status of a degree.
Part of it seems to be that as a parent, if your kid gets a big-name degree, you are allowed to feel satisfied th
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"Face" is a concept here. I've generally found that I'm happier and do better when I mostly ignore it in myself, though I do let other people save face.
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That's how Purdue works. Somebody's got to pay for the custom branded hand dryers and other pointless luxuries.
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That's how Purdue works. Somebody's got to pay for the custom branded hand dryers and other pointless luxuries.
The state of Indiana has about 6.5 million residents and has about 200,000 enrollment spots in its two major highly-ranked research university systems. It's neighbor to the west, Illinois, has about 13 million residents but only about 70,000 enrollment spots in its major highly-ranked research university system. It's neighbor to the north, Michigan, has about 10 million residents but only about 100,000 enrollment spots in its two major highly-ranked research university systems.
You're right, Indiana sees e
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The 50-50 chance you mention is not guaranteed.
He has two incentives for their success:
(a) The greater the number of students that get accepted, the greater his profit. Conversely, the greater the number of students that are rejected, the greater his loss (of time and effort preparing their apps and coaching them).
(b) As you said, the other thing is the success stories, word of mouth or reputation. His services need a hi