In terms of what UO can contribute, long-run, to Oregon’s economic growth, bringing smart ambitious undergrads from other countries with growing economies (and from other parts of the US) to Oregon is surely #1 on the list. Plus we get their out-of-state tuition and the diversity spillover for our Oregon students. I get a lot of these students in my field. Their quality is mixed but OK on average. Let me be un-PC for a moment and say I want more Indians. Good math, good verbal, fun in class. Comments?
7/19/2011: The China/India growth difference is striking. Why no growth in # of Indians? From a very interesting report from the Office of International Affairs.
Not only is UO’s % higher than other schools, so is our growth rate: (green for UO, blue for nat’l average).
dog says
not sure how much of this international growth is due to UO (although we clearly actively recruit) – this is a general phenomena among west coast universities.
My own experience with this increase in the last 5 years involves primarily students from China which are an extremely mixed bag. To be UN-PC – I find it difficult to teach most of those students because they really only care about getting the right answer and not about the process. Its hardwired. It makes it difficult to get them to be reflective thinkers. But then again, maybe reflective thinking isn’t worth a shit any more …
and now I am sure that this comment will condemn me to experience cultural sensitivity training …
UO Matters wants more Indian students? Done. Check today’s Insideoregon
http://insideoregon.uoregon.edu/institute-of-international-education-picks-uo-for-india-partnership/
So, anything else you want your administration to do for you, before we go home for the night?
The document from the Office of International Affairs (cited above) reports that enrollment at AEI has more than tripled over the past three years (going from 165 to 621). Does UOMatters know how many of those 621 enrollees come from China?
I have no doubt about the fact that Indian and Chinese students come to UO to root for a successful football team. After all is this not Wonderland? Why do I feel so much at home here?
Does anyone how this huge increase in students from China has been produced? I realize that countrywide, in a single year, there has been a 30% increase in enrollments of university students from China. My question pertains to how we managed to come up with our outsized share of them. (Our increase was 65%.) Some recent stories about recruiting practices by US universities are very disturbing. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/23/chinese-students-scammed-_n_865527.html
Has anyone asked what accounts for the massive uptick? It is known that the PRC controls where its overseas students go; incidents in Canada have shown that holding an audience with the Dalai Lama is enough to be taken off the preferred destination list. But was UO just added to the preferred destination list?
In that connection it’s worth nothing that the *65% increase* happened after UO sold out on academic integrity and brought in a Confucius Institute.
I wonder if the new vice president for international affairs, Denis Simon, has anything to say on that?
dog says
read this
http://www.oregonlive.com/education/index.ssf/2009/10/oregon_colleges_recruit_more_i.html
for good background – its a statewide effort
More from dog:
As I said before, this is largely a west coast
phenomena
see the link below for USC – whose population
of native chinese students has gone up by
250% over the last 5 years.
There is nothing mysterious about our “65%” increase – it really means we got 300 more students out of a potential pool of tens of thousands that the west coast universities are competing before.
I don’t even understand why this issue is on UOmatters.
http://dailytrojan.com/2011/03/02/usc-aims-to-recruit-more-native-chinese-students/
Thanks to a somewhat surly dog for his reference to the Oregonian article. I was intrigued by the info about OSU, but unfortunately I learned next to nothing about UO. Do we also pay a ton of money to a recruiting organization? Doesn’t any of this strike anybody else as eerily familiar?