American Scandal, Global Reaction
Thank God they aren’t Chinese.
I’m not going to lie – that was pretty much the first thought I had when news broke about that bonkers college admissions bribery scandal.
There’s a pervasive narrative out there about Asian students trying to game the American college-admissions system, so pervasive that it’s pretty much the one thing my non-higher-ed friends know about international students. And, yeah, I recognize I’ve got something to do with that storyline. Still, it didn’t diminish my feeling of relief that it was Hollywood royalty and Silicon Valley CEOs who were caught trying to get their kids into elite colleges through the “side door”:
That said, I was curious how the bribery scheme was playing overseas. Here are a few ways I think the controversy could reverberate in international admissions:
First, cheating knows no borders. This particular scandal was made in the U.S.A., but we can’t pretend that rules aren’t being bent abroad. The same day the indictments were announced in Operation Varsity Blues, a UCLA grad was arrested in a scheme to help fellow Chinese nationals cheat on English proficiency exams so they could fraudulently get student visas.
More than 160 Indian students have been jailed in the University of Farmington sting, while last summer the SAT was allegedly breached and stolen questions posted online in Asia. Nor is underhanded behavior confined to students applying to the U.S. – a few years ago, the admissions director of Renmin University, in Beijing, was prosecuted for taking payments from parents.
Look, not all – not most – international students cheat, just as the average American parent isn’t slipping the sailing coach half a mil to get their kid into college. But I’ve talked with two college counselors, one in China, another in Korea, who’ve already had parents ask them how they could access similar channels – or why the counselors weren’t providing such services.
Increased scrutiny of outside college counselors is likely. On Friday, Yale’s president said the university would conduct a review of its admissions process, including an examination of the “practices of commercial admissions consultants, whose work is conducted out of the view of admissions officers.” It seems likely other colleges will follow suit. What impact will that have overseas, where independent advisers and agents often shepherd students through an unfamiliar admissions process?
It reinforces the rankings obsession. When I asked David, a high school student in Shanghai, about the scandal, he shrugged. “I think all parents go crazy about college rankings,” he said.
Forget about fit. For all too many international students and families, prestige is the sole determinant of their college choices. I’ve known parents who’ve so committed the U.S. News rankings to memory that they could tell you the position of any college in the top 50 in an instant. I’ve seen agent contracts that stipulate bonuses for getting students in top tier universities.
Many counselors have been engaged in a Sisyphean struggle to convince students and families that they should apply to the colleges that are right for them, personally, academically, socially. Hamilton Gregg, in Beijing, is one of them. “There are so many choices for great education,” he wrote over Facebook, “yet there is an adverse perception that some are better than another.” The pay-for-prestige scandal is like rolling the rock back down over Gregg and others.
Could this be one more dent in America’s standing? Colleges were already battling the perception that the United States is unfriendly to outsiders. Now they’ll also have to fight the apprehension that institutions here are rigged in favor of insiders.
“Why would I want to put my child through this when the system seems so opaque and unfair?” That’s what Gavin Hornbuckle is hearing from colleagues at the American School of Brasilia. (Despite the name, only about 20 percent of the student body is American.) Hornbuckle’s students already study around the world, and he suspects that the admissions scandal will steer more of them towards Canada and Britain. “I think this could taint the reputation of American higher education,” he said. “I really think it will.”
What do you all think? Are you a counselor overseas, a parent, an American admissions officer about to head abroad on a spring yield trip? I want to hear your perspective. I’ll share any interesting responses next week. As always you can find me at latitudesnews@gmail.com or on Twitter @karinfischer.
Do the Math
The Trump administration has released its proposed budget for fiscal year 2020.
The bad: President Trump would cut funding for academic exchanges and other programs in the State Department’s Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs in half, to $310,000. That said, this year’s proposal is a substantial improvement over last year’s recommendation, of just $160,000.
The good: What the administration has put forward is probably pretty meaningless. After all, Congress reverted to ECA’s original spending level, $645,000, in the final FY2019 appropriations bill. And both the Senate and the House were then controlled by the president’s own party.
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‘It Doesn’t Get Talked About Much’
That’s how an email from Heather H. Ward at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill began. Ward, the associate dean for study abroad and international exchanges, was replying to one of my earlier posts about study abroad. The barriers to students going overseas aren’t simply financial, she wrote. She pointed to a major but less visible hurdle: credit transfer.
“Imagine going to all the effort and expense to study abroad and then not getting credit for it. That could be a real deterrent for other students.”
At UNC, Ward and her colleagues are working hard to tackle the problem. They instituted a new online system for the transfer of credits earned while abroad, speeding up and simplifying the process of securing academic departmental approval and getting the credits on students’ transcripts. The university takes the issue so seriously that four FTEs currently work on the project.
Of course, credit transfer happens after the fact, so I asked Ward if she’s pursuing other strategies. UNC is also working with academic departments on curriculum integration, she said, identifying overseas programs in which students can earn credit that complements their coursework back home. So far, Ward’s office has partnered with departments in which students earn significant credit abroad, like global studies and foreign languages. But she’s gearing up for more comprehensive outreach, so that more education-abroad credit is pre-approved.
If you have other best practices, please share them! And if you’re interested in curriculum integration, check out this piece on pathbreaking work at the University of Minnesota.
Around the Globe
The British government unveiled a new international education strategy, with a goal of increasing the number of overseas students by 30 percent.
University of California regents refused to take up a plan that would have raised tuition on out-of-state and international students in order to hold fees flat for California residents. This is an interesting about-face, as UC had been upfront about expanding international enrollments as a way to make up for state funding losses and to subsidize local students.
NAFSA announced the winners of its annual Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Internationalization.
A University of Maryland professor accused of discriminating against Chinese students has resigned.
Pitzer College’s president rejected a vote by the California institution’s College Council to end a study-abroad program at the University of Haifa. In a message to the campus, Melvin L. Oliver wrote that cutting ties with the Israeli university would threaten academic freedom by setting the college “on a path away from the free exchange of ideas.”
A political loyalty survey was administered to students at Peking University. Check out some of these multiple-choice questions:
And finally…
It’s commonplace for students from China and elsewhere in Asia to adopt English names as a way of preventing English speakers from mangling their given names. Sometimes the new monikers are pulled from popular culture; other times, they sound nonsensical to Western ears but mimic their Chinese names. Once I handed in an article with a Hennessey, a Bambi, a Simbory, and a Dream. The copy editor accused me of trying to punk him.
I was thinking about this the other day when I started a new Mandarin class, and we had to go around the room introducing ourselves by our Chinese names. I’m Kǎi lún, which was given to me by a former teacher because it’s similar-sounding to Karin. The guy sitting next to me had a five-character mouthful of a name, which initially flummoxed even our instructor. It turns out he had dubbed himself “Protector of the Animals.” Makes Bambi sound, well, tame.
For your reading pleasure, a piece on why Chinese students shouldn’t feel like they have to take English names and another that counters Chinese people don’t need to be “saved” from their English names.
’Til next week – Karin
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