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From: bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,sci.math,sci.physics
Subject: Re: Student and Course Integrity  (was Rising cost of textbooks)
Summary: 3 miscellaneous comments
Message-ID: <15748@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 12 Dec 88 18:01:53 GMT
Reply-To: bobmon@iuvax.UUCP (RAMontante)
Organization: malkaryotic
Lines: 90

[About tax-supported institutions and whether foreign students should
be allowed in] -- Indiana University is a state school, and state-tax
supported.  They have a policy which, while I don't personally like it,
makes a lot more sense than quotas for foreign students.  They simply
charge (much) higher rates for out-of-state students than for in-state
students.

Rationally, this is probably the most intelligent legislative move
Indiana has ever made.  (Irresistible cheap shot:  shuffling Dan Quayle
off to D.C. where he couldn't hurt anything here was the second most
intelligent :-)  (Irresistible cheap shot #2:  Mr. Quayle is a scary
example of what happens when money and nationality are favored over
academic ability as admission qualifications :-( )

For I.U. to turn away the better-qualified foreign students in favor of
the less-qualified domestic ones would be academic suicide, especially
when they're willing to pay for it.

--------

As an Associate Instructor (elsewhere known as Graduate Assistant), I
see a lot of foreign students in computer science classes.  Generally
they seem to be a _lot_ more motivated, and to take their studies much
more seriously.

At risk of stereotyping, I will say that I have the impression these
foreigners (mostly Asiatic, BTW) have the attitude that this
instruction is something they've fought hard to earn (note that word),
and that their future well-being depends on how well they absorb the
education that's available to them.  They are also far more willing to
put time and effort into studying for a course on their own.

I had one young woman in a class, who couldn't have understood as much
as half of what I said, and answering her questions in my office hours
was an excruciating experience for both of us.  But she worked _every_
problem in the textbook just for the practice (I'd assigned maybe 3% of
them as homework), and she was one of the few who did come to office hours.

On the other hand, the American students have been through 12 years of
schooling because the law said they had to, not because their parents
struggled to win them the chance.  Some of them seem to feel that what
they've earned is a 4-year party as a reward for having reached
puberty.  They expect to have enough education fed to them to get them
through the graduation ceremony, then they'll go get a job.

I don't think colleges or faculty are primarily to blame for any of
this -- they have to work with the students they get, and the best
students are too often the foreign ones.  Nor do I blame the
primary/secondary schools exclusively.  I think the real root of the
problem is that our entire culture sees education as something to do
with the kids until they're old enough to leave the house.  If the
parents don't care, their children won't either.  They'll do the
minimum they have to to get by.

American parents who _do_ want good education for the children must
either find a "good neighborhood" to live in, with an adequate school,
or pay for private schooling.  Unfortunately this strands deserving,
bright, but "under-privileged" students in schools that will do them as
much harm as good.  (I was lucky -- my mother scrimped and save to do
both for me as long as she could, and I survived the public zoos that
came later.  But I learned more history in 3rd and 4th grade than some
of my high school teachers knew, and taught myself trigonometry because
the high school "college prep" math curriculum didn't extend that far.
Then I got to MIT and had peers who already knew calculus....)

--------

liu@beowulf.UCSD.EDU (Hai-Ning Liu) writes:
	[...stuff about quotas for foreign students...]
>
>basis of race , color, NATIONAL ORIGIN, sex , handicap, or practices
			^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I don't think that "National Origin" means the same thing as
"Nationality" in the context of non-discrimination policies.  Consider
that at one time, Boston was notorious for anti-Irish discrimination.
Now, I can't detect any significant racial differences between Irish,
Scottish, Welsh, and English people (them white folks is all alike :-);
but the U.S. citizens of English national origin (and dominant social
position) were discriminating against U.S. citizens of Irish national
origin (and subordinate social position).  Such discrimination is now
held to be illegal, but this is different from discriminating against
someone with Irish (or English) citizenship.

As another, hypothetical example, if UCDavis receives applications from
two U.S. citizens, one the child of Taiwanese parents and the other the
child of parents from mainland China, it cannot choose one over the
other merely because it prefers one country or the other, but it can
choose either over an anglo-saxon with, say, Singaporean "nationality"
(I'm sorry, I don't know -- is that P.R.C.?  U.K.?)