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From: matloff@bizet.Berkeley.EDU (Norman Matloff)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Discrimination against American students???  (LONG)
Message-ID: <18494@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 20 Dec 88 22:00:32 GMT
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Reply-To: matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff)
Organization: EECS, UC Davis
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In article <350@wuibc.UUCP> evren@wuibc.UUCP (Evren Senol) writes:

>The ease of being able to pick the best qualified foreign students from all
>over the world may be contributing to the lack of interest or concrete
>action by the U.S. to better its education from grade school onward.

It's not nearly so simple as this.

In my activities as Graduate Adviser in CS here at UC Davis, I 
expend 100 times more effort per student on foreign students than 
on domestic students.  Many of the problems are financial.  Students
from China and India typically have no personal funds at all to draw 
upon, and there's still a money problem with students from other
countries, in the sense that I have to come up with good financial
support in order to compete in a "bidding war" with other schools
for the best students.  And of course these problems are compounded
by the fact that foreign students pay much more tuition than domestic
students at UC.  Also, foreign students often have visa problems to deal
with.  Also, there is the problem of making sure that the foreign students
who are TA's do a good job, both in absolute terms and also in perceived
terms (many Americans are not very tolerant of foreign accents, even if
the person's meaning is clear).  Sometimes cultural conflicts, e.g.
sexism, cheating, etc. occur (of course, these occur with Americans too, 
but they are often perceived as being more conspicuous if a foreign 
student is involved, and the frequency **does** tend to be higher), 
and I am called upon to smooth things out.  And, of course, there 
is the fact that our Graduate Division will give me a worried call 
if I admit more foreign students than the quota they've set, and
I am constantly having to fight with them every time they make a
new policy regarding foreign students.

So your use of the word "ease" is totally misleading.  It's nice that
we get all the best foreign students from each country to apply, and
thus we can "pick and choose" as you say (our CS grad admissions rate
is under 3%), but each one of those students represents a tremendous
amount of work, both at admissions time and later after enrollment  --
FAR from being "ease".

So why DOESN'T the U.S. do something?  I think the simple truth is that
they (I assume you mean government) JUST DON'T KNOW ABOUT IT.  Oh, sure,
once in a while, there is a newspaper story about the Japanese kids'
test scores are higher than ours, or the fact that a majority of
doctorates in engineering go to foreign students, but unless you
really OBSERVE it, you aren't really aware of it.  Most of us who
read this newsgroup are in either technical academia or in the
computer/electronics industry, so we see this phenomenon every day.
But the people in the government don't.

    Norm