Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!husc6!bu-cs!buengc!bph
From: bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: "Shortage" of American Grad Students
Message-ID: <2857@buengc.BU.EDU>
Date: 14 May 89 11:22:31 GMT
References: <29168@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton)
Followup-To: comp.edu
Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng.
Lines: 141

In article <29168@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> tedrick@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Tom Tedrick) writes:
>One of the latest schemes for extracting more money from
>the government by public universities is the "shortage of
>American grad students" scam.

Ted, you're paranoid.  Get help.  Please.  I'm serious.

>First, there is no shortage of applicants for admission to
>grad school, in fact there is a surplus. Since public

There's a surplus of everything, but you can't eat raw or spoiled meat
and you can't use idiots to teach college or conduct research.

>universities are directly financed by the state to a large
>degree, the costs to the university of educating the student
>are not fully reflected in the tuition and fees the student
>must pay for his education. In such circumstances, it would
>be surprising if there weren't a surplus of applicants.

Suddenly you get subjunctive about your thesis.  Are you sure you
weren't just blowing smoke when you stated that thesis?

>Since market forces don't keep the quantity of students desiring
>to get into grad school in balance with the space available,
>various non-economic schemes have evolved for eliminating
>applicants, such as test scores, academic history, racial
>quotas, and so on.

Yeah.  It couldn't possibly be true that those tests are used
to grade applicants on the pertinent aspects of the job, e.g.,
knowledge and academic ability; nor that racial quotas exist to
provide a corrective impetus to prejudicially imbalanced educational
achievement among the races...

No, if the school can't admit the first fifty to get the application to
them, correctly filled out or not, then the school must be running a
scam.

(Reread the line above about "Ted, you're paranoid" and add to it
"you're also schizophrenic.")

>Now enter foreign students into the equation. Americans are
>outnumbered by roughly 20 to 1 in population when compared
>to the rest of the world. Since we allow foreign students
>to come to American universities, if foreign students were
>given a subsidy to come here it would be highly surprising
>if the foreign students weren't able to score higher than the
>American students on admissions tests. In fact, that is what
>happens; foreign students pay higher fees than American students,
>but not the full costs of their education. Since American 
>universities are of higher quality on average than the norm,
>worldwide, foreign students have a strong incentive to come
>here to study. 

This last sentence is absolutely true.  I'm proud of you, Ted.
Unfortunately, you make no sense up to that point, nor do any of the
preceding sentences add to that point.  Foreign students are almost
always fully funded by their home country.

>This is not a criticism of foreign students, certainly they ought
>to act in their own best interests. It is a criticism of using
>tax payers money to subsidize American institutions, allowing
>them to escape the forces of economic competition. Certainly

Nope.  The money doesn't just show up on the doorstep.  It gets there
through grants for research, work-study, et cetera.

>the foreign students here are better on average than the
>American students. When you are picking the cream of the crop
>from a worldwide population of 6 billion (or whatever) to
>compete with the cream of the crop from a population of
>300 million (or whatever) it would be very strange if the
>smaller group could compete on even terms.
>
>So what is the way out? End direct subsidies of American
>public schools.

The foreigners, who would be here regardless, are somehow benefitting
from it, so destroy the system so that only those who can pay full-freight
are allowed to attend?  That leaves the opportunistically wealthy, and
the foreign.  Forget any chance of increasing US student enrollements.
Death to Equal Opportunity.  Heck, so what if eliminating graduate
students leads to an overall reduction of the quality of undergraduate
education?  (You think yer perfessers were overworked and underresponsive?
Just imagine if they had to do _all_ the grading, discussing, tutoring,
ad nauseum...)

>Since education is a public good, and students
>have limited financial resources, you can retain the benefits
>of education by indirect financing through tuition tax credits
>for education, and education vouchers, allowing students to
>choose for themselves which schools best serve their educational
>needs. By allowing market competition to come into play, public
>costs of supporting education will be minimized. Students will

No go, jo blo.  Market competition exists hokay-fine among private
universities.  So, what do they do?  They all fight like hell to see
who is the "most exclusive" and "most expensive", making it a badge of
honor.  Since it attracts the prestige-points on the TV, it's solid
gold in the admissions office.

>no longer have to put up with an abusive educational aristocracy
>that treats students like inferiors, while in fact this aristocracy
>feeds itself on the tax money of these same students and their
>parents. When these aristocrats have to earn their money by
>serving the students, you can bet they will change their tune.

Thanks for the title.  Any land go with that, my emperor?
And while the landed gentry are scraping the bottom of their
well-greased barrels to come up with the scratch to make tuition
for Millard Featherstoneshaugh III to go to State U. next term,
just where is Freddie "Crip" Jackson going to find a city college
with two books in its library that will enroll a kid with a GED?

>What is likely to happen? The self-interested class of state
>financed educators and bureaucrats will continue the process 
>of myth-making and obfuscation, designed to perpetuate their 
>state subsidy. Endless programs for educational reform will 
>be introduced, none of which will work as long as economic law 
>is ignored. The tax payers will continue to support a class
>of academic parasites that pretends to be a noble elite serving
>lofty ends, while sucking the life-blood out of the tax payers.

What is likely to happen is that 60% of the higher-educational capacity
of the United States will disappear, eliminating not only 60% of the
foreigner-brought tuition money, but 60% of the undergraduate
enrollment, and 90% of the highschool-hopefuls.  If you think the US
has a rotten educational system now, just wait until you've removed all
the incentive to perform in grades K-12.  What we need is an _increase_
in university funding, an _increase_ in enrollment, and an _increase_
in the educational opportunity for an undereducated population.

How about some ideas on how we can get this increase from somewhere
other than the overstretched federal budget, or the stripped-clean
pockets of the students' families (which is where the shortfall
was when we went to government funding in the first place)?

				--Blair
				  "I hear Libertarians rarely eat
				   their young, but fight to the
				   death for their right to do so..."