counterpoint: http://www.cis.org/articles/2002/back602.html from the
bibliography
An Evaluation of the
Foreign Student Program
June 2002
By George Borjas
Download the .pdf version
Read the panel discussion transcript
---------------------------------
The following evaluation of the foreign student program concludes that:
The INS has little control over the number and type of students being
admitted;
The program is littered with corruption and fraud;
American taxpayers subsidize a sizable part of the tuition of foreign
students;
The benefits from the program are greatly exaggerated, and the program may
well generate a net economic loss for the country;
The program is best viewed as yet another redistribution program, shifting
wealth away from native workers and taxpayers and redistributing it to
universities and foreigners.
Many foreign leaders, ranging from Pakistans former President Benazir Bhutto
to Mexicos Carlos Salinas de Gortari, from Israels Prime Minister Ehud Barak
to Philippines Corazon Aquino, obtained part of their education in the United
States. One can easily argue that such training may be one of Americas highest
valued exports. By giving future foreign leaders first-hand exposure to
American democratic values and showing them how the system works, we are
presumably building a safer and more prosperous world.
Another foreign student, Hani Hasan Hanjour, a 26-year-old Saudi national,
got a student visa to study English at ELS Language Centers in Oakland,
California, a Berlitz-owned school that leases space at a local college.
Hanjour did not attend a single English class. Instead, he became one of the
terrorists in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11. And two
other terrorists including Mohammed Atta, the presumed ringleader were
waiting for the official approval of their student visas to attend flight
school, an approval that the Immigration and Naturalization Service dutifully
mailed out six months after the attacks. Understandably, many Americans
demanded to know just how many foreign students were present in the country,
and how many of those students originated in the countries identified as
"terrorist sponsors" by the State Department.
The INS, however, had not learned the lesson from the Iranian hostage crisis
in 1979, when President Carter considered the possibility of retaliating by
expelling all the Iranian students then enrolled in American colleges and
universities. He too wished to know how many such students would be affected.
The INS could not provide that number during the entire 444 days of the crisis.
And the INS still has no way of determining how many foreign students are
present in the United States.
The United States issues two types of "non-permanent" visas for persons
wishing to study in the country, the "F-1" visa for academic studies and the
"M-1" visa for vocational training (such as flight training). The number of
student visas issued to foreigners has grown dramatically in the past few
decades. In 1971, the State Department issued only 65,000 student visas. In
2000, it issued 315,000 visas. (See Figure 1) This increase transformed the
ethnic mix of students in the typical American university, particularly at the
graduate level. By 1997, 2.2 percent of undergraduates and 10.8 of graduate
students were foreign students. The impact is particularly striking in some
educational programs and fields. Foreign students received 35.4 percent of all
doctorates awarded in the physical sciences, 48.9 percent in engineering, 27.2
percent in the life sciences, and 23.3 percent in the social sciences. In
contrast, foreign students received only 8.4 percent of the doctorates
awarded in education.
There is little doubt that the foreign student program has been spinning out
of control for years. The September 11 attacks motivated Senator Dianne
Feinstein (D-Calif.) to quickly propose a six-month moratorium on student
visas, giving the INS a breathing period to put the program back in shape and
under tighter control. After intense lobbying by the nations universities, who
quicklyand correctly perceived the economic impact of the moratorium as an
interruption of an important source of cheap labor and a loss of tuition
revenues, Senator Feinstein withdrew her proposal.
Nevertheless, the fundamental questions will not go away: Is such a
large-scale foreign student program in our best interests? What does it cost
us? And what does it buy us?
As currently structured, the program certainly increases the number of
high-skill workers available to American employers and exposes many future
leaders to democratic values and institutions. But the program is so large, so
riddled with corruption, and so ineptly run that the INS simply does not know
how many foreign students are in the country or where they are enrolled. There
are few checks and balances to keep the number of foreign students at a
manageable level, or to prevent foreigners from using the many loopholes to
enter the country for reasons other than the pursuit of education. Perhaps most
important, the program has grown explosively without anyone even asking the
most basic question: Does the United States benefit from it?
umesh sharma <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
-
http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/entry.php?u=jaipurschool&e_id=1513 some might
find this more concise in the post above - I have put the whole one above
(besides deleted portions)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi,
I an effort to evade copyright infringement of a CIES article - a society of
which I am a member (though I am told we can circulate in private groups - like
AssamNet??) I am giving a commentary and deleting some portions from the article
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CER/journal/contents/v51n1.html
It challenges the then prevalent notion that international graduate students
are money hungry bunch of job-pirates - in light of Sep 11 , 2001 bombings in
USA - done by student visa holders . SEVIS and Visa Mantis are now online ways
by which students are kept track of --like in July 2005 some Egyptian students
went missing soon after arrival --leading to hue and cry on national TV
channels - they had gone to see the Great Lakes and had forgotten to report to
their univ of their arrival.
So how is the perception changing -- here is some juicy bit of info (other
parts I have already deleted)
Umesh
Comparative Education Review, vol. 51, no. 1.
© 2007 by the Comparative and International Education Society. All rights
reserved.
0010-4086/2007/5101-0003
---------------------------------
Citizenship in a Global Context: The Perspectives of International
Graduate Students in the United States
Umesh Sharma
Washington D.C.
1-202-215-4328 [Cell]
Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005
http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/index.html (Edu info)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ (Management Info)
www.gse.harvard.edu/iep (where the above 2 are used )
http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/
---------------------------------
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Umesh Sharma
Washington D.C.
1-202-215-4328 [Cell]
Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005
http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/index.html (Edu info)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ (Management Info)
www.gse.harvard.edu/iep (where the above 2 are used )
http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/
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