The number of international students at traditional four-year institutions has been on the rise over the last five years, and according to the April 2014 report issued by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 29% of F and M visa holders are from China. With the number of Chinese students on the rise, it is time to explore how this population is in turn shaping the Higher Education environments in which they participate.
The upside of the recent influx of international students from China and other countries is multi-faceted. Colleges and universities seek international students for the oft cited diversity of perspective they bring to the classroom, as well as their interest and proficiency in the STEM fields (approximately one third of student visa holders are in STEM disciplines). Some of these international grads supplement the U.S. talent pool while others return to their countries of origin and contribute to the development of their fields there. Rarely mentioned is the benefit graduates of the U.S. universities in emerging markets bring to the table when U.S. companies seek business partnerships abroad. Many of these grads have the language and cultural fluency necessary to foster successful business relationships that benefit both the U.S. and their own countries. Of great importance is the fact that international students almost always pay the full sticker price at institutions where most home-grown students rarely do. And they aren’t there by accident. The active recruitment of Chinese students by U.S. institutions has seen a steep rise in recent years.
Some years ago, my first Chinese-English language exchange friend was a woman named Monica who would meet me for two hours every Saturday morning at the only McDonald’s in Lungtan, Taiwan. After watching me struggle painfully through my early attempts at learning Chinese, Monica confessed that when she came to the U.S. to earn a Master’s degree in Education from Arizona State University, her English language proficiency was so low that she too ate frequently at McDonald’s because it was possible to order dinner by saying only “Number 3”. When I knew her, Monica’s English was near fluent, so she had clearly come a long way, but It was hard for me to understand how she could have succeeded in Master’s level coursework in her first year if ordering a cheeseburger and fries was intimidating for her.
According to a 2011 article by Tom Bartlett and Karin Fischer, Monica’s experience is far from rare. Many of the international students admitted to U.S. universities have limited proficiency in English, such that they are given conditional admission and placed in Intensive English Programs for a semester or even two before they meet minimum proficiency requirements and are allowed to take coursework in their degree programs.The perceived benefits of an American university education combined with the rise of agents within China who act as coaches to guide Chinese students through the the college admissions process have fueled the response to university recruitment efforts. In many cases the agents go beyond coaching, and engage in the doctoring of transcripts and the writing of admissions essays to bolster their clients’ chances of admission.
The admissions issue is a sticky one. In my opinion, more can be done to ensure transcripts from China are authentic by taking the student out of the equation and requiring that transcripts be sent directly from the issuing institution. But so long as the college admissions essay is a part of the evaluation process, it does not seem likely that this can be a trusted measure of the student’s readiness for a university education conducted in English.
In an audio interview with The Chronicle, Karin Fischer discusses the impact the influx of Chinese students has had on classroom teaching. According to one University of Delaware Professor, he has changed the assignments in his courses because this population of students struggled to a great degree with developing giving presentations, and other activities that required critical thinking. This is the part I find most disquieting. While failure to modify teaching approach doesn’t seem like the right answer, it neither makes sense to respond by making fewer demands on students’ higher order cognitive skills, especially when the classes are also filled with native and proficient English speakers..
In my experience working with students from East Asia (Korea as well as China), the American teaching approaches are at least as difficult for these students to deal with as learning and producing work in English. One possible response is to develop a course to be taken in conjunction with Intensive English Program courses that provides students practice in the kind of classroom activities they are likely to encounter in their program courses. Exposure to group projects, presentations, engaging in debate, writing essays that require the application of theory to a new situation, etc. in a safe environment where the students can ask questions about what they are experiencing would better prepare them for their subsequent coursework. If we believe that international students are a valuable part of the University student body, and we continue to actively recruit them, this seems like a logical next step in building an appropriate support system for them.
anonymous-sarah works at the same Phoenix area for-profit higher education institution as anonymousbjorn.
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