Those of us who have been paying attention to the tsunami of foreign students — most of them Asian and specifically from China and India — studying in America know that we’ve never gotten the “best and the brightest.” Those go to the elite universities in their home countries — Tsinghua University and Peking University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India — while the also-rans come to the West, usually the United States. So much for any “brain drain” those countries might be suffering. They keep the wheat; we get the chaff.
But it’s worse than that. Now we are hearing from various sources that the well-heeled foreign students from China, in particular, who are keeping many of our colleges and universities afloat, are not even motivated or skilled enough to get into or stay in school without cheating.
Reuters, for example, has uncovered a cheating scandal involving students at the University of Iowa, where dozens of Chinese nationals hired Chinese-run companies to take online exams and complete coursework for them. Reuters discovered an email advertisement sent to many students at the university by a Chinese consulting company called UI International Student Services, which identified its offerings as “Test-taking services. Paper-writing. Take Online Courses for you.” And apparently at least 30 Chinese students took them up on it. The university is supposedly investigating.
Also, an education-based publication called The Hechinger Report has found that “ss many as 90 percent of recommendation letters for Chinese applicants to western universities were falsified in 2011.” In addition, “70 percent of admissions essays were written by someone other than the applicants, the firm found, and half of secondary school transcripts were doctored.”
Although, as President Trump points out, a great many of our higher-education institutions are financially dependent on the foreign students who typically pay full tuition, those institutions lose any remaining prestige they still have by looking the other way in the face of cheating. If we lose some, so be it.
For more, see Cypher-News.com.