When I was here a couple of years ago, I noticed a lot of travel brochures stuck up all over ChengChi University in Mucha offering ‘tours to England’ which included filling out applications for universities over there…
There has been articles in the Observer and Guardian newspapers (UK) about the recruitment drive from prominent universities, including Oxford and Cambridge who offer Masters and Bachelor degrees with lax to no entry requirment. I think Bristol has had to close down 3 apartments just to open up a ‘international business school’ to attract foreign and primarily East Asian money (of which school fees are almost 3 times the norm) to boost university funding. Professors are being asked to pass incompetent degree students and virtually write their thesis’ for them as well as turning a blind eye to the utter lack of grasp on the english language. It amkes me insane when I meet Chinese/Taiwanese students who claim to have taken X amount of courses for X amount of years in either country and yet aren’t able to buy something from the shop. Consequently, a bunch of academics are up in arms, as lot of degrees taken by domestic students are starting to be discredited.
Have you had any experience of this back home?
I think the idea is that it doesn’t matter really which uni you go to in ‘waiguo’ as they don’t differntiate between institutions as long as it sounds good.
Plus ca change, I’m afraid. Lots of chaps and chapesses in my law classes at Leeds ten years ago could hardly read verbatim from the case books. On the other hand a good number of the Malaysian and Singaporean students had fluent native-level English.
I’m not sure it’s that important. How much of our degrees do we remember ten years on ? I do however remember that Tetley’s was 80p a pint in the Old Bar.
i think the diploma for sale phenom is more prevalent in countries without private universities. it’s an easy way for a government subsidized uni to make quick bucks since they can’t raise their fees for domestic students.
in the us, most of the international students i’ve met(especially in undergrad) were much better students than american students. foreign students are still a bit of a cash cow here since they typically don’t qualify for the many loans and grants available and so have to pay full price(which at public unis can approach the price of private unis). they also tend to come from more well off families who can afford an expensive education in the us.
i am MUCH more impressed by a taiwanese student who went to ucla than a taiwanese american who went to ucla.
Well, in Australia there was a bit of a ‘soft marking’ controversy over whether there was pressure to pass overseas students because of their full-fee paying status. I didn’t really pay much attention to it though.
There were quite a few overseas students (almost all from various countries in Asia) in my course and at my uni - they ran the whole gamut, from complete party animals to people who seemed to have no other interest but studying.
She went to University of Illinois (Urbana-Champagne), also my dad’s alma mater, which is why I remembered. I believe she has a PhD in law, and she graduated at or near the top of her class at TWN University, which is no small feat. Back in those days the TWN students who had gone overseas to study were very, very good, because domestic graduate programs weren’t very good so for the top students to get good education it meant going to US or elsewhere, and they usually go because they got scholarships (and you had to be very good to get scholarships). Now all the scholarships are taken up by students from mainland China.
But this goes to show that academics usually don’t make good politicians. Another example is Y.T. Lee and his disastrous dabblings.
I’ve spoken to quite a few Taiwanese who got a master’s in Britain and complained about their classes being full of other Taiwanese or, worse, Chinese.
British universities are desperate for funding. First-degree foreign students pay six-times as much as local students. Some UK universities, have even opened campuses overseas, such as the University of Nottingham in Malaysia!
[quote=“Flipper”]
in the us, most of the international students I’ve met(especially in undergrad) were much better students than American students. foreign students are still a bit of a cash cow here since they typically don’t qualify for the many loans and grants available and so have to pay full price(which at public unis can approach the price of private unis). they also tend to come from more well off families who can afford an expensive education in the us.
I am MUCH more impressed by a Taiwanese student who went to ucla than a Taiwanese American who went to ucla.[/quote]
My Taiwanese roommate and all his friends that attended the university kept private test files that they freely shared with each other. If there wasn’t a test file for a particular class then 9 times out of 10 they were reluctant to take the class and if they did they scored very low. They all managed to pass (quite possibly owing more to the fact they paid so much tuition than to any extraordinary study habits).
As for the observation about humanities versus hard sciences…well humanities normally require the writing of essays and/or essay answers - something that doesn’t lend itself well to test files. Also rote memorization works better for science classes doesn’t it?
I went to a mediocre U.S. university, so relative to most of the rest of us, most of the Asian students seemed quite sharp and diligent. Never met any Taiwanese students there, but I knew two students from Singapore (one ethnically Tamil and one ethnically Chinese, both very good students), one from Hong Kong (excellent student), and one from Vietnam (I didn’t know him well enough to know how bright he was, but he was my next-door neighbor so I can attest that he was hard-working and studious).
The Hong Kong student was a grad student in English. He took a Milton class with me; he was taking it at the graduate level, and I was taking it at the senior level. I had to help him some with Milton. The Vietnamese-American student (I’ll call him that because he may have been a citizen–he came to America in the big exodus from Vietnam in the 1970s) took a sophomore American lit course under a tough professor. He had gotten some articles from scholarly journals, mostly on Hemingway. I remember one of the articles was about the stichomythia (a line from speaker A followed by a line from speaker B, then A, etc.) in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” There has been a dispute between scholars as to which of the two waiters is speaking at some point in the dialogue.
The Hong Kong guy probably had to take the Milton course if he wanted to graduate on time. And the poor Vietnamese-American guy was a pharmacy major but had to take a sophomore-level English course, I guess. Anyway, it didn’t make much sense to me for the university to torture him like that.
But they got their degrees and as far as I know are doing well. The Hong Kong guy finally got a Ph.D. in technical writing, and the last I heard, he was working for a software company.
It may well be that some things happened at my school that weren’t according to Hoyle, but coddling Asian students, or churning out degrees for them, didn’t appear to be among them.
Oh, I ought to mention the niece of my first boss here in Taiwan. She got a scholarship to a prestigious uni in the U.S., basically by making excellent grades in elementary and secondary school and by knocking the hide off the SAT ball.
I don’t know if the situation is still the same now, but in my student days and until quite recently at least, master’s courses in British universities were provided primarily as a means of earning revenue from foreign students.
I never even considered doing a master’s, nor did any of the other Brits I knew: as far as we were concerned, they had absolutely zero value in the UK job market (though if I’d known I’d one day end up in Taiwan, I’d certainly have had a good reason for obtaining one). Those of us who studied law moved directly on from our LL.B.‘s to studying for the Bar or the solicitors’ exams, and would have thought it exceedingly strange if any among us had opted to spend another year at university just to get an LL.M. The only people doing that were overseas students, and we understood that it was worth their while to do so because of the different value attached to the master’s in their home countries.
When my then Taiwanese girlfriend went to England to study for her master’s and then Ph.D. in anthropology, she chose LSE because its anthropology department is supposedly the best in the world, and was astonished to find that there wasn’t a single British postgrad student enrolled in the department!
Over the years, dozens of my Taiwanese friends, colleagues and acquaintances have gone to study for master’s degrees or higher in the UK, and I’ve helped many of them with their applications. Some of those peope have been very clever and well worthy of admission to any university in the world. Others have been as thick as two planks, with English to match. Yet none of them has ever failed to be accepted somewhere or other without much difficulty, and as far as I’m aware, none has ever failed to obtain the degree they studied for. So whenever someone comes to me now and expresses worry as to whether they’re well enough qualified to have a chance of gaining admission to a UK university, I assure them that they need not worry at all and I can guarentee that they’ll be successful: as long as they have the time and money, the degrees are theirs for the taking.
Omni wrote:
I never even considered doing a master’s, nor did any of the other Brits I knew: as far as we were concerned, they had absolutely zero value in the UK job market.
I disagree. Most of my foreign friends obtained high-paying city jobs within months of program completion.
Omni wrote:
The only people doing that were overseas students, and we understood that it was worth their while to do so because of the different value attached to the master’s in their home countries.
When I got my law degree at University of London, many of my fellow students were from overseas countries, many extremely bright (intimidatingly so), but some almost comically un-talented, to put it mildly. One guy from Hongkong I exchanged coursework with before a few exams gave me essays that, neatly written though they were, I couldn’t comprehend, he wasn’t making any sense at all, and these were essays he’d received passing grades for …
My feeling then though was that most money was made by requiring overseas students with little or no English language proficiency to go through language courses before being able to take up their degree studies. I believe these were minimum one year, but could go on for longer depending on the “jin bu” the students were making. The vast majority seemed to be Japanese then, they were bringing them in by the bus-load, literally …
Chewycorns, I think the best universities are an exception instead of the rule.
Xpet wrote:
Tutoring foreign students while I was in graduate school, I found this to be typical.
If they had a decent TOEFL score this wasn’t required. Many foreign students would attend a community college (in the U.S.) and therefore not be required to have this TOEFL score (or at least could have a lower score). Most of my Asian friends (and other who I helped with rewriting essays, etc), studying in the U.S., had piss poor command of English and I have always been amazed that they managed to pass any courses. I just wonder if it would be possible for me the ‘earn’ a master’s degree in Taiwan and not be able to speak/write fifth grade (elementary school) Chinese? Anyone know?
I had very few foreign students in my undergrad classes in Edinburgh, but when I did a masters in Birmingham about half of most of my classes were foreign. Of these about 75% were Asian. It became fairly clear from the opening bell that a lot of these people, though extremely hardworking and bright, were not going to be able to put together what most of us would consider as a coherent essay. It was also clear that they weren’t going to be failed unless they were truly awful. I just used this as a bit of extra motivation to get a distinction so that I could differentiate myself from these students.
I also met my girlfriend there (she turned to me in a lecture and said she ‘couldn’t understand anything’ the lecturer was saying :s ). I ended up proof reading all of her stuff, and many of her friends work too. The biggest problem they all had was not poor English, though it wasn’t great, but rather the complete inability to have an original thought or answer the bloody question. What was worse was when exam time came around they all learned whole essays by heart, and no matter how much I pleaded I could not get one of them to accept that sticking in a couple of sentences specifically aimed at answering the question was worthwhile. It seemed to be a complete cultural no-no. Most of them failed at least one exam, though they managed to pass the retakes.
The gf now works advising students who want to go to the UK. I heard recently that the University of Strathclyde Business school had a problem with a new professor, who seemed not to be clued in on the gentler marking regime required for foreign students. She failed nearly all the foreigners in her class.
Re the marking system in the uk
For undergrad work 70+ is a 1st, 60 - 69 is a 2:1, 50 - 59 is a 2:2, 40 - 49 is a third and below 40 is a fail.
The system for Masters courses seems to be different (at least at Birmingham)
75+ is a distinction. 60 - 74 is a pass. 50 - 59 got you a diploma
One final thought. I finds that most Taiwanese want to got to the ‘best’ universities by which they mean ‘most famous’. To me this is like wanting an LV bag. Sure Ox-bridge, UCL, Durham etc have the big reputations, but for what? For teaching skills? I am not so sure. A lot of these places are staffed by very intelligent professors who can’t teach for shit (I hasten to add not all). Many of the Taiwanese students would be better of going to less ‘prestigious’ unis which may have more talented teachers as opposed to researchers.
I agree totally. I had a funny conversation with a Chinese international student at Sydney Uni the other day. I told her I was studying Chinese and she said “oh, it must be very difficult to get a degree at Sydney University”, I suppose because Sydney Uni is more famous than other unis. I told her that in theory, it would be just as hard at any uni in Australia and she was surprised about that. I also told her that in my experience lesser known universities seem to have higher staff/student ratios which would be a good thing if you were having language difficulties.
most of the Asian students seemed quite sharp and diligent. Never met any Taiwanese students there, but I knew two students from Singapore (one ethnically Tamil and one ethnically Chinese, both very good students), one from Hong Kong (excellent student), and one from Vietnam (I didn’t know him well enough to know how bright he was, but he was my next-door neighbor so I can attest that he was hard-working and studious).