The Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the University of San Francisco School of Management has quit for an unusual reason: there are too many Chinese students there with poor English, so the school has to go to unreasonable lengths to accommodate them:
Some of the new students’ language skills, however, were so poor that they were given headsets for English-to-Mandarin translation during orientation.
Business school Dean Mike Webber said in his Sept. 8 letter to staffers announcing Smith’s exit that the “considerable increase” in foreign students this year is not in and of itself a cause for concern.
“But given that so many of these students have weak English skills and are disproportionately from one country, we are going to be faced with some unique pedagogical and cultural challenges,” he wrote.
This story represents the combination of two seemingly unrelated trends. First, wealthy Chinese people are obsessed with American higher education, since the prestige gap between U.S. and Chinese universities remains very high in China. Second, American universities are too expensive for most American people, so in order to avoid dispensing huge sums in financial aid, universities must turn to foreign students who are willing and able to pay full fare. Many of these are, of course, in China.
The arrangement seems to benefit everyone, so much so that it doesn’t even really matter that many of these students can’t speak English well and thus can’t actually complete their degrees. If this sounds like a farce, well, it is!
Unfortunately, these stories are only going to become more common. Even with the economic slowdown in China, the country is growing at a fast clip and will continue to produce wealthy people with big ambitions for their children. Secondly, university tuition costs seem poised to rise well in excess of actual U.S. economic growth- not to mention middle-class wage growth- so a smaller proportion of Americans will be able to afford college tuition without aid. Barring a sudden and unexpected improvement in the quality and prestige of Chinese universities, more Chinese students will be turning up at Americans schools with gobs of cash…and not much English.
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