@biagiotto You’re not alone. There were others who asserted their beliefs without using IMO. I am also an economist by training and education so I detest people shutting down other people. Alway have. The smartest people can look at both sides of any argument and see at least some valid points on both sides.
Facts and stats are and always have been malleable based on the model you build. There are ways to build a graph to highlight things that should not be highlighted as there are ways to present a data set by highlighting the wrong date set. I’m not going to get into your or anyone else’s content, that’s what they believe is the most important information/argument to present. I will however call out when people try to shut down other arguments under false pretenses. This has been a larger issue.
There are obviously some who think it’s all political and X’s fault and those who think it’s a multitude of reasons.
As I said previously I feel for all the students in every nation who are affected by Covid. This includes American students as well as students from abroad: All of whom are stuck.
I said “mostly”. There are still hotspots or hot states and it’s self-inflicted. Opened up too much, too fast, and too careless but the curve did get flattened. It got pushed to the right. It was never expected that people wouldn’t get sick or people wouldn’t die over time…just not all at once with a spike…hence flatten the curve.
There were some worstcase models showing 2M deaths predicted all in March/April. The shutdown was to avoid the high spike scenario and it did.
If you look at the nation as a whole, the curve is not only flat but has fallen. If you look at individual states or areas, there are some huge spikes and some large drop-offs as well. In our state, we went from more than 2K cases per day in April to less than 200 ( 162 yesterday).
I think people often relate to what is happening close to them. There are many states with very few cases and some states with cases exploding.
The US govt flexible? I guess you’ve never applied for a visa to come into the US. Nothing flexible about it. My daughter is foreign born and it was a huge process to get her here. At every step we were told “This isn’t guaranteed. If anything changes, your application could be denied. Even if you travel to China and complete the adoption, there is no guarantee the visa will be issued.”
There was a couple who did exactly that, went to China, completed all Chinese requirements (final adoption), went to the US consulate to complete the US documents - and the husband DIED before it was completed. (They did help her expedite it, but still took a couple of weeks) Well, all the paperwork was for a couple and not a single to adopt, and the wife had to start over! “Flexible” is not a word I’d associate with the US govt, the Dept of Homeland Security, the USCIS, or ICE.
Wow @twoinanddone. That’s sad.
I did actually get a Visa a couple of times, as a student and to work, and it was all quite smooth. Guess I was lucky (and it was a while ago)…
I think that school are planning to be F2F should be the ones really concerned. If local conditions get to the point that you should go all online mid term, 10% of your students would have to immediately leave the country. That is an unnecessary additional thing to consider in the decision process.
“There isn’t much purity in decision making by the colleges, either.”
Agree, colleges at least for undergrad, are duplicitous on this, reading “Hillbilly Elegy”, they don’t really make much effort to recruit in places like Appalachia, but they have no problems going to places outside the country to recruit wealth.
This will be a wonderful opportunity for some deserving American students to be accepted to schools they might not have had a chance to attend otherwise with the hundreds of thousands of foreigners taking spots at these schools nationwide…I am delighted and absolutely over the moon for the American kids…it will also be an opportunity for the well off, full pay foreign students no longer allowed in those schools to develop their coping skills…I’m sure they will find an alternative soft landing spot.
I’m not seeing how the bright low-income student from Appalachia is going to replace the full-pay international, from the college’s point of view. Where does the extra $40,000 (or whatever) come from?
Typically, at pubic schools, international students pay higher tuition than out of state students. State schools increased the number of full pay international students over the last decade as states decreased public funding. There have been drastic decreases in public funding of public colleges and universities since 2008. There isn’t a way to make up lost international tuitions, without raising taxes or raising tuitions significantly.
Right now, colleges and universities are planning for huge financial hardships. Already, staff has been cut, hiring frozen, salaries cut, and staff furloughed. Many have said this will be worse than economic hardships of 2008 and 2009.
In 2018, international students contributed 45 billion dollars to the U.S. economy. How do we make that up? I don’t know. I’m not an economist.
@airway1 Plus online wasn’t the choice why we sent our kids to the US And unlike in-state we pay full price for an in-class experience. Those “privileged” kids benefit universities and are usually funded by their governments.
Let’s not forget that in-state tuition students pay less because their families have been contributing to the economy of their state and paying taxes in their state which in turn allocates money from those contributions to state colleges. It is not free. I am sure that those families did not sign up for a zoom experience either.
@alh Actually if want to reduce college costs you can reduce services, the number of students or staff. A lot has been written, sadly, about the costs of college tuition rising and being tied to a rise in administrative costs vs. teaching staff. There are lots of ways that colleges can reduce costs and not many of them have to do with raising taxes. Unlike private companies which have to adapt to their sales, colleges rarely look at their costs and pass it along to the students.
For many decades, state and other schools existed and offered low-quality high-cost education. It was only in the last decades that schools decided they wanted to compete for students driving up their costs. They didn’t compete for that kid in Appalachia but they went for the full pay international kid.
When I went to college (an Ivy league no less) there were no gluten free options, 24 hours gyms or a vast array of other services that are not related at all to education. All of these things can be eliminated. So if Purdue eliminates their international students there are a couple of options: 1. take kids from their long wait list :), 2. Make the school smaller or 3. eliminate some of the excess. I’d go for 1 and 3.
Not sure how cutting out high salaried admins has anything to do with deporting international students who add to the vibrancy and diversity of college campuses.
I apologize for invading a parents forum as a student, but I’d been following along with this thread since it began, and this response is very upsetting.
One of the best parts about being in college has been being surrounded by the different people and cultures. Without international students, that experience is kind of dimmed. They’re important. They’re not “taking the place of American students” because sometimes, those American students just aren’t what a university is looking for. This means ECs, high school courses, and many other factors. No one knows why an international student was admitted over an American student with the same test scores and GPA except for that university’s admissions officers. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe, just maybe, your child just simply isn’t who that university is looking for? Doesn’t mean they aren’t qualified.
You’re also saying that this is a wonderful opportunity, yet if these international students go back to their home country and agree to take courses online, you understand that they’re still students, right? How are American students going to take their place if… the international students… are still students at their universities.
I’m 20 years old and even I’m upset about international students having to leave the country. It’s a moral thing, and I’m sure you can see how wrong it is. I can also see that this move is more to force universities to be f2f since that’s currently what our president wants. As someone said before, these students were just basically used as a ploy to do so. It’s upsetting. A reminder that these international students were here legally, and pay tuition just like we do. I don’t pay full tuition to attend my university, but many international students do.
Anyway, from an American student to the American parents who want to fight for international students to stay here: thank you. Older adults get a bad rep from many of us generation z kids because we feel that you don’t care about all of us. Thanks for showing that you do.