The practice described below is alo an issue at WSU and UI. Can anyone present accurate statistics?<br>__________<br clear="all"><br>
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/"><img src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif" alt="The New York Times" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" align="left"></a></div><br></div>
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<div class="timestamp">February 4, 2012</div>
<h1>Taking More Seats on Campus, Foreigners Also Pay the Freight</h1>
<span><h6 class="byline">By <a rel="author" href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/tamar_lewin/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More Articles by Tamar Lewin" class="meta-per">TAMAR LEWIN</a></h6>
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SEATTLE — This is the <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_washington/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about University of Washington" class="meta-org">University of Washington</a>’s
new math: 18 percent of its freshmen come from abroad, most from China.
Each pays tuition of $28,059, about three times as much as students
from Washington State. And that, according to the dean of admissions, is
how low-income Washingtonians — more than a quarter of the class — get a
free ride. </p>
<p>
With state financing slashed by more than half in the last three years,
university officials decided to pull back on admissions offers to
Washington residents, and increase them to students overseas. </p>
<p>
That has rankled some local politicians and parents, a few of whom have
even asked Michael K. Young, the university president, whether their
children could get in if they paid nonresident tuition. “It does appeal
to me a little,” he said. </p>
<p>
There is a widespread belief in Washington that internationalization is
the key to the future, and Mr. Young said he was not at all bothered
that there were now more students from other countries than from other
states. (Out-of-state students pay the same tuition as foreign
students.) </p>
<p>
“Is there any advantage to our taking a kid from California versus a kid
from China?” he said. “You’d have to convince me, because the world
isn’t divided the way it used to be.” </p>
<p>
If the university’s reliance on full-freight Chinese students to balance
the budget echoes the nation’s dependence on China as the largest
holder of American debt, well, said the dean of admissions, Philip A.
Ballinger, “this is a way of getting some of that money back.” </p>
<p>
By the reckoning of the <a title="Web site." href="http://www.iie.org/">Institute of International Education</a>,
foreign students in the United States contribute about $21 billion a
year to the national economy, including $463 million here in Washington
State. But the influx affects more than just the bottom line — campus
culture, too, is changing. </p>
<p>
While the University of Washington’s demographic shifts have been
sharper and faster — international students were 2 percent of the
freshmen in 2006 — similar changes are under way at flagship public
universities across the nation: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and University
of California campuses in Berkeley and Los Angeles all had at least 10
percent foreign freshmen this academic year, more than twice that of
five years ago. And at top private schools including Columbia
University, Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania, at
least 15 percent of this year’s freshmen are from other countries.
</p>
<p>
All told, the number of undergraduates from China alone has soared to
57,000 from 10,000 five years ago. At the University of Washington, 11
percent of the nearly 5,800 freshmen are from China. </p>
<p>
A few places have begun to charge international students additional fees
besides tuition: at Purdue University, it was $1,000 this year and will
double next year; engineering undergraduates at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had to pay a $2,500 surcharge this year.
</p>
<p>
“We’re in something akin to the gold rush, a frontier-style environment
where colleges and universities, like prospectors in the 1800s, realize
that there is gold out there,” said David Hawkins, the director of
public policy at the <a title="Web site." href="http://www.nacacnet.org/">National Association for College Admission Counseling</a>.
“While it’s the admissions offices butting up against the issues most
right now, every department after them, every faculty member who comes
into contact with international students, is going to have to
recalibrate as institutions become more international. I see a cascading
list of challenges.” </p>
<p>
They have already begun here at Washington’s flagship university, where
orientation leaders last fall had to explain, repeatedly, the rigorous
campus recycling practices, reinforce no-smoking rules and, at the
make-your-own-sundae bar, help people get the hang of the whipped-cream
cans. </p>
<p>
But there are deeper issues, like how much latitude professors should give in written assignments. </p>
<p>
“We recognize that people from other countries often speak with an
accent,” said John Webster, director of writing at the university’s
College of Arts and Science. “If we’re truly going to be a global
university, which I think is a terrific thing, we have to recognize that
they may write with an accent as well.” </p>
<p>
For example, because Mandarin has one word for “he,” “she” and “it” and
nothing like “a” or “the,” many Chinese speakers struggle with pronouns
and articles. And English verb forms, like past participles, gerunds and
infinitives, can be difficult to master, since Chinese verbs are
unchanging. </p>
<p>
Given that Chinese students’ writing will be “accented” for years, Mr.
Webster believes that professors should focus less on trying to make
their English technically correct and more on making their essays
understandable and interesting. But he knows this could be a
controversial issue, reminiscent of the <a title="About Ebonics." href="http://www.lsadc.org/info/ling-faqs-ebonics.cfm">Ebonics</a> debate decades ago. </p>
<p>
The international influx is likely to keep growing, in part because of
the booming recruiting industry that has sprung up overseas. That
includes the use of commissioned agents, who help students through the
admissions process — and sometimes write their application essays. Amid
controversy over such agents, Mr. Hawkins’s group has named a
commission, to meet for the first time next month, to formulate a policy
regarding recruiters. </p>
<p>
Nationwide, higher education financing has undergone a profound shift in
recent years, with many public institutions that used to get most of
their financing from state governments now relying on tuition for more
than half their budgets. But legislators and taxpayers still feel deep
ownership of the state institutions created to serve homegrown students —
and worry that something is awry when local high achievers, even
valedictorians, are rejected by the campuses they have grown up aspiring
to. </p>
<p>
“My constituents want a slot for their kid,” said Reuven Carlyle, a
Democrat state representative from Seattle. “I hear it at the grocery
store every day, and I’ve got four young kids myself, so I get it.
</p>
<p>
“We are struggling with capacity, access and affordability,” he said.
“But international engagement is part of our state’s DNA. We have a
special economic and social relationship with China, and I am happy to
have so many Chinese students at the university.” </p>
<p>
Still, Jim Allen, a counselor at Inglemoor High School in Kenmore,
Wash., an affluent suburb north of Seattle, said: “Families are
frustrated. There aren’t as many private colleges here as in the East,
and a lot of families expect their children to go to U.W.” </p>
<p>
Unlike many other state universities, the University of Washington did
no overseas recruiting before this academic year, when it staged
recruiting tours in several countries. So the rapid growth in
international applications — to more than 6,000 this year from 1,541 in
2007, with China by far the largest source — was something of a
surprise. Last spring, another surprise was the percentage who accepted
offers of admission: 42 percent decided to enroll, up from 35 percent
the previous year. </p>
<p>
“As best I can make out, it’s just word of mouth,” said Mr. Ballinger,
the admissions dean. “We’re well known in China, we’re highly rated on
the Shanghai rankings, and we have a lot of contacts.” </p>
<p>
Applications from abroad present some special challenges. Because the
SAT is not given in mainland China, the university does not require
international students to take it. Although it does not pay recruiting
agents, Mr. Ballinger said he knew many applicants hired them, so the
university does not consider Chinese applicants’ personal essays or
recommendations. (Yes, he also knows that some affluent applicants in
the United States get extensive help from paid private counselors.)
</p>
<p>
Some in-state students said they had trouble knowing what to make of the
fact that international students, on the one hand, help underwrite
financial aid, and on the other, take up seats that might have gone to
their high school classmates. </p>
<p>
“Morally, I feel the university should accept in-state students first,
then other American students, then international students,” said Farheen
Siddiqui, a freshman from Renton, Wash., just south of Seattle. “When I
saw all the stories about U.W. taking more international students, I
thought, ‘Damn, I’m a minority now for being in-state.’ ” </p>
<p>
Actually, nearly two-thirds of Ms. Siddiqui’s classmates are from
Washington, but her inaccurate sense of the population was echoed by all
of the three dozen freshmen interviewed — including those from other
states and from China. Most, like Ms. Siddiqui, estimated that half to
two-thirds of the class was international. </p>
<p>
Ms. Siddiqui cited a psychology class in which the professor asked the
600-plus students about the nature of the families they grew up in. With
clickers recording the responses, Ms. Siddiqui said, about 60 percent
said their families were “collectivist,” rather than “individualist,”
something she perceived as more Asian than American. </p>
<p>
Alison Luo, who grew up in Chongqing, a major city in southwest China,
had mixed feelings about the trend that she is part of. </p>
<p>
“Before I came, I saw the online chatting in China, with hundreds of
people coming to the University of Washington,” Ms. Luo said. “I was
kind of worried about that. I paid to study abroad, and it was almost
like I was studying in China.” </p>
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