Re: OT Rant

On Oct 21, 5:26 am, Tom Sherman <sunsetss0...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
b...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx aka Ben? wrote:

UW-Milwaukee with two-thirds (2/3) the total enrollment of UW-Madison,
has the highest number of students that graduated from Wisconsin high
schools. UW-Madison has made a conscious decision to bring in as many
foreign and out of state students as possible. Should that be the policy
of a state taxpayer funded institution?

There are not generally policies to keep local students
out of grad school (Maybe there is at UW, but I doubt it).
I'd argue that there is some amount of class prejudice
at the undergrad level but less so at the grad level
once you have that B.A.

Where I went to school (UIUC), it is much harder to get in as an
undergraduate, in-state student (smaller number of students in a much
larger population state), yet they gave preference to their own
undergraduates for graduate school admissions and
assistantships/fellowships.

UW-Madison has an out-of-state undergrad percentage
of about 23%. UIUC has about 10%. UW-Milwaukee has
about 6%. (All of these numbers are easily googlable.)
So when arguing the difference between UW-Madison and
UIUC, you're talking about 13% of the student body.
It's really hard for me to get as worked up over that
fraction as you are. It is not the primary cause keeping
deserving cheeseheads out of Madison.

The reason UW-Madison has many more out-of-staters than
UW-Milwaukee is almost certainly that out-of-staters,
having chosen to spend lots of money and move away from
home, wish to attend the flagship campus of the UW system
(and to live in Madison rather than Milwaukee). This
is no slight on UW-Milwaukee, in fact my brother taught
there for a year and liked it. It's just a fact.

The out of state kids are paying higher tuition and
subsidizing (slightly) the in-state tuition. Further,
the mission of a state university is not only to
educate the yoot of the state, but to provide them a
good education, and the powers that be generally think
that exposing them to a few people from out of state
is a good idea. At the undergrad level, out of staters
are mostly from within the US. So there's some
exchange of undergrads between states, which doesn't
necessarily decrease the number of places available
at any given university.

The problem is that many foreign students want it more.
In my entering grad class in physics, there were 3 US-born
Americans and 1 naturalized citizen out of 18, the
rest including China, India, Russia, Europe, etc.
A few years later when we hit a recession, the
percentage of US-born students went up, since it was
not as easy to find a job straight out of college.

No, that is not the problem in this case.

There is demand for talented domestic grad students.
They often have less advanced classwork but make better
TAs and research assistants (because educated in a less
regimented system).

They can also be understood by the undergraduates.

That doesn't mean that an
applicant can necessarily get into the university
next door. He or she will probably have to apply
to several places and may have to move across half
the country. OTOH, many Asian students move 7000 miles
away from home, to an unfamiliar culture and foreign
language, and are still sending remittances back
to their families out of their meager graduate stipends.
Try to remember that the next time you get annoyed
by one riding a Huffy bike on the sidewalk.

When I am a pedestrian, I do not get out of the way of any illegally
operating cyclist, regardless of their national origin. Is not part of
studying in a foreign country learning the customs to a reasonable
extent? (Of course, to be fair, on State Street where Andrew Muzi has
his front door, there are US born students riding 50cc motor scooters on
the sidewalk.)

Yes, I see lots of Grade-A American kids riding bikes on
the sidewalk, wrong way, etc. And driving rudely.
Universities are teeming with traffic hazards.

I sigh briefly when I have to go through a paper by a
collaborator who's not a native English speaker and
correct the grammar. Then I remember that I can barely
order a meal in a foreign language, let alone write
a scientific paper in one.

Ben

P.S. Graduate housing usually is depressing, and not very
cheap either. One of the reasons foreign students may
get preference for it is that domestic students can
navigate the US rental market more easily. Imagine coming
fresh off the boat and you have to start grad school
classes and negotiate with landlords in a foreign language
when you don't even have a paycheck or a bank account yet.

Imagine being an overachieving student from the "hood" in a US city, and
having to live in the same type of crappy housing with the same type of
"slum lord" running the place, while in graduate school.

Blame the slumlord, not the Chinese students. Crappy
housing is part of the joy of grad school in any
expensive area. You have options. People born in the
US start with a huge leg up on most of the rest of the
world (unless they come from a really poverty stricken
place or dysfunctional enviroment). Use what you got
rather than feeding resentment about policies that cut so
slightly into your advantage of birth.

I'm as lefty as anyone, and when I see people making
these kind of complaints, I think it is falling into the
hands of those who would like to distract US workers by
pitting them against immigrants (or out-of-staters).
For historical precedents, when late 19thC industrialists
imported Italians (the 19thC equivalent of Mexicans;
Italy was really poor) as scab labor to break strikes,
nativists howled about what a bunch of subhumans the
Italians were. Dividing workers who should have had
interests in common helped delay effective worker
organization in US heavy industry. (Like organization
or not, when it finally happened in the 30s-40s, the
country subsequently managed a sustained industrial boom
from the 40s-60s that lifted lots of people into what
we call the middle class, so their kids could go to
state universities and not have to work in the mines.)

Ben


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