Summury and response - Essay Example

Lecturer: Topic: Ranks of Foreign on US Campuses on Rise Justin Pope is the Chief of staff to the president at LongwoodUniversity. He is also an Associated Press national higher education reporter of 2004-2013 and a University of Michigan Knight-Wallace journalism fellow of 2010-11. In this article the author wants to show his concern on the rising cases of foreign students saturating the local universities and how it affects the local students. He tries to shed some light on the issue which he expresses that it is a cause of concern.

According to him, the Indiana University would be the best spot to examine a sample of public universities in America and how they are evolving. Only 87 students that were of Chinese descent graduated from the university 5 years ago, while 2224 will graduate from the same university this year. Enrollment of international students has grown tremendously in the last years by over 6 percent with china having the highest figures of over 20 percent that prefer the big public colleges.This figures help to give an insight into the metamorphosis of the public universities in America in a time when support from the state has reduced.

There are about 25 campuses that have amplified international enrollment to more than 40 percent in the last five years according to data collected by the Institute of International Education except one public university. The enrollment in Indiana has gone over 6,000 to 15 percent of the students in the university while in Illinois it has reached 9,000 and consequently it has been ranked as the second in the country. These universities are perceived to put importance on having international students and the ideas that they bring since they pay all their fees and don’t need financial aid.

The universities have discovered that the fees paid by the international students can enable them continue to offer scholarships to help the local students even after funding is cut.As at last year, there were over 700,000 international students in the campuses in the US most of them coming from China and the rest from India and South Korea. The number of students from Saudi Arabia is fast growing since their government has established a lucrative sponsorship program. These students bring in over 22 billion dollars to the economy and most of them remain behind after they graduate either to work or continue with their studies.

Indiana prefers international students since the rate that they pay in fees is three times what the local ones pay though this denies the local students from getting chances that are offered in this university. This year alone, Indiana had to turn down 4,164 applications from local students since they had to enroll foreign students explaining that there must be a global balance.Although this endeavor brings money to the institutions, the universities have to develop services for the foreign students and this isolates them from the others.

Increasing the numbers of these students does not help this cause. It is now evident that the Chinese students that were on government scholarships are losing their chances to the ones that come from well of families and are more at home in the US. The ones that get these opportunities get them at the expense of bright ones that would have been more successful in life had they got the opportunity. (Pope, 16)Personally I don’t think this issue of foreign students saturating the universities is a cause for concern, as long as the university management tries to balance the number of the foreign students with the number of those from abroad and also make sure that they are not given better preference as a result of what they pay and it should make sure that money is only priority.

Works CitedPope, Justin. Ranks of foreign students on US campuses on rise. Community College Week, 25(8), 16.