"“The problem is clear,” said Kapil Sibal, the government minister overseeing education in India, who studied law at Harvard. “There is a demand and supply issue. You don’t have enough quality institutions, and there are enough quality young people who want to go to only quality institutions.”
American universities and colleges have been more than happy to pick up the slack. Faced with shrinking returns from endowment funds, a decline in the number of high school graduates in the United States and growing economic hardship among American families, they have stepped up their efforts to woo Indian students thousands of miles away.
Representatives from many of the Ivy League institutions have begun making trips to India to recruit students and explore partnerships with Indian schools. Some have set up offices in India, partly aimed at attracting a wider base of students....
Indians are now the second-largest foreign student population in America, after the Chinese, with almost 105,000 students in the United States in the 2009-10 academic year, the last for which comprehensive figures were available. "
That's great for the Indians and the Chinese, but what about the American middle class? Because what I'm hearing in that glossed over "shrinking returns from endowment funds, a decline in the number of high school graduates in the United States and growing economic hardship among American families" is that the Ivy Leagues think America has grown too dumb and too poor, so they're looking overseas.
Of course, liberals love the story of a Westernized foreigner with a degree from Harvard. If you disagree with them on this, supposedly you're xenophobic and "have no heart." America is supposedly always the only one with the problem for many liberals.
It seems the American institutions of higher learning are abandoning the demographic which should be their primary focus - Americans, particularly the middle class, which has been hard hit by this recession.
I know it's all about "diversity," but when Americans are hurting the Ivy Leagues should worry about giving aid to struggling families and help them obtain the degrees that will lead to greater employment opportunities. When America is struggling, that is when people need an Ivy League education the most, not when schools should go overseas. At the end of the day, this should always be the focus.
Other countries will always have their own top-ranking institutions, and foreigners will always come here for America's world-class education but regardless of this ebb and flow, the Americans will always be there for the Ivies. The Ivies should not make U.S. citizens second-best.
-Ryu
-Ryu
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