Has the University of Illinois gone too far?

Last updated on: August 5, 2014 at 2:38 pm by Jane the Actuary

Has the University of Illinois gone too far? 2014-08-05T14:38:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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In recruiting undergraduate students from China to pay the bills, that is?

A while back, I linked to and wrote about an article describing the extensive support services for foreign students at Oregon State University. I lamented that the aggressive recruitment of foreign students will disrupt the hoped-for supply-and-demand, market-based reduction in tuition as students become less willing to pay any price for their college education, and more keen on comparison-shopping, and choosing no-frills (or, at least, fewer-frills) options — as colleges fill those spots with students from China and Korea who are more than willing to take those spots.

Apparently, this is all the more dramatic in my own backyard, at the flagship Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois, according to a set of articles over the weekend in the Chicago Tribune. From “U. of I. reaches out to 600 freshmen from China“:

More than 600 Chinese teenagers have made the same decision, and soon they will arrive on campus as part of the Class of 2018.

They will represent nearly 10 percent of the entering freshman class at the state’s most competitive public university, up from fewer than 20 freshmen in 2006. And they are so important to the university’s present and future that a U. of I. team flew halfway around the world this summer to conduct three orientation sessions in their country.

While the students and their families are betting their futures on a U. of I. education, the university depends on the full tuition they pay — a minimum of $31,000 a year, in some cases totaling twice that of an Illinois resident, plus housing and other costs.

U. of I. has more international students than any other American public university, and it trails only the University of Southern California, a private institution. All told, including graduate students who qualify for some aid, about 9,400 international students funneled $166 million into the Urbana-Champaign campus budget last year in tuition alone, triple the amount from just five years ago.

When fees and housing are factored in, international students contributed $211 million to the campus budget, accounting for 25 percent of the amount paid by all students. Nearly half that sum came from China, university figures show.

In other words, it’s all about the cash flow.

This is a massive increase in the number of Chinese students. A follow-up article described some of the consequences:

U. of I. professor Gary Xu, a native of Nanjing, China, started teaching at the university in 2001. Back then, the 250 spots in his East Asian literature class were filled almost entirely by American students. Now, about half of the class is international students, most of them Chinese, he said.

He has mixed feelings about the change. “English proficiency is a big issue,” he said. “It is getting harder to teach these courses.”

Even the incoming students acknowledge that language use is among their biggest concerns. During the recent online class, conducted entirely in English, several students said they were apprehensive about speaking the language — particularly with each other.

“We might feel weird speaking English instead of Chinese in front of other Chinese students,” one student said aloud.

“I can’t agree more,” said another, typing the response in the comment area.

When Xu came to the U.S. as a graduate student, there were so few Asian students that he was forced to make friends from around the world. His best friend came from Cleveland.

He and others said the increase has led to less integration, as international students can more easily fall into a comfort zone with peers from their home country. Chinese students tend to sit together in class, speak Mandarin to each other and eat at the many Asian restaurants on campus, he said.

How is this impacting Illinoisians? According to the article’s statistics, it hasn’t hindered the chances of an Illinois student being admitted — that rate has increased from 63% to 70% from 2006 to 2013. Does that mean that it’s American out-of-state students who are less represented than in the past? That the overall number of students has increased accordingly? Or that, as a chart which is too confusingly-constructed to give too much credence to, implies, there has been a decline in the numbers of Illinois applicants in absolute numbers? The data is unclear but it seems quite likely that the U of I is abandoning its mission to serve Illinoisians.

In any case, despite our trumpeting of “diversity” as our highest value, the issue of integration and English proficiency is a huge problem (and it’s my understanding that the TOEFL tests reading comprehension, not speaking ability). The universities chasing Chinese students as a profit center may soon discover that the extra costs in special support services, as well as the overall loss in the quality of the education (when your classmates can’t effectively participate in class discussion, and teachers change their lesson plans accordingly), mean the new revenue isn’t worth it. (And, according to the comments on the Trib article, there are already plenty of parents dissatisfied with the quality of the institution, feeling that the university ignores undergraduates, not scheduling enough sections of required courses, for instance, with a “you should be grateful to be here” attitude.)

So if even state universities are going to chase new sources of revenue rather than controlling costs (and see my weekend post on all the little ways that costs are escalating at my own alma mater), then we’d need some new cost-effective competition. But who, and how? For-profit universities are at a disadvantage because they don’t get state funding. Online education isn’t for everyone — many students simply need in-person interaction, or are in courses of study which require extensive labwork. Or is the answer for the states to step in and mandate cost-control, demanding, for instance, that the university offer a no-frills dorm option and an “unbundled” education?

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