I have never been one to say that student visas are bad things, but I heard a story over the weekend that made me wonder if they are as good as I thought. I ran into a student from Florida who went to one of their majors schools. He said he was tired of having Chinese students get "a free ride" and he has to work to pay his tuition. I was naturally curious.
He said the graduate students he was competing with were getting scholarships from his school that required them to pay no tuition or board on campus and he could barely make it by working two jobs and going to school. He said the rationale by the school was Chinese students make a school better because they are going to be the leaders of the future.
So, I looked up student visas and found that 331,000 were Chinese students, and they were the largest single group from any country. There are over a million students in this country from countries I am not too sure about, and China is one of them.
Do we really want Chinese students getting to come to school free of charge while we make our own students pay full fare? I wondered who is making these kinds of decisions until he said the faculty and administrators were mostly Chinese. What are we thinking here? Maybe it might be better to think about this a little and start looking at why we would do such a thing.
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