dukeleto
1mo ago
Do you know if the undergrads are any better? My primary experiences have been with international ms (the worst) and PhD (who seem average to slightly above average) students.
As I said in my comment above, I believe that academics should be incentivized to support a smaller number of students who they actually mentor and otherwise invest in. I might not have been explicit, buts my experience is that most work completed by graduate students is of relatively low quality and the point of the exercise is to train people so that they are equipped to do actual science. The foreign students I have interacted with are usually at around the same level as the domestic students but are more desperate because they are trying to escape from a shithole. Automatically giving green cards to people would just make the situation worse by further increasing the pool of labor available for exploitation.
As for the ones who stayed, how many of them are actually doing science? I bet the majority of them used it as a pathway into the us labor market and are now working fairly standard jobs. Had they not come these jobs would have still been filled (probably at significantly higher cost, but if that’s the cost of a more equal society, so be it).
dukeleto
11d ago
If anyone wants to watch the press conference from this morning you can find it here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ARwRsOvVmew (starts around 41 minutes).
I didn’t think they really said anything particularly interesting. Still waiting on more substantive comments on the amounts of damage done at the facility.
I went to a Montessori school from first through sixth grade, this wasn’t a completely unschooling experience (in first through third grade they made us learn how to read, learn basic arithmetic, etc. but 3rd - 6th grade is basically as you described, except that in addition to the library we had works (such as a board that used beads for doing long division etc.), which we could choose from). I learned a lot of roman history, played a lot of RuneScape and developed a love of gardening which I have retained to the present day. I had no trouble catching up when I entered a regular middle school for 7th grade (I actually tested a year ahead in my science and math courses). This experience has left me with a very strong belief that kids should be taught how to read, preform basic arithmetic and learn to socialize with others in elementary school and otherwise be left alone.
I feel like people are giving institutions like Harvard the benefit of the doubt in a way that they do not deserve. If we where talking about MIT or caltech (and maybe even Stanford) I believe that most of these arguments about having the best international students would be correct, and while Harvard is very good, it’s not as if their institutions primary purpose is supporting ground breaking work in the physical sciences, it’s there to provide the most privileged children in the world a place to mingle and make connections.
I suspect the elite truly see themselves as post national “global citizens” and removing that from Harvard will hurt their image.
More broadly I don’t think that people have really thought through how corrosive having tons of international students is to the us university system (this comment applies to state schools as well as elite institutions). Put succinctly, academics advance their careers by getting grants, and publishing papers. This means paying talented post docs and graduate students. Having an essentially open boarders system for this means that academics can access foreign labor at a fraction of what it would cost to hire us students, so instead of having one or two students who are paid slightly more, you end up with academics who have 8-10 students, 2 of whom are domestic and the rest are international.
This leads to worse mentorship and the situation we have now where the us tax payers is funding efforts to educate a bunch of foreign nationals who then leave.
I have worked with plenty of brilliant people with PhDs, it may just be my particular background but it seems to me that the main trait shared by the best ones was that they had received good mentorship from their advisors. You’re less likely to get that when the advisor is able to recruit an army.
Finally I would add that giving them all green cards would just make the system even worse since it would give academics even more power over their international students than they have now and would make these positions even more attractive.
So while I don’t have a problem with some international students, I think it’s important to reco
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