Skilled Immigrants to the US Going Home: The Latest Fear

Funkenpants wrote:
Staats wrote:

"Liberal" jab aside, I agree with Shoal -- I don't think tracking programs ala Germany or Japan would fly here. I've even heard complaints that state colleges don't have open admissions.

I was a grad student at Ohio State after they had been forced into an open admissions policy. Seemed like a terrible idea to me. Another example: for decades the city college system in NYC fed smart, college educated students into the NYC economy and bureaucracy who didn't have to worry about student loans. You went free provided you could get in. They got rid of it because it was closing people out. I guess open admissions is a good idea if you want to make sure the maximum number of people have the chance to get a college education.

Any time the federal government sticks their noses into education, they tend to foul it up. The only thing they've done well lately (and that's loosely interpreted) is using the school as a vehicle for free and reduced breakfasts and lunches, basically insuring that children don't starve in this country.

They got rid of it because it was closing people out. I guess open admissions is a good idea if you want to make sure the maximum number of people have the chance to get a college education.

Or from a more cynical point of view, when your state has a ton of financial services companies, it makes sense to have all of these kids taking out loans instead of getting a free ride.

BlackSheep wrote:

Any time the federal government sticks their noses into education, they tend to foul it up.

It was a state-level issue, I think.

Minase wrote:

Or from a more cynical point of view, when your state has a ton of financial services companies, it makes sense to have all of these kids taking out loans instead of getting a free ride.

Could be, but that might be too cynical even for me. However, I've never considered that there are financial beneficiaries to policy that everyone should have access to a college education. Same as with people pushing the idea that home ownership is a great "investment."

BlackSheep wrote:

Any time the federal government sticks their noses into education, they tend to foul it up. The only thing they've done well lately (and that's loosely interpreted) is using the school as a vehicle for free and reduced breakfasts and lunches, basically insuring that children don't starve in this country.

I don't know. I tend to think that Brown vs. Board of Education is possibly the MOST important decision the Supreme Court has made in the last 100 years. If anything, a much stronger case can be made that the American education "system" is far less well served by a group of uneducated yahoos running local school boards than it would be by a group of full-time professionals with specific education and training. Certainly it can be observed that other countries with unified education programs do much better than we do.

Paleocon wrote:
BlackSheep wrote:

Any time the federal government sticks their noses into education, they tend to foul it up. The only thing they've done well lately (and that's loosely interpreted) is using the school as a vehicle for free and reduced breakfasts and lunches, basically insuring that children don't starve in this country.

I don't know. I tend to think that Brown vs. Board of Education is possibly the MOST important decision the Supreme Court has made in the last 100 years. If anything, a much stronger case can be made that the American education "system" is far less well served by a group of uneducated yahoos running local school boards than it would be by a group of full-time professionals with specific education and training. Certainly it can be observed that other countries with unified education programs do much better than we do.

Brown vs. Board is a little bit different -- that's not quite a school matter, schools just made the best and most direct illustrative point against segregation and separate but equal being complete bs.

After having been in the school system as a teacher, and from having a wife that is an administrator (and about a bazillion in-laws that are in the school system too), it is readily apparent that Bush put his stamp of stupidity on education from up high with his latest, NCLB, which really should have stayed in the theory room. You want issues -- here's what some of the problems in my district were concerning education and what NCLB (Nicklebee to educators -- No Child Left Behind)

1. Flood honors classes with normal students. Here's what happened. It became a regular class. You can't leave anyone behind and when you have 1-5 students not getting it, fine, tutoring works. When you have half your class not getting it? Well, you've got to find a way to reteach it, which takes a ton of time. We were doing a grave disservice to those honors kids that were bored and not getting the education they deserved by that point, all because we wanted to stroke childrens' (and parents) egos by placing them in 'honors.'

2. Devote a crapload of time to testing standardized tests. Now I don't have a problem with 'teach to the test' and blah, blah. I found that most of my students, whether honors, gifted, normal, or Limited English Proficient, did a pretty good job with the test without me wasting more than a day or two on 'How to take a test,' which really is a skill everyone needs in the 9th grade anyway. What drove me nuts is that we had no less than 4 benchmarks and then the real test. Holy mother of God! That meant that we were basically shorting the students about two weeks of instruction due to benchmark taking when it was all said and done.

3. Schools have become segregated again. There is very little diversity in many schools. Fort Worth ISD, the district I taught in, has four schools that are not totally segregated. The rest look a lot like the one I taught at -- 98% of one ethnicity. Part of the issue was that FWISD tore down their highly successful magnet programs to comply with federal and local pressure, which stopped shipping kids all over the district, where these programs had been set up in schools that were heavily segregated. A desegregated school is a much better school than the segregated one, where one culture pervades and complaceny can set in.

Anyone with a high school diploma can enter university or college in Belgium (Flanders), with scholarships according to income awarded to anyone with Belgian (Flemish) citizenship. First thing to note is that level of high school education is excellent in Flanders (can't find sources after a one minute google at work), albeit with a high level of drop-outs. So there IS an entry barrier, though not as high as in the States.

Because of the low barrier the level of education in our universities/colleges is kind of average. Certainly not the level of a Yale/Harvard/Oxford, but not crap either. Our top universities (Leuven, Ghent, Liège, Brussels) end up around 150th place internationally.

Just thought I'd toss in a real-life example of open universities

Paleo wrote:

My wife just passed her orals five minutes ago and is now Dr. Paleogal! She's talking about moving us both back to Korea so it looks like I might be part of that statistic.

Well, there are skilled immigrants, and then there are no-skillz sararymen

Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:
Paleo wrote:

My wife just passed her orals five minutes ago and is now Dr. Paleogal! She's talking about moving us both back to Korea so it looks like I might be part of that statistic.

Well, there are skilled immigrants, and then there are no-skillz sararymen :P

Hey! I'm a victim of American education!

Paleocon wrote:

In a word, YES. The primary driver of our economy is the ability to attract innovators and skilled workers from other countries. That has, traditionally, been because of our superiority in capital formation and the ease of entry into business ownership. Now that other countries are making huge strides in both of those areas, we're looking at tremendous competitive pressures to attract good talent.

In the absence of that competitive advantage, we need to develop the talent ourselves. Considering we have a broken education system and a stratification of capital that is stagnating upward mobility, I'm not terribly optimistic.

I disagree. The shift of skilled workers back to their own countries - especially to certain countries may (not necessarily will) spread certain key ideas and principles. Also, it will increase the need for the US to reemphasize science and engineering as a home grown skill and increase potential opportunity for cultivating our own science communities. As for the education system - parts are broken, but some parts are not - of course we only here the bad and rarely the good. Holding parents and teachers accountable for the progress of lack thereof for their children is better then simply screaming the system is broken. I have some good friends that are teachers and I was married to one. Some teachers chose teaching because they didnt know what else to do and they "got summers off" others chose it to make a difference. My wife's best friend is a high school teacher and has received a number of accolades, but she is paid a travesty of a salary in Indiana. That's a problem, but introduce the concept of performance pay and the teacher's union will sh*t themselves because slacker teachers will have to work and be evaluated. Work hard, get results, get paid - works for me.

As for higher education - if it were broken - I doubt many of these people who came for an education and then returned to their home countries would come in the first place. I think, in general, that this is not a forest fire, but a potential opportunity for the US to regain some of its edge in science and engineering.

dejanzie wrote:

Anyone with a high school diploma can enter university or college in Belgium (Flanders), with scholarships according to income awarded to anyone with Belgian (Flemish) citizenship. First thing to note is that level of high school education is excellent in Flanders (can't find sources after a one minute google at work), albeit with a high level of drop-outs. So there IS an entry barrier, though not as high as in the States.

Because of the low barrier the level of education in our universities/colleges is kind of average. Certainly not the level of a Yale/Harvard/Oxford, but not crap either. Our top universities (Leuven, Ghent, Liège, Brussels) end up around 150th place internationally.

Just thought I'd toss in a real-life example of open universities :)

The entire country has a population of about 10.7 million. That's roughly the pop size of Michigan, the 8th largest State, or slightly smaller than the top two US cities combined (NY & LA, ~11.5mil).

The problems we have with US education are multi-fold. We're geographically dispersed more than any western-ish country I can think of. We incredibly multi-cultural. Our social-economic swings are huge. We have 300 million people. We're too diverse. We can't standardize and fix education because no one fix is going to work. Actually, this sums up most of our problems.

Shoal07 wrote:
dejanzie wrote:

Anyone with a high school diploma can enter university or college in Belgium (Flanders), with scholarships according to income awarded to anyone with Belgian (Flemish) citizenship. First thing to note is that level of high school education is excellent in Flanders (can't find sources after a one minute google at work), albeit with a high level of drop-outs. So there IS an entry barrier, though not as high as in the States.

Because of the low barrier the level of education in our universities/colleges is kind of average. Certainly not the level of a Yale/Harvard/Oxford, but not crap either. Our top universities (Leuven, Ghent, Liège, Brussels) end up around 150th place internationally.

Just thought I'd toss in a real-life example of open universities :)

The entire country has a population of about 10.7 million. That's roughly the pop size of Michigan, the 8th largest State, or slightly smaller than the top two US cities combined (NY & LA, ~11.5mil).

The problems we have with US education are multi-fold. We're geographically dispersed more than any western-ish country I can think of. We incredibly multi-cultural. Our social-economic swings are huge. We have 300 million people. We're too diverse. We can't standardize and fix education because no one fix is going to work. Actually, this sums up most of our problems.

If easy standardized fixes would exist, there wouldn't be any problems left to discuss/solve ;-). It would definitely free up some space on the Goodjer servers.

I never said Belgium could be compared 1 on 1 with the States, although I'm sure there are plenty of areas in the US that CAN be. I'm just saying that at least in our example open access to universities and college with help from the government hasn't led to a huge loss in quality, although there aren't real elite schools either. Flanders' government (responsability on education is split between Flanders -Dutch-speaking- and Walloon -French-speaking- as are all cultural domains) invests very heavily in education, and it pays off. And trust me, there's virtually no squalor in our educational system. Which is more than I can say for other governmental departments

As an aside, don't underestimate the cultural diversity in Belgium. We have, institutionally, a division between 6 million Dutch-speaking Flemish, 4 million French-speaking Walloons, and 100.000 German-speaking Belgians (a gift after WWI). Thanks to the many international institutions residing in Brussels, our capital is at least as diverse as New York or London. 50% of Brussels' inhabitants are foreigners: Dutch, French, Italians, Moroccons, people from Congo (our former colony), Turks, Americans, English, and all the others from the EU or the NATO.

Shoal07 wrote:
dejanzie wrote:

The problems we have with US education are multi-fold. We're geographically dispersed more than any western-ish country I can think of. We incredibly multi-cultural. Our social-economic swings are huge. We have 300 million people. We're too diverse. We can't standardize and fix education because no one fix is going to work. Actually, this sums up most of our problems.

As an aside, don't underestimate the cultural diversity in Belgium. We have, institutionally, a division between 6 million Dutch-speaking Flemish, 4 million French-speaking Walloons, and 100.000 German-speaking Belgians (a gift after WWI). Thanks to the many international institutions residing in Brussels, our capital is at least as diverse as New York or London. 50% of Brussels' inhabitants are foreigners: Dutch, French, Italians, Moroccons, people from Congo (our former colony), Turks, Americans, English, and all the others from the EU or the NATO.

And your forgetting that most European states (besides Britain and Ireland) have to teach English to a high level as its the language of trade. I feel embarrassed at the ability of most Europeans to switch between two or three languages.

Shoal, I mean this with the greatest respect but that arguement is used every time you point a difference between Japan/Europe and the US where the former come out on top. Public transport and Broadband are the two other examples I can think of. Healthcare used to be the other. Frankly it doesn't wash with me for the simple reason that, as Malor alluded to earlier, you're talking about a country that put men on the moon. That and, as Dejanzie points out, other countries have there own hurdles to jump as well.

Of course there are differences. Of course there are issues the US has the others don't. At the same time the US has some advantages. Ireland, for example is the most sparsely population country in the first world, not the US. It has far greater socio-economic swing than the US. What we don't have is 300 million people. Heck we would give our eye tooth for 12 million. What we don't do is make up our own systems, ignoring other successful systems, because we are different to our neighbours. We adapt the successful systems to suit our needs.

Oh and to add, Trinity College Dublin is an open university to EU citizen (non EU pay through the nose) and is 50th in the world up from about the 80's. Its aiming for top 25 which would be fantastic for a country our size. The US has the huge advantage of its best universities picking from such massive pool which we don't have. That 300 million people under one federal system is a huge advantage.

This seemed like the best one to necro.

Thailand is in the process of shipping home over 100k of their illegal immigrant workforce with the new junta in place. They are being bussed back to Myanmar and Cambodia mainly.

Construction is about to grind to a halt on many major projects and there are fears it will impact farm work.
It might become a good example of "be careful what you wish for" for immigration policies around the world. It will impact all the economies in the region.

I will be watching with interest.

Will be very interesting to see how it all shakes out.

The anti-immigration rhetoric has always been based more on "truthiness" than fact, though, so even if it's a disaster I can't imagine it'll actually change attitudes.

It will change voting habits, though. The more Tea Party types we elect, the less functional the Legislative branch will be. That's already a big problem. It won't take much longer to push it into crisis.

Robear wrote:

It will change voting habits, though. The more Tea Party types we elect, the less functional the Legislative branch will be. That's already a big problem. It won't take much longer to push it into crisis.

Not much help here, unfortunately. By our last election even the left wing party had built offshore detention facilities for the processing of illegal migrants.