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The Great Seal of Ohio.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Ohio recruits students from China and Kelly Williams-Bolar is jailed for sending her kids to a school in her own father's district two miles away: welcome to globalized ed.
The
global middle class is on the move and life is good. It is also a great time to be in educational administration in state schools that once had to focus on their state. No more. Just because you pay your taxes and attend as required doesn't mean you get a job or can attend college.
The educational-industrial complex supports the global middle class and maybe your state, too, can find smart students abroad. US students are just not very smart and they can't afford to pay much either.
in Ohio colleges in record numbers | cleveland.com: "The university, like others in Ohio and across the country, has realized the benefits of recruiting Chinese students -- who usually pay full price and can handle the academic challenges.
The number of Chinese students in undergraduate programs at U.S. colleges increased 43 percent, to 57,000 students, from 2009 to 2010, according to the most recent statistics from the Institute of International Education."...
William Brustein, vice provost for global strategies and international affairs at Ohio State University, has worked in international education for 30 years. He said the sudden increase in undergraduate Chinese students has been a surprise.
"The phenomenon is due to the growth of the professional middle class in China and the emphasis they place on higher education," he said. "The United States is that magnet. The growth wasn't a surprise, but I don't think people expected it to surge so quickly and rapidly."
OSU, in an effort to establish a large global presence, targeted China as its first "global gateway" -- a prime location for faculty research, international student recruitment and opportunities for study abroad.
The university has opened offices in Shanghai, China, and Mumbai, India, and plans others in Brazil and Turkey .... While universities focus on China and India, they are also looking to other countries because as China and India expand their university systems, fewer students will look to the United States, Brustein said.
"There are emerging markets," he said. "Brazil will be one and Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia as well. We have to have plans for that more diverse flow."
A year ago, representatives from 56 universities, including the University of Cincinnati, Miami University, Shawnee State University and the University of Findlay, visited Vietnam and Indonesia to explore opportunities for student recruitment there. They were invited by the U.S. Department of Commerce. via Blog this'
School administrators, a growing and prosperous group, are happy they can get kids from the global middle class who can handle the educational challenges. Those kids who slogged through twelve years of compulsory mis-education in Ohio just can't seem to cut it.
Tuition increases at Ohio State are on the way next year. Many students have been protesting the proposed hikes over the past two months, saying they’r e already stretched to the limit. On Wednesday, more than 50 sign-carrying students marched across the College Green chanting “higher education, not a corporation.”
“I’m being crushed by debt,” said Christy Holden, a 19-year-old sociology major. “I understand wanting to maintain the quality of the education at Ohio University, but at what costs?”
Ohio is the same state that has not fairly funded their public schools and the state that used its police arm to charge Kelley Williams-Bolar with felony charges for sending her kids to a better school in her own father's district two miles away. Soaring tuition rates and few jobs for high school grads put pressure on everyone and when some in this system feel fearful, things can get ugly.
Kelley Williams-Bolar’s father dies in prison hospital - Local News: "Williams and Williams-Bolar, 41, went on trial together in 2010 on charges of conspiring to enroll his granddaughters in Copley-Fairlawn schools in 2006. Williams-Bolar, who lived in Akron, was convicted of felony record tampering and served nine days in jail. Gov. John Kasich, after a torrent of international support for the mother, granted her request for a pardon over the objection of Summit County prosecutors."
The whole point of compulsory public education was to strengthen citizen choices and the local and state economy. States provided resources, from land to funding, to build schools that everyone paid for and benefitted from except the rich, of course, who had private schools of their own. Now the so-called public schools themselves are globalized and privatized and helping fund a global middle/upper-class, entitled to whatever they have by test scores. Schooling was designed to end child labor but kids can take high-stakes tests for twelve years and still not get a job or a scholarship. Many have taken on debt trying to get a decent job. And debt levels record the amount of transfer:
Paul Krugman’s Economic Blinders – By Michael Hudson | Steve Keen's Debtwatch: "Blindness to the debt issue results in especial nonsense when applied to analysis of why the U.S. economy has lost its export competitiveness. How on earth can American industry be expected to compete when employees must pay about 40 percent of their wages on debt-leveraged housing, about 10 percent more on student loans, credit cards and other bank debt, 15 percent on FICA, and about 10 to 15 percent more in income and sales taxes? Between 75 and 80 percent of the wage payment is absorbed by the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector even before employees can start buying goods and services! No wonder the economy is shrinking, sales are falling off, and new investment and hiring have followed suit.
Globalization and the growth of corporate power has been a long time coming.
The Demise of Higher Education in the United States « unsettling economics:
"The response to the falling rate of profit also played a role in changing education. Tax reduction had the attraction of partially restoring profits, but it also had an important effect on education. Growing budget deficits would ramp up pressure to privatize what had been previously public responsibilities. By largely defunding education, universities became increasingly dependent on corporate money. Administrators became cautious about allowing expression of ideas that might seem upsetting to business. These factors took an enormous toll on higher education."
