Overrepresentation of foreign-bred students in U.S. specialties

January 21, 2004

Yesterday, psychometrician Kimberly Swygert gave us "The inside scoop of Harcourt Assessment." In her post, she suggested that readers note "the names of the four doctoral fellows who spent the summer at Harcourt in 2003, learning the ropes." We did, and they are Saengla Chaimongkol (Florida State University), Pei-Hua Chen (University of Texas at Austin), Shuhong Li (University of Massachusetts), and Yungchen Hsu (University of Arizona).

In an online essay titled Johnny Can't Add--But Suresh Venktasubramanian Can, Fred Reed addresses the success of foreign students (and the children of new Americans). Here are a few choice samples:

Maybe we need to wake up.

The other day I went to the Web site of Bell Labs, one of the country's premier research outfits. I clicked at random on a research project, Programmable Networks for Tomorrow. The scientists working on the project were Gisli Hjalmstysson, Nikos Anerousis, Pawan Goyal, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Jennifer Rexford, Kobus Van der Merwe, and Sneha Kumar Kasera.

Clicking again at random, this time on the Information Visualization Research Group, the research team turned out to be John Ellson, Emden Gansner, John Mocenigo, Stephen North, Jeffery Korn, Eleftherios Koutsofios, Bin Wei, Shankar Krishnan, and Suresh Venktasubramanian.

Here is a pattern I've noticed in countless organizations at the high end of the research spectrum. In the personnel lists, certain groups are phenomenally over-represented with respect to their appearance in the general American population: Chinese, Koreans, Indians, and, though it doesn't show in the above lists, Jews. What the precise statistical breakdown across the world of American research might be, I don't know. An awful lot of personnel lists look like the foregoing.

Overrepresentation can mean one of two things: American companies and universities are discriminating against Americans, or foreign-bred students are better prepared than we are.

Why are members of these very small groups doing so much of the important research for the United States? That's easy. They're smart, they go into the sciences, and they work hard. Potatoes are more mysterious. It's not affirmative action. They produce. The qualifications of these students can easily be checked. They have them. The question is not whether these groups perform, or why, but why the rest of us no longer do. What has happened? It is not an easy question, but a lot of it, I think, is the deliberate enstupidation of American education.

We tend to agree with Fred, although we take issue with "deliberate." We don't believe it is a conspiracy by the forces of evil for evil, we believe it is the natural consequence of taking Romantic notions to their logical extremes, under the banner of Progressive Education. (However, if one were to engineer a plan to gut the educational standards in America, it could not have been done more brilliantly than has been accomplished by the Progressives. So maybe Fred has a point.)

It appears that a few groups are keeping their standards up and the rest of us are drowning our children in self-indulgent social engineering, political correctness, and feel-good substitutes for learning.

Progressive reforms have been designed for the good of the child, and yet the reformers seem blind to their actual consequences.

It's not them. It's us. I've heard the phrase, "the Asian challenge to the West." I don't think so. When Sally Chen gets a doctorate in biochemistry, she's not challenging America. She's getting a doctorate in biochemistry. Those who study have no reason to apologize to those who don't.

Kimberly Swygert says "America is a mecca for would-be psychometricians from around the world (the Netherlands is a close second)."

We'd opine that America is a mecca for any technical specialty. Legions of students cross the oceans to study at our universities, then either return home or stay here. Either way, someone in the world's rolling up their sleeves in the primary and secondary grades.

Let's roll up ours.