The Chinese Student Crisis
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters recommend it in college-ranking and higher-ed threads as an explanation of why rankings are a hustle for foreign student revenue.
What it is
PolyMatter examines how universities, especially in the West, depend on foreign and Chinese student tuition and how rankings and incentives distort institutions around that money.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2022 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec acidbaseextract · 2022-03 · on “I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears”
Polymatter recently had a great video on the way the college ranking system is a hustle for foreign student money, and just how heavily it distorts colleges incentives: [this video]
Recommends dnissley · 2022-07 · on “U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings”
Polymatter did a great episode on the pressures that create outcomes like this in regards to rankings: [this video]
Cites TheLoafOfBread · 2022-10 · on “NYU organic chemistry professor terminated for tough grading”
The "how good is university" is based on some arbitrary metric, which does not tell anything to the student, but works on foreign students see PolyMatter The Chinese Student Crisis - [this video] It has even lower value for Europeans, because even if some university in Paris would be THE BEST in the world, it still will have only a national character. For example some guy from Poland is not going to study there, simply because when you are 20 years old, then you can barely speak English on A2, but at that case, to actually understand and learn, you would need to speak French on B2 (of course, we can find rare exceptions). So in the end you are choosing your school from less than dozen national un