Regarding Clinton Collins’ March column [“Who are you calling an ‘underperformer’?”]: You don’t have to go to Silicon Valley to find this point of view about U.S.-born Caucasian students. You can find it here at the U of M. I am a research faculty member in the Division of Biostatistics, School of Public Health. For fifteen years now, a substantial majority of our students have been from mainland China. The same is true of every biostatistics and statistics program in North America. I know of no instances in which a biostat or stat student from mainland China has returned after graduating, so North American junior faculty are now also mostly Chinese. With our foreign students from other countries, this means our native-born U.S. students are a distinct minority. Now, I think this is great. First, our admissions are not competitive, so our foreign students aren’t displacing anybody, and plenty of biostat jobs go begging, so they don’t take jobs from anybody. Second, because they stay here after they graduate, China is essentially exporting its best technical talent to the U.S. Personally, I like mixing with foreign students and I’ve gradually become more and more interested in Chinese culture, to the point where I’m studying Mandarin at the U, playing in the Minnesota Chinese Music Ensemble, and marrying a woman from Taiwan. However, there is some sentiment that our Chinese students are of higher caliber than our native-born students. A U.S. citizen with an M.S. in Biostatistics foregoes a lot of income in the four or five years it takes to get a Ph.D. Also, ours is not a first-tier biostatistics program, so the better native-born students tend to go to, say, Harvard or Johns Hopkins. Therefore, we need to cut our native-born students some extra slack–exactly the attitude Mr. Collins found in Silicon Valley high schools. My own experience supervising M.S. and Ph.D. theses is not consistent with this argument, and this view is by no means universally held. But it’s there.
James S. Hodges,
Minneapolis
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