What does the United States get out of this deal?
I'm against this move overall primarily because of the espionage reports and my general attitude of wanting foreigners to fuck off, but there are a few things to consider. Hopefully trump is aware of them.
In short: The general narrative pushed on /pol/ and other right wing places that this is chinese students getting trained on america's dime in ultra advanced high tech knowledge to then go home and use that knowledge turn china into a hyperpower with brain-smartness and destroy us is abusrd for several reasons.
A:
The vast majority of chinese undergrad students are spoiled rich kids who pay a
massive markup to come here, don't even bother pretending to do the work (most can't even speak english) and are given good grades basically due to being bribed from the parents and memorizing answer keys and cheating.
Cheating is so worked into the chinese dna that they have to make their own students do shit like this:
As far as what they
actually learn talk to any of your friends who spent a semester in europe to figure out what this is like, they get less "education" than you get in 11th grade no exaggeration.
Even when they "major" in something like engineering or sciences and get all those impressive asian grades, they don't learn a damn thing, hell even most native undergrads don't learn that much from these classes that you can't learn online these days. So they're essentially dumping money into the US economy in exchange for bragging rights back home.
B: All that aside, most modern universities are worthless at the undergrad level anyways. I went to a top 50 university in 2010 and even back then the actual worthwhile classes I had could have been condensed into one year. Worthless geneds, outdated classes, and apathetic teachers are extremely common, i can't name one single thing i learned from about 60% of my classes. I imagine this problem has only gotten worse.
C: They get a different perspective on life which the CCP hates. The efficiency of this has been up for debate in recent years, it's not like they become flag waving Americans who are ready to stab the CCP in the back. But the myth pushed on /pol/ in recent years that they're actually horrified by the inefeciency and niggers ruining the streets and only become more pro china, desperate to go home and work in slave conditions to defeat capitalism, is equally bullshit. There is a huge problem of chinese students not wanting to go home after tasting life.
D: It's bad optics for china, almost an admission that they still depend on the US for education because their own system sucks and is just a massive cheating scheme. That's a bit of a reach but it's something i guess.
The real problem is the spies and that's only an issue at the graduate level which comprise a small % of the students and would be easier to keep hold of. Again there's no "fact" our undergrad programs teach that you can't find on wikipedia and most of the teachers aren't that good so it's not like we're giving away our intellectual power.
If this move came with an asterisk that said
"all foreign graduate students will be heavily monitored and if any of them even glance at something classified they will be promptly shot in the face" i would honestly be all for it. Community colleges, trade school, and company funded programs give better
actual skills than colleges do now even though the prestige aspect hasn't caught up (it will in time).
In short: I have my problems with this, but the fact is college degrees are worthless, the chinks are basically just paying the US loads of cash for bragging rights back home. Let them have it.
