08-05-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
A Chinese Student Learns the American Way
Em. Prof. M. Mark Hoffer asks, 'Why Do We Teach Foreign STEM Students?' (Letters, May 5). He writes that the reason we host foreign students isn't to 'abduct them' but 'to teach and train them so that they can return to their country and share what they've learned.'
For decades our universities have endorsed the notion that taking so many Chinese students was good for this reason—that they could return to their homeland to share the democratic values they picked up in the U.S. A few years ago, I asked one of my Chinese graduate students about this idea. In response, he told me the story of his girlfriend at our university who was the child of communist elites in China—an increasingly common thing in recent years. She caught a minor illness and went to our student health center. She checked in at the desk and took her place in line where she waited over an hour to be seen by the medical staff. When she returned, she told her boyfriend: 'This American system is awful! If I had been in China, I would have told the desk who I was and walked right to the front of the line.'
