Student Union
Students from Wuhan Traveling Globally for Holidays
International students remaining in Wuhan, China — where the government has issued a lockdown to avoid the spread of the deadly coronavirus — report being provided surgical masks and being asked to stay indoors.
“As I write this message, the school is on lockdown as the school authorities are putting in place measures to protect the remaining foreign students on campus,” emailed an international student who identified himself as @Vince Vela Nova from Ghana who is doing a post-graduate degree program in land resource management.“
There are just a handful of Chinese students around as most of them have gone back home to celebrate the Chinese New Year,” he wrote. “This morning the international office provided the students with surgical masks and entreated every one of us to stay indoors.”
Medical students from India training in Wuhan have been advised to stay home and away from their hospital workplace, according to the Hindustan Times. While about 600-700 medical students from India study in Wuhan, most have returned home for the winter-New Year’s break from school.
A 45-year-old teacher from India working at an international school has been admitted to the hospital with flu-like symptoms, reported the Telegraph.
The outflow of international students to points around the globe for winter break has caused rapid anxiety.
"My niece is stuck in Wuhan China, with airport closed she can't travel to India," tweeted @harinatha with a video showing a van blocking a roadway. "Please get Indian citizens safely back to India till this virus crisis is over? Few more Indian students, not knowing what to do! University Roads blocked, Please help!!"
"There are Maldivian students in Wuhan [who] need immediate attention as the virus is spreading so fast,” tweeted @Anjumaa on Monday, Jan. 20, imploring the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Maldives to “take an action.”
Friends in Wuhan "are scared of how fast the virus has spread & they also fear it will mutate & affect students when they get back from the school break," tweeted Yarella Espinoza, an English professor in Osorno, Chile.
Wuhan is a university center in China, with more than 30 universities, and international students from around the world. In the U.S., Chinese students comprise more than 33% of the 1,095,299 international students studying there.
At the University of Illinois, which has more than 6,000 Chinese students among its nearly 14,000 international students, the health center has begun screening students who "come for care presenting with respiratory illness, with and without a travel history to areas with confirmed cases of coronavirus infections."
"All appropriate students will be masked and those of particular concern will be masked and then seen in an isolation room," according to Chanelle Thompson, the university's chief communications officer.
Neighboring University of Indiana hosts more than 10,000 international students, according to the Institute for International Education. Amber Denney, assistant direction of strategic communications at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), said the school is following Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and WHO guidelines.
"We are evaluating the situation," Denney said. "No students are scheduled to travel to that area but we have no clear assessment of students who have traveled and been to that region." Health officials are at the ready, she said, to respond to anyone with flu-like respiratory symptoms.
Columbia University in New York City hosts nearly 16,000 international students — the fourth-largest population of international students in the U.S. — and issued an advisory to its community and says it is monitoring the situation.
Jennifer Stevens, Ph.D., and interim Associate Dean for the College of Visual and Performing Arts at James Madison University, said her school has postponed an exchange program.
"We just can't send them abroad in good faith at the moment," she told VOA. Emails and calls to other universities with large international and Chinese student populations were not returned.
WATCH: Father, daughter discuss plan for Chinese students to visit Virginia school
Panic over the potential spread of the virus reached suburban Washington, as residents and parents took issue with the Fairfax County Public School system's hosting a group of Chinese middle-school students.
Ping Song, whose daughter attends Longfellow, said in the video above that in light of the coronavirus outbreak in China, he and his wife decided he would pick their daughter up from school early.
He said people discuss the situation on WeChat every day and that he and his wife were were being cautious, just in case.
"Allowing 20-ish Chinese’s exchange students of Yichang, 214 miles from Wuhan-epic center or coronavirus outbreak to come to Longfellow MS this afternoon completely irresponsible! If anyone got the virus, it’ll be *on* you!" tweeted @FairfaxNova to the superintendent of schools in the county.
Writing on Saturday, Jan. 18, Weijia Cai (@cai_weijia) compared China's response to the coronavirus to the outbreak of the severe-acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus there in 2003.
"Comparing with the outbreak of SARS in 2003, when I was a graduate student for medical virology program in Wuhan University, China obtained great achievements in many fields of dealing with a novel virus. I believe my hometown will defeat this outbreak. Bless Wuhan!"
The CDC started a "public health entry screening" on Friday, Jan. 17, at San Francisco (SFO), New York (JFK), and Los Angeles (LAX) airports and said it will expand that to Atlanta (ATL) and Chicago (ORD) airports.
"This is a rapidly evolving situation," they wrote on their website.
The CDC has reported that cases of the virus have spread to Taiwan, Thailand, Japan and South Korea.
See all News Updates of the Day
US remains top choice for Indian students going abroad
About 69% of Indian students traveling abroad for their studies chose the United States, according to a Oxford International’s Student Global Mobility Index. Other popular choices were the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
Education Times reports the main influencers for deciding where to study abroad – for Indian students and others – were parents. (April 2024)
Malaysian official: Schools can’t turn away from global tensions
Zambry Abdul Kadir, Malaysia’s higher education minister, said protests spreading across universities in the United States show that schools can’t ignore political tensions.
Helen Packer, reporting in Times Higher Education, said the minister reminded educators that universities are key in the development of leaders, individuals and societies. (April 2024)
Social media breaks are difficult, but necessary
Between online classes, maintaining social connections and working on projects, college students can have a hard time disengaging from the demands of technology.
In Florida International University’s PantherNOW, Ariana Rodriguez offers strategies for taking a break from social media. (April 2024)
- By Melos Ambaye
Many master's degrees aren't worth the investment, research shows
Nearly half of master's degrees have a negative financial return, according to new research by the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, an economic research organization.
The study indicates that many graduate degree programs do not increase lifetime earnings enough to be worth it.
While 23% of bachelor’s degree programs yield a negative financial return on investment, 43% of two-year degrees and master’s degrees fail to deliver a return, according to the study by Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at FREOPP.
Cooper assessed the return on investment for 53,000 degree and certificate programs to determine whether a student’s lifetime earnings outweigh program costs and the risk of not completing their degree.
His findings show that a student’s field of study was the overriding indicator of return on investment at the undergraduate and graduate level.
Engineering, computer science and nursing bachelor’s degrees have high financial returns on investment, while programs in education, fine arts, psychology and English usually have low returns.
Graduate degrees in medicine and law tend to have strong payoffs. But a large share of master’s programs, including the MBA, frequently have low payoffs, according to Cooper.
Although workers with master’s degrees earn 16% more than those with only bachelor’s degrees, Cooper says the figure fails to account for students who had “higher preexisting earnings potential.”
“MBA students typically have high preexisting earnings potential, having often chosen high-ROI undergraduate majors such as finance and economics,” Cooper writes. “So the MBA adds little value on top of that.”
The study indicates that high starting salaries are predictors of high returns on investment. Degrees with starting salaries of $57,000 a year or more deliver the best lifetime returns.
But the return on investment of a degree can vary depending on the educational institution.
“Students interested in fields with low average pay can still find some schools that do well transforming those fields of study into high-paying careers,” Cooper writes.
The quality of an institution also matters, said William Tierney, professor emeritus of higher education at the University of Southern California.
“An MBA from Harvard is a likely ticket to a good job,” Tierney told VOA. “An MBA from the University of Phoenix, less so.”
But students pursue graduate programs for more than just financial reasons.
“Some degrees open up careers in fields that students may enjoy, such as in the performing arts,” Robert Kelchen, head of educational leadership at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, told VOA.
“Others can help gain access to social networks or simply help students learn about a topic that is of interest,” Kelchen added.
Cooper told VOA that it might make sense for students in degree programs with low returns on investment to switch majors if they can still graduate on time.
He found the worst outcome for a student’s return on investment is dropping out of college “because they must pay for one or more years’ tuition and spend time out of the labor force.”
Lawmakers who fund higher education have a responsibility in ensuring “higher education delivers on its promise of economic mobility,” Cooper said.
Nearly a third of federal funding, including Pell grants and student loans, pays for higher education programs that fail to provide students with a return on investment, according to the study.
Cooper’s view is that “some schools should shut down low-ROI programs and reallocate institutional resources to programs with a better return.”
“There's definitely this narrative out there that higher education is always worth it, and you should always try to get that extra degree because it will increase your earnings,” he told VOA. “That's reinforced by colleges who make lofty promises regarding their graduate degree programs' outcomes, which all too often fall short.”
Harvard students end protest as school agrees to discuss Gaza conflict
Protesters against the war between Israel and Hamas were voluntarily taking down their tents in Harvard Yard on Tuesday after university officials agreed to discuss their questions about the endowment, bringing a peaceful end to the kinds of demonstrations that were broken up by police on other campuses.
The student protest group Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine said in a statement that the encampment "outlasted its utility with respect to our demands." Meanwhile, Harvard University interim President Alan Garber agreed to pursue a meeting between protesters and university officials regarding the students' questions.
Students at many college campuses this spring set up similar encampments, calling for their schools to cut ties with Israel and businesses that support it.
The Israel-Hamas war began when Hamas and other militants stormed into southern Israel on October 7, killing some 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages. Palestinian militants still hold about 100 captives, and Israel's military has killed more than 35,000 people in Gaza, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, which doesn't distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Harvard said its president and the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Hopi Hoekstra, will meet with the protesters to discuss the conflict in the Middle East.
The protesters said they worked out an agreement to meet with university officials, including the Harvard Management Company, which oversees the world's largest academic endowment, valued at about $50 billion.
The protesters' statement said the students will set an agenda that includes discussions on disclosure, divestment, reinvestment and the creation of a Center for Palestine Studies. The students also said that Harvard has offered to retract suspensions of more than 20 students and student workers and back down on disciplinary measures faced by 60 more.
"Since its establishment three weeks ago, the encampment has both broadened and deepened Palestine solidarity organizing on campus," a spokesperson for the protesters said. "It has moved the needle on disclosure and divestment at Harvard."
