Student Union
- By Esha Sarai
Teenage Girls Find Confidence Sailing the Open Sea
Pink from the sun, unshowered and barefoot, the 17 teenage girls scarfed down fried chicken sandwiches after seven days at sea.
“I used to be a very anxious person, and I would let my anxieties hold me back from doing stuff that I felt I need to do,” Waverly Kremer, a high school junior, told VOA as she waited to board the Liberty Clipper.
And that was the point of the voyage arranged by their small private school in Charleston, South Carolina: Return confidence to girls at a time in life when it traditionally starts to wane.
WATCH: Sailing trip
The Offshore Leadership Program at Ashley Hall School aims to boost the confidence of girls aged 15 to 17 — a time when studies show girls can lose up to 30 percent of their confidence.
Roscoe Davis, the classics teacher at Ashley Hall, created the yearlong program 10 years ago. The boat trip is what he calls the “capstone” of the program, which involves identifying failures in leadership in reality television shows, and reading Greek philosophy that empowers women.
Kremer said she was excited and nervous at the beginning of the trip. Like most of the girls, she had no sailing experience.
“My biggest fear is just kind of being away from home so far away 20 miles offshore,” Maura Mooney, a junior, said. “I guess just I miss my dog. I miss my family, but I’m really excited to get to know everyone. So hopefully, I won’t get too homesick.”
“I like to talk about the Oracle of Delphi, whose injunction was, ‘Know thyself,'" Davis told VOA. He explained that the girls get to know themselves on a deeper level when faced with the challenges of being on the boat.
“They identify their own weaknesses that they think are holding them back from the persons they need to be, the leaders they need to be, and they work on those weaknesses,” he said.
When the girls docked in Charleston — having shed their duck boots after realizing bare feet were more practical — they said the trip had been more challenging and rewarding than they had anticipated.
“I learned — beside the terminology — how to be confident in things that I do outside of my comfort zone,” Celia Smith, a senior, told VOA. “Once I committed myself to really embracing everything it had to offer, I knew I was going to get the most out of this experience.” She showed her parents around the stern, explaining the steering and navigation systems.
The girls described cold weather, long nights and physical challenges.
“I’m over here by myself pulling at one of these lines, and toward the end, it was absolutely my full body weight to pull this thing down,” Waverly said, describing what she called her toughest challenge on the ship — raising one of the sails.
“It was cold and windy, like really hard manual labor,” she said.
The other challenge the girls said they faced was the vast amount of downtime — being disconnected and feeling so far from everything they knew.
“For so much of it, we were literally just in the ocean, and the ocean looks the same a lot of the places where you are,” Smith said. “There were a lot of times when we were not feeling so great because the waves were so rough. Or because it just looked like the sun wasn’t going to come out that day. But in the end, we’d make it through, and we’d see how far we had gone. And that was just so rewarding,” she said.
And though the main lesson was introspective, some of the girls fell in love with the sailing itself.
Mooney “never ever” thought she would want to sail again after satisfying the requirements of the academic program.
Now, she’s considering taking a gap year before college to spend more time at sea.
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- By VOA News
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- By Tracy Liu
Economics, tensions blamed for Chinese students shifting from US to Australia, Britain
U.S. universities are welcoming international students as the academic year begins. But while the total number of foreign students is steadily growing, the top sending country, China, is showing signs of leveling out or shrinking.
Industry analysts say the negative trend is mainly due to higher costs amid China’s struggling economy, with a growing number of students going to less expensive countries like Australia and Britain, and tense ties between Washington and Beijing.
The number of foreign students studying in the U.S. in 2022-23 passed 1 million for the first time since the COVID pandemic, said Open Doors, an information resource on international students and scholars.
While the U.S. saw a nearly 12% total increase year-on-year for that period, the number of international students from China, its top source, fell by 0.2% to 289,526.
That’s 600 fewer students than the 2021-22 academic year, when their numbers dropped by nearly 9%. The COVID pandemic saw Chinese student numbers drop in 2020-21 by nearly 15%, in line with the world total drop.
While it’s not yet clear if the drop is a leveling out or a fluctuating decline, analysts say China’s struggling economy and the high cost of studying in the U.S. are the main reasons for the fall in student numbers.
Vincent Chen, a Chinese study abroad consultant based in Shanghai, said although most of his clients are still interested in studying in the U.S., there is a clear downward trend, while applicants for Anglophone universities in Australia and Britain have been increasing.
"If you just want to go abroad, a one-year master's degree in the U.K. is much cheaper,” Chen said. “Many people can't afford to study in the U.S., so they have to settle for the next best thing."
Data from the nonprofit U.S. group College Board Research shows that in the 2023-24 academic year, the average tuition and fees for a U.S. private college four-year education increased 4% to $41,540 compared with the previous academic year.
The British Council said three to four years of undergraduate tuition in Britain starts as low as $15,000.
The number of Chinese students in Britain was 154,260 in 2022-23, according to the U.K. Higher Education Statistics Agency, HESA, up from 121,145 in the 2018/19 academic year.
Australia’s Home Affairs office said in the 2023-24 program year, China was the top source foreign country for new student visa grants at 43,389, up slightly (1.5%) from the previous year.
Chen said Chinese state media's negative portrayal of the United States and concerns about discrimination have also contributed to the shift.
Bruce Zhang, a Chinese citizen who received his master's degree in Europe after studying in China, told VOA Mandarin he had such an incident occur to him after he was admitted to a U.S. university’s Ph.D. program.
When he entered Boston's Logan International Airport last year, Zhang said customs officers questioned him for more than an hour about his research, and if it had any links to the military, and took his computer and mobile phone for examination.
"Fortunately, I had heard that U.S. customs might be stringent in inspecting Chinese students, so I had relatively few study-related data and documents on my personal computer," he said.
Zhang was allowed to enter the U.S. for his studies in materials science, but the questioning left him so rattled that he has encouraged other Chinese to study elsewhere.
Cui Kai, a study abroad consultant in Massachusetts told VOA Mandarin that experiences like Zhang’s or worse happen for a reason.
"Students who were questioned or their visas were revoked at the customs are usually those who completed their undergraduate studies in China and come to the U.S. for a master's or doctoral degree in a sensitive major," said Cui.
Former President Donald Trump signed Proclamation 10043 in June 2020, prohibiting visas for any Chinese student who “has been employed by, studied at, or conducted research at or on behalf of, an entity in the PRC that implements or supports the PRC's “military-civil fusion strategy.”
The U.S. says China has been using students and scholars to gain access to key technology and, under Proclamation 10043, revoked more than 1,000 visas issued to Chinese nationals and has denied thousands more.
Critics say the policy is costly to the U.S. and is encouraging Chinese students to look to European and other universities.
Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
- By VOA News
Duolingo report details the reality of Gen Z international students
A report by Duolingo takes a look at the experiences of Gen Z international students studying in the U.S., Australia and the U.K, The Pie reports.
The report, the site says, debunks "characterizations of them as 'tech-obsessed, attention-deficit and self-centered'" and highlights "their emerging role in shaping global politics and economics."
Read the full story here. (August 2024)
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School with the lowest costs for international students
U.S. News & World Report crunched the numbers and came up with a list of 20 U.S. colleges and universities with annual total costs at or below $20,184. Check out these best bargains for international students here. (August 2024)
- By VOA News
How to make the most of schools' international student services
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U.S. News & World Report takes a look at them and details how to best use them. Read the article here. (June 2024)
