Foreign Born TAs
Pure Pedantry has a nice overview of a George Borjas paper entitled "Foreign-Born Teaching Assistants and the Academic Performance of Undergraduates". Borjas, a Harvard economist, investigated the effects of having a foreign-born TA vs a native TA on undergraduates' subsequent academic performance. Students with foreign born TA's fared worse than those with native born TA's (by 0.2 on the usual 4 point grading scale with F=0, A=4). More interestingly, when he broke out the undergraduates' citizenship, he found that the native born undergraduates were the ones whose grades suffered when the TA was foreign born, while the foreign born undergraduates did not. The summary at Pure Pedantry is pretty good and worth reading in full.
Borjas is a smart guy, and the study looks to be well analyzed, but he's looking at a very small data set (3 years worth of undergraduates in an introductory econ sequence at one university), so it may not generalize.
(Borjas, who is an immigrant to the US himself, has a fairly extensive body of work casting doubt on the benefits of immigration to the US, particularly in academia. There was a good profile of him in the NY Times Magazine a couple of years ago http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/magazine/09IMM.html. Whether or not you agree with him, he's worth paying attention to.)
One key point from the article:
The evidence indicates that foreign-born TA's do not worsen the scholastic achievement of undergraduates if they are better prepared than native-born TA's. It seems as if additional class preparation may resolve the teaching difficulties encountered by foreign-born TA's
I'd guess that the observed difference is largely due to differences in communication abilities between TAs for whom English is their first language and TA's for whom it is not. It's promising that better preparation appears to cancel out the effect. The take away for me is that it's important to prepare TA's to teach, regardless of their country of origin (there are plenty of terrible American TA's, I can assure you). Universities benefit considerably from having foreign graduate students - they get to tap a huge pool of incredibly bright people to help with research. It's only fair that their undergraduates share in the benefits.
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on Tue, Jul 29, 03:07AM
My personal experience with foreign TAs was that some were good and some were terrible. Largely due to language barriers making the bad foreign TAs terrible instead of just bad. I remember going to one TA and I couldn't understand a word he said. A half an hour later I still couldn't understand hiim. Obviously visiting him wasn't much use.
On the larger topic of recruiting foreign students I'd say that it only makes sense to bring in the best and the brightest but a lot of the foreign students I met while pursuing my bachelors and masters (across 4 universities) were no better/smarter than average native students. I don't see the point in recruiting foreign students who aren't any smarter than the natives. The only benefit from this is for corporations that use foreign engineers to supress salaries. However, there are long term consequences (engineering students and professionals returning to their home country with proprietary knowledge) that will only get more acute as the economic conditions in India and China improve. We should be recruiting more natives rather than spending time and money on recruiting the average engineer from other countries. This would cause our corps some short term pain but I think it will be healthier for the US in the long term.
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