Please note this article is from 2012. I feel like the HN headline should be edited to reflect this.
40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
111–120 of 310 posts
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#112Fwiw 10 years ago I was organizing weekly dance parties in a college town. 80% of our attendance was foreign students. Nightly I would have kids from all over the world profusiosly thanking me. The bulk of the complements were in one way another "thank you so much for putting this on I feel like I'm home. I don't get American culture but I get this." 10 years later I still have people coming up to me randomly thankin…
Why do you say that the greek system was hostile to foreign students, more so than the regular social experience of college?
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#113I can't generalize for every school, or everyone at every school. I attended an engineering program at one of the top 5 schools by total international student population. Honestly, international students are cliquey. Many of them that I talk to openly admit to cheating on their english proficiency exams universities require you to take before you can attend. Meshing with local students is nearly impossible if you don…
>international students are cliquey
I've noticed this at my college firsthand; I see groups or pairs of Chinese students speaking solely Chinese. Speaking in their native language isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly makes them less approachable.
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#114It seems obvious that a huge (and hard to solve) reason for this is simply language! There are many levels of language proficiency: Level 1: Can read and write it at your own pace Level 2: Can comfortably converse in a professional setting (little slang or cultural knowledge needed) Level 3: Can comfortably converse in a social setting (slang, faster speech, less clarification) Level 4: Can do all of the above passiv…
It's the cultural proficiency that gets you. By now I have probably spent 1000 hours learning (as part of a formal process), reading, listening, writing and speaking English. Probably a lot more, but let's go with that estimate. The actual language learning part was probably 20%, the rest was acquiring cultural references. I'm trying to do the same for French, where I'm probably around level 2 or 3, and damn, I had f…
> the rest was acquiring cultural references.
Exactly as I was reading this sentence I heard someone use the idiom in English, "You're in the home stretch". A bit of a comical coincidence.
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#115[deleted]
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#116It seems obvious that a huge (and hard to solve) reason for this is simply language! There are many levels of language proficiency: Level 1: Can read and write it at your own pace Level 2: Can comfortably converse in a professional setting (little slang or cultural knowledge needed) Level 3: Can comfortably converse in a social setting (slang, faster speech, less clarification) Level 4: Can do all of the above passiv…
I don't think that holds, the same happens with Erasmus students in europe (~40% don't make local friends).
https://thepienews.com/news/erasmus-students-local-friends-e...
And they mostly DO know english and the local language (in fact that's a common reason to do it).
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#117It seems obvious that a huge (and hard to solve) reason for this is simply language! There are many levels of language proficiency: Level 1: Can read and write it at your own pace Level 2: Can comfortably converse in a professional setting (little slang or cultural knowledge needed) Level 3: Can comfortably converse in a social setting (slang, faster speech, less clarification) Level 4: Can do all of the above passiv…
Language is not the reason however why these foreign students wouldnt spend energy to learn the language better before studying abroad.
There's only so much you can learn from books and TV shows. One might have Shakespeare's vocabulary and mastered the intricacies of grammar, but there's no substitute for prolonged interaction with native speakers in achieving (near-)native proficiency in a language. Studying abroad is one of, if not the easiest way to get there.
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#118Just an anecdote from a medium sized German town:
We had two big bunches of foreign students, Chinese and US Americans. Americans organized a lot of parties, the Chinese were hard to engage with. We had a big international community (language exchange regular meetings, parties, movies, BBQs, etc.) But the general thing from the Chinese group was what seemed like shyness. Even when one managed to get them to join, they tended to leave early and barely interact (not for a lack of trying). There were exceptions of course, and I'm currently subletting my apartment (while in another country) to two Chinese students, one of whom turned out to be very talkative once he opened up. But for the majority I met it's really hard to get them to get them to open up. There is some cultural barrier that's very hard to break.
Of course this might be the same for other nationalities, but as those usually arrived here alone, they didn't have a group of countrymen to fall back to and I couldn't tell.
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#119People should know the Quartz headline is wrong. Follow the source link and you find that 40% have no close American friends, which is different from "friends on campus". I checked the source looking for a baseline (how many domestic students have no close friends) and discovered that it was specifically about international students making friends with Americans. > "Nearly 40 percent of the survey respondents had no…
Yeah, that's a totally different statement, with utterly different implications. To be honest, I'm impressed that 60% do have American friends... that's a pretty solid majority.
The data is highly distorted by a large fraction of foreign students being Canadians. "Hey guys lets watch hockey tonight" and a fondness for maple syrup in the cafeteria isn't a major cultural road bump, compared to say a dude fresh out of Saudi Arabia who barely speaks English.
Also the study carefully avoids discussing the stats for the Americans so there's no useful comparison (intentionally?). Is that the same ratio? I wouldn't be shocked. I took some weekend/night classes and those folks are samurai with lives outside class and barely enough time for assignments and homework and existing social relationships, so in those classes I would not be surprised to see 90%-plus of students having no student friends at all. When I was finishing up my degree a couple decades ago I had a wife and kids and a house and a full time job and zero interest in going to a kegger with some kids almost young enough to be my own kids, and after a full days work and a four hour lab and having to go to work early the next morning there's no way I could stay awake for a kegger anyway.
I also took some specialty classes at a tech college and their students have nothing at all to do with each other socially as near as I can tell. A nineteen year old kid living in moms basement, a 40 year old retired disabled army vet living in a house, and a 30 year old single mom working three jobs and living in an apartment walk into a bar together sounds like the start of a joke but it was pretty accurate description of tech school. Socializing with classmates seems to be a purely 18-22 residential/dorm/greek thing. And thats still a lot of kids... but gotta be realistic, its maybe only 3/4 of total students, maybe even less.
I am so old that I know that inserting a 21 year old legal drinking age in the middle of the prime college socializing years of 18-22 must have quite an effect. That must be very weird for foreign kids from countries without drinking age hangups. What I have had a beer with my pizza for two years now back home what do you mean that I go to jail? What I am here in your country illegally and everyone thinks thats great and its illegal to kick me out but I want un cerveza after class and they act like I am felon? Crazy americans... crazy americans.
Re: 40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus
#120When I was in school, international students had a week prior to orientation with their own orientation. They formed friend groups from this orientation, so it's not too surprising that they would stick to those friend groups rather than then branching out to the people they have less in common with the following weeks.
Yep. Through the orientation they are also introduced to organizations on campus that provide outings and other social activities specifically just for these people who happen to have nothing much in common besides being international students. It's kind of a weird idea, honestly: oh you're from Belarus, you're from Indonesia, and you're from Peru? Here are a bunch of activities you can all participate in for free or cheap, that are ostensibly mostly about exposing you to the local culture & attractions, but without having to interact with local students or other local people.
Further, students from some countries have the option of a critical mass of their compatriots to hang out with, which I'm sure is a tempting comfort to rely on. >30% and >15% of international students are from China and India respectively: http://www.iie.org/Services/Project-Atlas/United-States/Inte...