• This forum contains old posts that have been closed. New threads and replies may not be made here. Please navigate to the relevant forum to create a new thread or post a reply.
  • Welcome to Tamil Brahmins forums.

    You are currently viewing our boards as a guest which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our Free Brahmin Community you will have access to post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), respond to polls, upload content and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free so please, join our community today!

    If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact contact us.

'University of Manavallu': In Silicon Valley, a dodgy Chinese-Telugu alliance

Status
Not open for further replies.

prasad1

Active member
Silicon Valley University (SVU) and Northwestern Polytechnic (NWP), two Bay Area schools that are currently in the news in India because several students who came here to study have been deported, and others have not been allowed to board flights from Hyderabad on their way here. Two days of moseying around these sketchy colleges yielded the following observation: saturated with students from Andhra and Telangana, they well may be dubbed Sri Venkateshwara University and Nalgonda-Warangal Polytechnic.

Here's the inside - and outside - scoop about SVU and NWP. The two institutions, run by Chinese-American principals, appear to cater almost exclusively to Indian applicants; students who spoke to this correspondent said more than 70 per cent of the nearly 5,000 enrolled in two schools are from these two states, and clearly and audibly, Telugu is the lingua franca on campus.

They might as well call it University of Manavallu ("our people" in Telugu).

The institutions also don't bear any comparison to UIUC, USC, and NJIT, which, jokes about Indian-Chinese overflow aside, are well-established and highly-regarded schools.


Officials from two institutions under the lens made themselves scarce when this correspondent went visiting on Monday and Tuesday, but its not difficult to get an idea of the real picture talking to students, scores of whom were hanging around NWP campus in Fremont with worried expressions, even though the semester had ended. They said they were anxious about news reports in India that the schools were under the scanner and some students arriving in San Francisco to study here have been deported, and they were eager for some clarity on the situation.

The schools have issued statements denying they have been blacklisted and maintain they are legitimate institutions. Technically, they are correct. They have a campus, a faculty, classroom instruction, and valid accreditation. But they are sketchy in the extreme and just about make the cut in terms of legitimacy.

Even a cursory tour of the institutions and interviews with students points to a massive academic rip-off where getting a good education and earning a degree is secondary to immigration. These are basically education warehouses, diploma mills.

Because this "business model" affects the overall sterling reputation of students from India, thousands of who gain admission to America's greatest institutions and best universities, the story needs to be told in some detail.

Over the past decade or so, there has been an explosion of engineering colleges in the (undivided) Andhra Pradesh. By some accounts, the state has more than 700 engineering colleges, with more than 300,000 seats, a third of which are unfilled because supply exceeds demand. The thousands of students graduating from these dodgy colleges are poorly skilled to even land a job in India.

But the United States is an attractive destination because a few Chinese-American entrepreneurs have engineered a business model to take advantage of this massive overflow of "engineers" who want to migrate to America, "higher education" being just an excuse. So for $20,000 (close to Rs 14 lakhs at current exchange rates), institutions such as SVU and NWP lower the bar for students to gain admission to their courses (sans any rigor with regards to qualifying tests such as GRE or GMAT), facilitate their post-degree job search, and mainstream them in the US.

Once in the US., they are slumming it.

Some students admitted to this correspondent that they live on $ 500 a month (aside from the $ 20,000 tuition fee for the entire course), shacking up five and six to an apartment. There were mixed reviews about the faculty, and according to some, classes are held only two or three days a week. Some of them work illegally they said, although they are not allowed to do off-campus work on a student visa till they get Curricular Practical Training or Optional Practical Training.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...nese-Telugu-alliance/articleshow/50295648.cms
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest ads

Back
Top