Students on F-1 visas don’t even know how to do coding.
AB Wire
Why should students enroll for a graduate degree program in computer science if they cannot even do coding? And perhaps, more importantly, how they did they get admission to such a course? Those are perhaps the two questions that dogged administrators at Western Kentucky University, who have now publicly acknowledged that an admissions recruitment drive in India has resulted in some students who are not fit to do the course to be admitted, and they are asking 1/3rdof students – or at least 40 – from that recruitment drive to leave the program after the first semester.
The university used international recruiters to find the students, compensating the services based on how many students they enrolled. The outcome, which will force the students to return to India or find placement in another university or program in the United States, illustrates a pitfall of using such recruiters, reported The New York Times.
James Gary, the chairman of Western Kentucky’s computer science program, saidon Monday that “almost 40” of the students did not meet the requirements of their admissions, even though they were offered remedial help by the university.
While some students will be allowed to remain, Gary said, at least 25 of the nearly 60 students in the program must leave.
Permitting the students to continue in the program would “be throwing good money after bad,” he said, because they were unable to write computer programs, a necessary part of the curriculum and a skill that United States schools teach to undergraduates, the Times report said.
“If they come out of here without the ability to write programs, that’s embarrassing to my department,” Mr. Gary said, explaining why the university could not permit them to continue.
The chairman of the Indian Student Association at Western Kentucky University, Aditya Sharma, expressed concern for the students.
“I definitely feel badly for these students,” said Sharma, a graduate student in public health administration. “They’ve come so far. They’ve invested money into it.”
But he said some of the students had adopted what he called a “casual” approach to their studies. “They could not meet their G.P.A., so the university had to take this decision,” Sharma said.
Some of the students are seeking placement in graduate schools in Missouri and Tennessee, Sharma said. Others are considering applying to less rigorous programs than the one at Western Kentucky, in Bowling Green, Ky.
Those who are not able to find placement will be forced to leave the country under the terms of their F-1 visa.
The students had been admitted in January after a recruitment campaign in India last summer and fall. Recruiters in India had run advertisements offering “spot admission” to the university, as well as tuition discounts.