Community colleges cash in on foreign students

Phillip Matier,Andrew Ross
San Francisco Chronicle July 12, 2010 04:00 AM Copyright San Francisco Chronicle. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Monday, July 12, 2010

Homegrown students may have trouble getting into classes, but community colleges in California are having no problem finding room for foreign students who pay top dollar to come here - and provide millions of dollars for the schools.

Take the Peralta Community College District in the East Bay, which recruits an estimated 800 to 1,000 students from Europe, Asia, Africa and Israel each year, according to a new Alameda County civil grand jury report.

Foreign students pay $5,332 apiece for 12 units per year - compared with $624 for students who come from in state. The foreign aid translated to more than $4 million this year for Peralta.

"It's not just Peralta - the jury found that everybody does it. It's a real moneymaker," said Jeff Stark, the Alameda County prosecutor who advised the investigation into the program's costs.

Peralta even has its own foreign recruitment office - including a full-time director who hunts the globe for students and a staff of eight full-time and 14 part-time workers.

The grand jury questioned whether for-profit students are, in effect, buying up class seats that could go to locals. But Peralta spokesman Jeff Heyman called the influx "good news on every front."

"It generates revenue and makes it a more interesting place for community college students to have international students," Heyman said. "We live in a global world."

Interesting to note that the district's statistics show that only 14 percent of the foreign recruits actually get an associate degree within two years.

What happens to the rest?

"We haven't got a clue where they go," Stark said. "As far as we could determine, the community college is making no effort to track them once they get here."


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