Studying in America: Pros and Cons

Shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev opened the door on America, more than 5,000 Russian undergraduate, graduate and exchange students went to the United States. Nearly all of them got there through their connections, and only a few distinguished themselves academically.

A little later, when the era of so-called New Russians set in, a defining factor in going to a U.S. university was being flush with money – by Russian standards. Today a higher education in the United States can cost up to several hundred thousand dollars, but this does little to discourage Russia’s rich.

He Who Pays Goes to the U.S.

According to Princeton University experts, at present there are 3,000 “self-supporting” undergraduates and graduates from Russia, and about 1,000 students from other CIS countries in America.

The cost of tuition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the most prestigious and expensive training establishment in the United States today (with an estimated 30 Russian students), is almost $35.000 a year.

Adding in the cost of housing, food, transport, and textbook, the total can be double that amount. As the course lasts for four to five years, Russians studying here need to have a very sound financial base to be able to complete their studies.

Incidentally, the other so-called top ten universities are not far behind: John Hopkins, $33,000 a year; Yale, 33,000; Harvard, $32,000; Georgetown, Washington, $32,000, etc.

All of these universities have Russian students, and experts believe that they are the main target of local head-hunters.

The fact is that by paying so much money for a course of training, parents secure not simple a promising career but also financial future for their children. A well-paid job will fully recoup tuition costs within three to four years after graduation. Any company in any part of the world will welcome a Harvard alumnus.

Looking for a job.

At first, Russian undergraduates at U.S. universities feel unhappy about what they see as oversimplified curricula with some of the material already covered in high school in Russia.

But the balance is soon redressed, and they have an opportunity to advance academically without any limit, while those with a good head on their shoulders can get a highly paid job.

The main attraction to a student from Russia is the prospect of a good job abroad. No Russia company can pay a recent university graduate $60,000 to $65,000 a year while in the United States and Europe this is standard practice. Still, the majority of Russians graduating from even the most prestigious of American universities do not stay in the United State but go home.

What is the outlook for them in Russia? Survey show that they mainly go to work for their parents’ companies or foreign companies operating in Russia.

This, however, does not apply to alumni of the top American universities. At the same time Russians whose parents are not very rich enroll in American universities that do not guarantee a job even to U.S. citizens.

Say, tuition at Maryland State University, a half hour’s drive from the U.S. capital, is a mere $13,000 a year. There are approximately 20 Russians at the university – mainly children of Russian World Bank employees, as well as of provincial businessmen from Lipetsk, Saratov, Kaliningrad, and even Nakhodka.

Incidentally, these students are not particularly concerned by the fact that they will have little chance of getting a decent, well-paid job with a degree from Maryland University. All of them are going to return home to get, under their parents’ protection, a cushy job in the sphere of international relations or business.

Exchange Programs Unproductive.

Student exchange programs – a widespread practice in the late Gorbachev era and early in the Yeltsin era – are virtually nonexistent today. Russia’s higher schools have no money for that, to say nothing about students themselves.

Moreover, there are very few of those wishing to do just one or two terms. Those who do come have difficulty getting a foothold in the United States, especially in the sphere of social sciences.

True, there are various advance training programs funded by the U.S. government: the MacArthur, Hurbert Humphrey, Muskie, Eleanor Roosevelt, and other programs. Only individual Russian undergraduate/graduate students and teachers get on such programs. But these people, by their own admission simply hope to make some money, not pursue any useful academic program.

It is certainly prestigious, and potentially beneficial, to get a degree in the United States. Especially if one plans to live and work abroad (preferably in North America, since there is some allergy to a U.S. diploma in Europe). But in Russia, someone with a degree from an American university is unlikely to automatically land a high-level job at Gasprom or LUKoil. Still, is not impossible, especially if their tuition in the States was paid for by people near the top in these companies.

Task 1

Read the text again and answer the following question about the details.

1. Who could go to a U.S. university in the Gorbachev era? Who can go there in the era of new Russians?

2. What are the most prestigious American universities?

3. What is the main attraction to a student from Russian? Why?

4. Why do the majority of Russian graduates not stay in the USA?

5. Do Russians study only in the top universities?

6. Do American universities guarantee a job to their graduates?

7. Who study at Maryland State University? Does the future trouble them?

8. What education program was very popular in the late Gorbachev – early Yeltsin era?

9. What other educational opportunities are there?

10. Who take this kind of advance courses? Why?

Task 2

1. Find words (phrases) in the text for the following definitions.

1) having plenty of money

2) guarantee a good job

3) get back expenses

4) study the material

5) make things equal again

6) future probabilities

7) make officially a member of a school

8) gain a stable position

9) continue with a program

10) pick up prestigious work

11) ex-students, former graduates

2. Use these words and phrases in your own sentences.

Task 3

Explain or express in another way.

1. At present there are 3,000 “self-supporting” undergraduates from Russia.

2. Russian students are the main target of local head-hunters.

3. At first, Russian undergraduates at U.S. universities feel unhappy about what they see as oversimplified curricula.

4. It is certainly prestigious and potentially beneficial to get a degree in the United States.

5. By paying so much money for a course of training, parents secure not simply a promising career but also financial future for their children.

Task 4

Render the following text into English

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Через образование – к общности человечества

Одаренные россияне могут учиться за рубежом бесплатно. В конце 50-x годов, вопреки «холодной войне», Курт Хан и его сторонники решили создать Unites World College (UWC) – Колледж объединенного мира для обучения по единым стандартам одаренных, вдохновленных идеями мира между народами, интернационализма и гуманизма юношей и девушек из различных стран. Первое учебное заведение в сети UWC открылось в 1962 году в старинном замке на западе Уэллса. С тех пор возникло еще девять аналогичных учебных заведений: в США, Канаде, Италия, Норвегии, Сингапуре, Венесуэлы, Свазиленде, Гонконге и Индии.

Всюду обучение проходит на английском языке, в течение двух лет, после чего получают диплом бакалавра и перед ними открывается дорога в лучшие вузы мира, в том числе такие, как Гарвард и Кембридж. Программа UWC предполагает не только всестороннее пополнение знаний студентов, но и гармоничное развитие личности: умственное, физическое, эстетическое и, в первую очередь, нравственное. В частности, студенты оказывают «шефскую помощь» нуждающимся в духе наших «тимуровцев», о которых писал Аркадий Гайдар. Выпускники колледжа из различных стран мира регулярно встречаются и на протяжении всей жизни поддерживают между собой теснейшие связи.

Что, пожалуй, особенно примечательно, так это то, что в UWC вообще нельзя поступить за деньги. Либо студентов направляют правительства из стран, которые и платят за их обучение (так поступают власти Швеции, Нидерландов и т.д.), либо их принимают по определенной для каждой страны квоте на обучение за счет самого заведения. (Спонсорами колледжей сети UWC в Италии и Канаде выступает правительство, в Норвегии – Красный Крест, в Индии – семья Махиндра и т.д.).

В России молодых людей направляет на обучение общественная организация – Национальный отборочный комитет совместно с Ассоциацией выпускников UWC. За последние шесть лет эта честь выпала 32 россиянам.

К участию в конкурсе принимаются юноши и девушки от 16 до 18 лет, окончившие 10 или 11 классов средней общеобразовательной школы. Наряду с академическими результатами, общей эрудицией и культурным уровнем отборочный комитет будет принимать во внимание желание молодых людей служить общественному благу, идеалам мира и гуманизма, толерантность, открытость к восприятию культур различных народов и наличие лидерских качеств. Знание английского языка желательно, но обязательным условием не является.

Helpful vocabulary

Unified (единый), inspire (вдохновлять), widen (всесторонний), patronize (оказывать шефскую помощь), the needy (нуждающийся), in the spirit of (в духе), quota (квота), at the expense of (за ч-л счет), selection committee (отборочный комитет), the honour fell on (честь выпала), school providing general education (общеобразовательная школа), the welfare (the good) (благо), apprehend (perceive) (воспринимать).

Final task

Organize your knowledge on the topic and present a report on one of the following points.

1. What is the purpose of secondary school in your opinion?

2. What subjects in the school program are of the greatest importance? Why?

3. The higher education system reforming.

4. Advantages and disadvantages of studying abroad, in the USA in particular.

5. The value of University degree.

6. The ways of self-education.

UNIT 6

PEOPLE AND PROGRESS

People from time immemorial have said that ‘know­ledge is worth more than wealth’. At present the value of knowledge is rapidly increasing. Therefore the problem of training young scientific workers is of great impor­tance. A novice (a beginner) in science is like a bud—­either he will blossom into a beautiful rose or he will fade without blooming. If a novice proves to be really talen­ted, then he is given every possible assistance. What scientist's personal traits are the most important? Many scholars put diligence before all else. The time of scien­tific discoveries "by intuition" is over - you know this business of a scientist sitting down, pondering and exclaiming ‘Eureka’. Nor are new laws of physics disco­vered just by seeing an apple fall. Today it takes hun­dreds of costly experiments to discover something new. There is no doubt that it is a scientist's social and moral obligation to investigate and discover. Morally, the scien­tist should push his talent, which nature has given him, to the utmost.

Text 1

Pre-reading task

How often do you think about the advantages of the 20-th century?

Reading

Read the text and .rate the inventions mentioned. Prove your choice and answer the questions.

Is the idea clearly stated?

Are details effectively supported? Explain or defend the ideas in each text.

Our Century … and the Next One

As centuries go, this has been one of the most amazing: inspiring, at times horrifying, always fascinating. Sure, the 15th was pretty wild, with the Renaissance and Spanish Inquisition in full flower, Gutenberg building his printing press, Copernicus beginning to contemplate the solar system and Columbus spreading the culture of Europe to the Americas. And of course there was the 1st century, which if only for the life arid death of Jesus may have had the most impact of any. Socrates and Plato made the 5th century B.C. also rather remarkable. But we who live in the 20th can probably get away with the claim that ours has been one of the top four or five of recorded history.

Let's take stock for a moment. To name just a few random things we did in a hundred years: we split the atom, invented jazz and rock, launched airplanes and landed on the moon, concocted a general theory of relativity, devised the transistor and figured out how to fetch millions of them on tiny microchips, discovered penicillin and the structure of DNA, fought down fascism and communism, developed cinema and television, built highways and wired the world. Not to mention the peripherals these produced. Initials spread like graffiti: NATO, IBM, UN, NBA, CIA, IMF. And against all odds, we avoided blowing ourselves up.

All this produced some memorable players. Look around. There's Lenin arriving at the Finland Station and Gandhi marching to the sea to make salt. Winston Churchill with his cigar, Louis Armstrong with his horn, Charlie Chaplin with his cane. Einstein is in his study, and the Beatles are on The Ed Sullivan Shoow.

In our special issues we'll pick and profile the most influ­ential players of this century: leaders, politicians and revolu­tionaries, artists and entertainers, business titans, scientists and thinkers, heroes and inspirations. It's not a simple task, but it helps to start by looking at what the great themes of this century have been.

Rarely does a century dawn so clearly and cleanly. In 1900 Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, ending the Victorian era. Her Majesty died the following January, after a 63-year reign. The Boer War in South Africa was signaling the end of the colonial era. In America, cars were replacing horses, 42% of workers were in farming (today it's 2%), and the average life-span was about 50 (today it's around 75).

The tape recorder was unveiled in 1900 at the Paris Ex­position and Kodak introduced the Brownie camera, and apt symbol of a century in which technology would at first seem magical, then become simple, cheap and personal. Lenin, 30, published his first newspaper calling for revolution in Russia. Churchill, 25, was elected to the House of Commons. And the German physicist Max Planck made one of the discoveries that would shape the century: that atoms emit radiations of energy in bursts he called quanta.

From these seeds was born a century that can be summed up and labeled in a handful of ways.

The century of freedom

If you had to pick a two-word summation, it would be: freedom won. It beat back the two totalitarian alternatives that arose to challenge it, fascism and communism. By the 1990s, the ideals developed by centuries of philosophers — individual rights, civil liberties, personal freedoms and dem­ocratic participation in the choice of leaders — finally held sway over more than half the world's population.

The century of capitalism

Democracy can exist without capitalism, and capitalism without democracy, but probably not for very long. Political and economic freedom tend to go together. Early in the century, Theodore Roosevelt laid the foundation for a govern­ment-guided free market, one that encouraged individual initiative while protecting people against cartels and the colder faces of capitalism. His cousin Franklin confronted capitalisms greatest challenge, the Great Depression, by following these principles. Half a world away, Lenin laid the groundwork for a command economy, and his successor, Stalin, showed how brutal it could be. They ended up on the ash heap of history. Although capitalism will continue to face challenges, internally and externally, it is now the economic structure for most societies around the world.

The electronic century

A defining event actually occurred three years before the century began: the discovery of the electron by British physicist J.J.Thomson. Along with Planck's 1900 theory of quantum physics, this discovery led to the first weapon of mass: destruction, which helped hasten the end of the Second Work War and became the defining reality of the cold war. Alar turing harnessed electronics to devise the first digital computers.

The transistor and the microchip have cut the cost of transmitting information by a factor of more than a million.

The global century

In this century, everything became global. Now not only are military issues global, so are economic and even cultural ones. People everywhere are threatened by weapons anywhere, they produce and consume in a single

The mass-market century

Yet another defining event of the century came in 1913, when Henry Ford opened his assembly line. Ordinary people could now afford a Model T. Products were mass-produced and mass-marketed. Television sets and toothpaste, magazines and movies, shows and shoes: they were distributed or broadcast to millions of people. In reaction, a modern­ist mix of anarchy, existential despair and rebellion against conformity motivated art, music, literature, fashion and even behavior for much of the century.

The genocidal century

Then there was the dark side. Amid the glories of the cen­tury lurked some of history's worst horrors: Stalin's collectivi­zation, Hitler's Holocaust, Mao's Cultural Revolution, etc.

We try to personalize the blame, as if it were the fault of just a few madmen, but in fact it was whole societies, includ­ing advanced ones like Germany, that embraced or tolerated madness. What they had in common was that they sought totalitarian solutions rather than freedom. Theologians have to answer the question of why God allows evil. Rationalists have one almost as difficult: Why doesn't progress make civ­ilizations more civilized?

The American century

Some countries base their foreign policy on realism: a cold and careful calculation of strategic interests. America is unique in that it is equally motivated by idealism. Whether it is the fight against fascism or communism, or even interventions like Vietnam, America's mission is to further not only its in­terests but also its values. And that idealist streak is a source of its global influence, even more than its battleships. As became clear when the Iron Curtain collapsed in 1989, America's clout in the world comes not just from its military might but from the power of its values. Which is why it did, indeed, turn out to be an American Century.

So what will the next century be? Let's take that risk, peer into the haze and slap a few labels on the postmillennial period.

In the digital realm, the Next Big Advance will be voice recognition. The rudiments are already here but in primitive form. In a decade microchips will be truly embedded in our lives when we can talk to them. Not only to our computers; we'll also be able to chat with our automobile navigation systems, VCRS, microwaves and any other devices we want to boss around.

Task 1

Identify common technical terms used in the text.

Task 2

Use the various parts of the text (index, table of contents, glossary) to locate specific information.

Task 3

Find in the text the synonyms to the following:

to watch, to examine, influence, to consider, to think over, to invent, very small, to expose, apt, hasten, amid.

Task 4

Where are the facts and opinion or a combination of facts and opinion?

Task 5

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