Saudi Students in U.S. Up More Than 500% Since Sept. 11, 2001

The number of Saudi Arabian students in the United States has increased by more than 500 percent since Sept. 11, 2001—when Hani Hanjour, a Saudi national who came here on a student visa flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, killing 189 people.

According to the Institute of International Education—whose numbers on foreign students in the United States are used in official reports published by the U.S. Department of Education—there were 5,579 Saudi nationals enrolled in U.S. institutions of higher education in the 2001-2002 school year. The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks took place near the beginning of that school year. …

From the 2001-2002 school year to the 2011-2012 school year, the number of Saudi nationals enrolled in U.S. institutions of higher education increased by 28,560.

Stop this!

They keep telling us how bad our education system is! Let them get educated in their own countries and their oh so better higher educational systems. Especially engineers who seem to come out of the woodwork to blow this country up with the know-how that we give them!

Politicians have to be the dumbest people on planet Earth!

It doesn't help that the Saudis I knew in college were some of the worst students there. The Chinese worked their butts off. The Indians worked their butts off. The Saudis were the most likely to screw around and cheat their way through class. One American student I knew got a kick out of going into the classroom before a test, finding the desk the Arab students usually sat and scrub the top clean of the notes they had written there in Arabic.

After college I had no respect at all for the Saudis, and now it looks like we are dipping even deeper into their "academic" pool. Stupid and suicidal is no way to run a country.

Students at the University of Virginia recently voted to eliminate the “single sanction” of the honor code. Under the single sanction, a student found guilty of lying, stealing or cheating had to leave the University forever. The new code provides for the student leaving for one year and returning.

I spoke to one of the school administrators about this disappointing progressive change. She acknowledged that cheating was rampant among the foreign students, particularly the Chinese. She attributed this to “cultural” differences we should understand. The implication of keeping the single sanction, and strictly enforcing the honor system, would have been expelling numbers of foreign students and some US minority students. The new rule provides “flexibility”.

Clearly UVA is consciously moving from a tradition of moral absolutes to the shifting sands of secular self defined ethics. Now that the single sanction is gone, who is to say expulsion, even for one year, isn’t discriminatory, hateful, or culturally insensitive. Perhaps counseling sessions would be more appropriate for the 21st century. Even better, why don’t we just respect that we are all different and just accept the behavior? After all, in the immortal words of Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Does it really matter?”.

Since I have choices as well, I’ve employed my single sanction. Having given faithfully to the institution since graduation, this year I choose not to send a donation. There are still a few institutions in this country worthy of my financial support, although I’m getting concerned about the Boy Scouts.

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