Pam Duran, the retired former director of Washington State University’s Intensive American Language Center, saw a major shift in the approach to foreign students during her career. She worked at the IALC from 1988 to 2021, helping students with weaker English skills reach a level of proficiency that would allow them to enter the university. The program worked well during her tenure, she told me, and often received transfer students from more commercialized programs that used what Duran described as “fast food” models.
But over the course of her career, Duran saw finance become a bigger concern. Eventually, after she’d spent 16 years as director, the university switched over to a contracted commercial program. As she put it, the university said, “you’ve been operating like grandma’s kitchen: high touch, high personal contact, high individual attention...it’s time to think fast food.” It wasn’t a good fit for her and she was moved to another position; ultimately, the partnership between the IALC and the private company failed, but Duran was not involved in rebuilding the program.
What is striking about this story is that a society where students are treated like interchangeable economic units and rushed through a for-profit program is likely the impression much of the world already has about America, whereas the “grandma’s kitchen” model gave enrollees the support they needed while presenting the U.S. as a gracious and caring host, leaving a lasting good impression.
Yet fast food is the model we appear to have settled on, one that President Trump says should serve even more customers in the future. According to Trump, the number of foreign students—and specifically Chinese ones—on American campuses should be far higher than it is today. He has suggested increasing student visas so that as many as 600,000 Chinese nationals would sit in college classrooms across America. The alternative is that “half the colleges in the United States go out of business.”
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