It's a double edged sword. For a few reasons.
Firstly it maintains an elite who are much better educated, and skilled, than those at home.
Secondly, when there's lots of foreign students from the same place, they just clique up. In my university there were a lot of Chinese students that hung around almost exclusively with other Chinese students.
One year I represented the student common room, a sort of social club/support network for everyone living in one of the 20 odd accommodation halls.
Despite trying, the 50-100 Chinese in our hall never mixed, keeping themselves extremely secluded from the rest of us. I remember chatting regularly with one person.
To put that in context, I knew the name and would at least exchange greetings with virtually every one of the other 200 odd people in the hall.
There were a lot of other foreign students because it was a self catering hall. They were better, though still ultimately formed their own, mixed nationality, foreign students clique within a few weeks. It was more accessible though as the shared language was English.
Firstly it maintains an elite who are much better educated, and skilled, than those at home.
Secondly, when there's lots of foreign students from the same place, they just clique up. In my university there were a lot of Chinese students that hung around almost exclusively with other Chinese students.
One year I represented the student common room, a sort of social club/support network for everyone living in one of the 20 odd accommodation halls.
Despite trying, the 50-100 Chinese in our hall never mixed, keeping themselves extremely secluded from the rest of us. I remember chatting regularly with one person.
To put that in context, I knew the name and would at least exchange greetings with virtually every one of the other 200 odd people in the hall.
There were a lot of other foreign students because it was a self catering hall. They were better, though still ultimately formed their own, mixed nationality, foreign students clique within a few weeks. It was more accessible though as the shared language was English.