By Shambhu Sharan

The recent economic downturn hurt many university students. The students, who graduated or are graduating soon, face difficulties paying their different bills.  Most students have jobs. However, the international students have many more problems. The University of Texas at Arlington’s international students makes up 10 percent of the student body. The university offers scholarships, research grants, teaching assistantship, research funding to pay tuition and bills for qualified international students.

The graduate international students have to keep their GPAs high. Physics graduate Kunal Tiwari said he lost the university’s tuition assistance last semester because his GPA dropped below 3.00. UTA’s education quality is much better than Indian universities. The only thing is education is more expensive here compared to India. International students pay 40-50 percent more tuition compare to in-state tuition.

International students cannot get students loans and are legally not permitted to work off campus jobs. They cannot get a social security numbers unless they have an on-campus job. The SSN is the basic requirement to get cell phone connections and other essential things. The students cannot work more than 20 hours each week, and the average on-campus job pays $7 an hour.

Undergraduate and master’s international students who have no scholarships and grants work and study hard to keep their GPA up to stay in the university.

Business Administration graduate student Prashant Dwivedi said the medical care here is expensive compared to the Southeast Asia. He spends $18,000 per year for all his expenses. He took a loan from a bank in India. He received scholarship for a semester that was the great help for him.

“It is very hard to get medical treatment when I become sick,” Dwivedi said. “Most cases, I can’t get an appointment same day at the University’s Health Service Center. The health insurance doesn’t cover the alternative medicine.”

Job market is looking for experts to employ them. Considering the job market, those who graduated are having hard time to find a job. H-1 visa has made stricter to get jobs for the international students.

Besides financial problems, most international students use public transportation to buy groceries and go off the campus. The University provides shuttle service on Saturday and Sunday from the campus to Wal-Mart.

Most Indian students like to eat cooked food at home. Due to busy schedules, they don’t find time every day to cook.

There is a scarcity of on-campus apartments because the university is demolishing the Legacy Height apartments. The landlords have increased the apartment rent.

After getting a university degree if students do not get hired in their field, they are compelled to work in low paying jobs like restaurants, gas stations and supermarkets.

I think university’s international students have many difficulties and challenges. The university administration and the government should try to solve some of the problems.

From my childhood, I had many questions. Who am I? What is the goal of my life? What is the nature of this world? Who created this universe? I used to ask many people, but I did not get any satisfactory answer.

I was born and raised in India. I noticed that some people were suffering from poverty and others from family problems.

My primary goal was to take care of my own family members. I received a scholarship and got admitted into a very good high school. I studied hard and passed my high school exams. I wanted to study biology to become a doctor, but my parents wanted me to study math so that I could earn more money by becoming an engineer. Finally I listened to my parents and studied for two-years in an intermediate college.

I learned meditation from a spiritual teacher and monk when I was 8-years-old from the Ananda Marga ( “Path of Bliss” ) organization, and I started practicing. I was a very emotional person before I learned meditation. I got angry if my mother was not serving me food or water quickly. After practicing meditation regularly, my mind got expanded. I started to feel how my actions caused my mother pain. So I started doing my own chores. I did not allow my mother to wash my clothes or to serve me food.

Instead of expecting and receiving help, I started helping others. I felt many people suffer from so many problems without anyone to help them. I thought if I became an engineer I could earn good money and take care of my own family.

I was very much concerned with many problems in society. I saw that many people were not satisfied even when they had a lot of money. Matter is limited, but the mind is not. It is subtle. I was not running after money or material gain. I wanted to attain peace and happiness in my life.

I read several books about great personalities and felt that people remember them because they did good works for the society. Many people come into this world but very few are remembered. I thought I should live a glorious life.

I started following moral and ethical principles strictly. My meditation got better and better. I felt very happy, and wanted to give happiness to others by teaching meditation. I decided to become a monk and yoga teacher of Ananda Marga.

When I was leaving for the training center, my parents objected and did not allow me to go. I was not yet 18. I left home and went to Kolkata, India, but parents brought me back home twice. So the third time I left home without telling anyone. I completed my training, passed the exams and became a monk and spiritual teacher.

It was very painful for me to leave my parents for the first time ever. My goal was to attain self-realization and to do service to humanity. My goals were high and noble, so I decided to dedicate my whole time to help others by becoming a monk.

My first posting after graduating as a monk was as principal of a primary school in India run by Ananda Marga. After working three months there, I received a higher responsibility and I started to travel. I worked nine months with very little funds. I taught yoga asanas and meditation and gave workshops on those topics for about 10 years to thousands of people in India before I came to the U.S.

I had some health problems which I cured by practicing yoga asanas regularly and eating healthier food prescribed by my guru Shrii Shrii Anandamurti. I learned that particular asanas and alkaline food can cure constipation, acidity and leucoderma. I also had emotional problems like anger, fear, vanity and jealousy. Meditation helped me to control these negative tendencies.

My mind was also very restless, and daily practice of meditation calmed me. I could reach deep inside and access at will a vast reservoir of positive energy, creativity and peace.

By becoming a monk I volunteered my time and served others. I taught yoga free of charge. I felt happy to see that people got benefited by changing their bad behavior. I cured many people’s diseases by teaching yoga.

When I came to the U.S. in 1998, I continued my practice. I traveled the entire country and tried to help people. I visited Canada and Mexico and gave seminars, workshops and personal counseling. I helped with the relief efforts by serving food with the Salvation Army during the Hurricane Katrina. I also served food and helped with cleaning efforts with the Red Cross during the Hurricanes Katrina, Ike and Gustav at the Dallas Convention Center.

As a monk and yoga teacher I still teach meditation and asanas. I visit different places to give seminars and workshops on meditation and spiritual philosophies. I volunteer my time and money with the social service organizations for doing relief work. I will continue my service in future. I receive donations from people to serve others.

I am happy by being a monk. I left my small family, but now I have a bigger family. I have a bigger responsibility now to take care of my universal family. As a monk I don’t have to think about myself. The concept of a monk in my mission is very different from the usual concept of a religious monk. I am dedicated to everyone. I don’t call myself Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish or Muslim. I am a human being and my duty is to serve all without any discrimination.

By only viewing education as a way to a higher-paying job we’re giving a free pass to the prevailing machinery of power.

Hardly a week goes by without dire headlines about the failure of the American education system. Our students don’t perform well in math and science. The high-school dropout rate is too high. Minority students are falling behind. Teachers are depicted as either overpaid drones protected by tenure or underpaid saints at the mercy of deskbound administrators and pushy parents.
Unfortunately, all such headlines collectively fail to address a fundamental question: What is education for? At so many of today’s so-called institutions of higher learning, students are offered a straightforward answer: For a better job, higher salary, more marketable skills, and more impressive credentials. All the more so in today’s collapsing job market.
Based on a decidedly non-bohemian life — 20 years’ service in the military and 10 years teaching at the college level — I’m convinced that American education, even in the worst of times, even recognizing the desperate need of most college students to land jobs, is far too utilitarian, vocational, and narrow. It’s simply not enough to prepare students for a job: We need to prepare them for life, while challenging them to think beyond the confines of their often parochial and provincial upbringings. (As a child of the working class from a provincial background, I speak from experience.)
And here’s one compelling lesson all of us, students and teachers alike, need to relearn constantly: If you view education in purely instrumental terms as a way to a higher-paying job — if it’s merely a mechanism for mass customization within a marketplace of ephemeral consumer goods — you’ve effectively given a free pass to the prevailing machinery of power and those who run it.

Three Myths of Higher Ed
Three myths serve to restrict our education to the narrowly utilitarian and practical. The first, particularly pervasive among conservative-minded critics, is that our system of higher education is way too liberal, as well as thoroughly dominated by anti-free-market radicals and refugee Marxists from the 1960s who, like so many Ward Churchills, are indoctrinating our youth in how to hate America.
Nonsense.
Today’s college students are being indoctrinated in the idea that they need to earn “degrees that work” (the official motto of the technically-oriented college where I teach). They’re being taught to measure their self-worth by their post-college paycheck. They’re being urged to be lifelong learners, not because learning is transformative or even enjoyable, but because to “keep current” is to “stay competitive in the global marketplace.” (Never mind that keeping current is hardly a guarantee that your job won’t be outsourced to the lowest bidder.)
And here’s a second, more pervasive myth from the world of technology: technical skills are the key to success as well as life itself, and those who find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide are doomed to lives of misery. From this it necessarily follows that computers are a panacea, that putting the right technology into the classroom and into the hands of students and faculty solves all problems. The keys to success, in other words, are interactive SMART boards, not smart teachers interacting with curious students. Instead, canned lessons are offered with PowerPoint efficiency, and students respond robotically, trying to copy everything on the slides, or clamoring for all presentations to be posted on the local server.
One “bonus” from this approach is that colleges can more easily measure (or “assess,” as they like to say) how many networked classrooms they have, how many on-line classes they teach, even how much money their professors bring in for their institutions. With these and similar metrics in hand, parents and students can be recruited or retained with authoritative-looking data: job placement rates, average starting salaries of graduates, even alumni satisfaction rates (usually best measured when the football team is winning).
A third pervasive myth — one that’s found its way from the military and business worlds into higher education — is: If it’s not quantifiable, it’s not important. With this mindset, the old-fashioned idea that education is about molding character, forming a moral and ethical identity, or even becoming a more self-aware person, heads down the drain. After all, how could you quantify such elusive traits as assessable goals, or showcase such non-measurements in the glossy marketing brochures, glowing press releases, and gushing DVDs that compete to entice prospective students and their anxiety-ridden parents to hand over ever larger sums of money to ensure a lucrative future?

Three Realities of Higher Ed
What do torture, a major recession, and two debilitating wars have to do with our educational system? My guess: plenty. These are the three most immediate realities of a system that fails to challenge, or even critique, authority in any meaningful way. They are bills that are now long overdue thanks, in part, to that system’s technocratic bias and pedagogical shortfalls — thanks, that is, to what we are taught to see and not see, regard and disregard, value and dismiss.
Over the last two decades, higher education, like the housing market, enjoyed its own growth bubble, characterized by rising enrollments, fancier high-tech facilities, and ballooning endowments. Americans invested heavily in these derivative products as part of an educational surge that may prove at least as expensive and one-dimensional as our military surges in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As usual, the humanities were allowed to wither. Don’t know much about history? Go ahead and authorize waterboarding, even though the U.S. prosecuted it as a war crime after World War II. Don’t know much about geography? Go ahead and send our troops into mountainous Afghanistan, that “graveyard of empires,” and allow them to be swallowed up by the terrain as they fight a seemingly endless war.
Perhaps I’m biased because I teach history, but here’s a fact to consider: Unless a cadet at the Air Force Academy (where I once taught) decides to major in the subject, he or she is never required to take a U.S. history course. Cadets are, however, required to take a mind-boggling array of required courses in various engineering and scientific disciplines as well as calculus. Or civilians, chew on this: At the Pennsylvania College of Technology, where I currently teach, of the roughly 6,600 students currently enrolled, only 30 took a course this semester on U.S. history since the Civil War, and only three were programmatically required to do so.
We don’t have to worry about our college graduates forgetting the lessons of history — not when they never learned them to begin with.

Donning New Sunglasses
One attitude pervading higher education today is: students are customers who need to be kept happy by service-oriented professors and administrators. That’s a big reason why, at my college at least, the hottest topics debated by the Student Council are not government wars, torture, or bail-outs but a lack of parking and the quality of cafeteria food.
It’s a large claim to make, but as long as we continue to treat students as customers and education as a commodity, our hopes for truly substantive changes in our country’s direction are likely to be dashed. As long as education is driven by technocratic imperatives and the tyranny of the practical, our students will fail to acknowledge that precious goal of Socrates: To know thyself — and so your own limits and those of your country as well.
To know how to get by or get ahead is one thing, but to know yourself is to struggle to recognize your own limitations as well as illusions. Such knowledge is disorienting, even dangerous — kind of like those sunglasses donned by Roddy Piper in the slyly subversive “B” movie They Live (1988). In Piper’s case, they revealed a black-and-white nightmare, a world in which a rapacious alien elite pulls the levers of power while sheep-like humans graze passively, shackled by slogans to conform, consume, watch, marry, and reproduce.
Like those sunglasses, education should help us to see ourselves and our world in fresh, even disturbing, ways. If we were properly educated as a nation, the only torturing going on might be in our own hearts and minds — a struggle against accepting the world as it’s being packaged and sold to us by the pragmatists, the technocrats, and those who think education is nothing but a potential passport to material success.

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), now teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. His books and articles focus primarily on military history and include Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism (Potomac Press, 2005). He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu

By only viewing education as a way to a higher-paying job we’re giving a free pass to the prevailing machinery
of power.
 
Hardly a week goes by without dire headlines about the failure of the American education system. Our students
don’t perform well in math and science. The high-school dropout rate is too high. Minority students are falling
behind. Teachers are depicted as either overpaid drones protected by tenure or underpaid saints at the mercy of
deskbound administrators and pushy parents.

Unfortunately, all such headlines collectively fail to address a fundamental question: What is education for?
At so many of today’s so-called institutions of higher learning, students are offered a straightforward answer:
For a better job, higher salary, more Marcetable skills, and more impressive credentials. All the more so in
today’s collapsing job Marcet.
 
Based on a decidedly non-bohemian life –20 years’ service in the military and 10 years teaching at the college
level –I’m convinced that American education, even in the worst of times, even recognizing the desperate need
of most college students to land jobs, is far too utilitarian, vocational, and narrow. It’s simply not enough
to prepare students for a job: We need to prepare them for life, while challenging them to think beyond the
confines of their often parochial and provincial upbringings. (As a child of the working class from a provincial
background, I speak from experience.)

And here’s one compelling lesson that all of us, students and teachers alike, need to relearn constantly: If you
view education in purely instrumental terms as a way to a higher-paying job — if it’s merely a mechanism for
mass customization within a Marcetplace of ephemeral consumer goods — you’ve effectively given a free pass to
the prevailing machinery of power and those who run it. Three Myths of Higher Ed

Three myths serve to restrict our education to the narrowly utilitarian and practical. The first, particularly
pervasive among conservative-minded critics, is that our system of higher education is way too liberal, as
well as thoroughly dominated by anti-free-Marcet radicals and refugee Marxists from the 1960s who, like so
many Ward Churchills, are indoctrinating our youth in how to hate America. Nonsense.

Today’s college students are being indoctrinated in the idea that they need to earn “degrees that work” (the
official motto of the technically-oriented college where I teach). They’re being taught to measure their
self-worth by their post¬college paycheck. They’re being urged to be lifelong learners, not because learning is
transformative or even enjoyable, but because to “keep current” is to “stay competitive in the global
Marcetplace.” (Never mind that keeping current is hardly a guarantee that your job won’t be outsourced to the
lowest bidder.)

And here’s a second, more pervasive myth from the world of technology: technical skills are the key to success
as well as life itself, and those who find themselves on the wrong side of the digital divide are doomed to
lives of misery. From this it necessarily follows that computers are a panacea, that putting the right
technology into the classroom and into the hands of students and faculty solves all problems. The keys to
success, in other words, are interactive SMART boards, not smart teachers interacting with curious students.
Instead, canned lessons are offered with PowerPoint efficiency, and students respond robotically, trying to
copy everything on the slides, or clamoring for all presentations to be posted on the local server.

One “bonus” from this approach is that colleges can more easily measure (or “assess,” as they like to say)
how many networked classrooms they have, how many on-line classes they teach, even how much money their
professors bring in for their institutions. With these and similar metrics in hand, parents and students
can be recruited or retained with authoritative-looking data: job placement rates, average starting salaries
of graduates, even alumni satisfaction rates (usually best measured when the football team is winning).

A third pervasive myth — one that’s found its way from the military and business worlds into higher education
–is: If it’s not quantifiable, it’s not important. With this mindset, the old-fashioned idea that education
is about molding character, forming a moral and ethical identity, or even becoming a more self-aware person,
heads down the drain. After all, how could you quantify such elusive traits as assessable goals, or showcase
such non-measurements in the glossy Marceting brochures, glowing press releases, and gushing DVDs that
compete to entice prospective students and their anxiety-ridden parents to hand over ever larger sums of
money to ensure a lucrative future?

Three Realities of Higher Ed
What do torture, a major recession, and two debilitating wars have to do with our educational system? My guess:
plenty. These are the three most immediate realities of a system that fails to challenge, or even critique,
authority in any meaningful way. They are bills that are now long overdue thanks, in part, to that system’s
technocratic bias and pedagogical shortfalls — thanks, that is, to what we are taught to see and not see,
regard and disregard, value and dismiss.

Over the last two decades, higher education, like the housing Marcet, enjoyed its own growth bubble,
characterized by rising enrollments, fancier high-tech facilities, and ballooning endowments. Americans invested
heavily in these derivative products as part of an educational surge that may prove at least as expensive and
one-dimensional as our military surges in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As usual, the humanities were allowed to wither. Don’t know much about history? Go ahead and authorize
waterboarding, even though the U.S. prosecuted it as a war crime after World War II. Don’t know much about
geography? Go ahead and send our troops into mountainous Afghanistan, that “graveyard of empires,” and allow
them to be swallowed up by the terrain as they fight a seemingly endless war.

Perhaps I’m biased because I teach history, but here’s a fact to consider: Unless a cadet at the Air Force
Academy (where I once taught) decides to major in the subject, he or she is never required to take a U.S.
history course. Cadets are, however, required to take a mind-boggling array of required courses in various
engineering and scientific disciplines as well as calculus. Or civilians, chew on this: At the Pennsylvania
College of Technology, where I currently teach, of the roughly 6,600 students currently enrolled, only 30 took
a course this semester on U.S. history since the Civil War, and only three were programmatically required to do so.

We don’t have to worry about our college graduates forgetting the lessons of history –not when they never learned
them to begin with.

Donning New Sunglasses

One attitude pervading higher education today is: students are customers who need to be kept happy by
service-oriented professors and administrators. That’s a big reason why, at my college at least, the hottest
topics debated by the Student Council are not government wars, torture, or bail¬outs but a lack of parking and
the quality of cafeteria food.

It’s a large claim to make, but as long as we continue to treat students as customers and education as a
commodity, our hopes for truly substantive changes in our country’s direction are likely to be dashed. As long
as education is driven by technocratic imperatives and the tyranny of the practical, our students will fail to
acknowledge that precious goal of Socrates: To know thyself — and so your own limits and those of your country
as well.

To know how to get by or get ahead is one thing, but to know yourself is to struggle to recognize your own
limitations as well as illusions. Such knowledge is disorienting, even dangerous –kind of like those sunglasses
donned by Roddy Piper in the slyly subversive “B” movie They Live (1988). In Piper’s case, they revealed a
black-and-white nightmare, a world in which a rapacious alien elite pulls the levers of power while sheep-like
humans graze passively, shackled by slogans to conform, consume,watch, marry, and reproduce.

Like those sunglasses, education should help us to see ourselves and our world in fresh, even disturbing, ways.
If we were properly educated as a nation, the only torturing going on might be in our own hearts and minds –
a struggle against accepting the world as it’s being packaged and sold to us by the pragmatists, the technocrats,
and those who think education is nothing but a potential passport to material success.

William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), now teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology.
His books and articles focus primarily on military history and include Hindenburg: Icon of German Militarism
(Potomac Press, 2005). He may be reached at wastore@pct.edu.