Today’s Topic

For hundreds of thousands of foreign students, the United States--with its superior colleges and universities--is still the promised land.

And so, when two Japanese students--Go Matsuura and Takuma Ito--were gunned down in a carjacking in San Pedro last month, their deaths became more than two shocking murders. The young men took with them a slice of the American Dream.

In today’s Community Essay, writer Kinue Tokudome deplores the seemingly endless cycle of violence in the United States and she urges Americans to act immediately to get guns off their streets.

To help foreign students adjust to life in the United States, most colleges and universities offer orientation courses and counseling. Still, the culture shock can sometimes be extraordinary.

In today’s Platform, students from places as diverse as Lithuania, Pakistan and Jamaica discuss how different their lives are here compared to home.

While many--but certainly not all--foreign students come from safer environments, it appears that few of them will return home as a result of the killings.

“The students I have spoken to recognize that this random quality to violence is part of life in the United States,” says Dixon Johnson, executive director of the Office for International Students and Scholars at USC. “They cope very well considering that.”

In fact, the Institute of International Education in New York reports that almost 440,000 foreign students were willing to cope with life in the United States in the 1992-1993 school year. The largest number of those, more than 57,000, attended schools in California.

While there is no evidence of a mass exodus as a result of the killings of the Japanese students, some educators worry that the American reputation for violence will eventually take its toll on foreign student enrollment.

“I think we may find students are being scared away from California because of a whole host of things that we’re familiar with,” says Robert Ericksen, director of International Education and Exchange at Cal State Fullerton. “This incident will create more reluctance.

“I see countries like Britain and Australia heavily recruiting foreign students, who may turn to those places more frequently in the future,” Ericksen says.

From a practical point of view, losing foreign students means losing the dollars they pay for tuition. Todd Davis, director of research at the Institute of International Education, says about two-thirds of the foreign students attending schools in the United States pay full tuition.

“They help support our higher education in times of softening enrollment, “ Davis says. “And they contribute to the local economy.”

More than dollars and cents, however, educators believe foreign students contribute to the diverse fabric of campus life.

Says Dr. Richard Pedersen, director of international programs at Cal Poly Pomona: “Foreign students bring into a student body a knowledge about the world that most students would never get.”