Growth Industry

December 26, 2014

We have wondered why Michigan’s high schools would enroll more J-1 visa students than in any other state, as well as more J-1 and F-1 visa students combined than the schools of any other state. It certainly can’t be our weather!

Like schools in many states, Michigan schools are looking to foreign countries to fill classrooms where enrollments have been falling, and they are looking to the tuition dollars of international students to help fill the hole of declining state funding.

And schools across the US are finding a hungry market, especially in Asia where families are willing to pay almost any amount to give their children the kind of educational opportunities their own countries don’t, including a leg up in gaining admission to a US college or university.

One unique contributing factor to our state’s leading totals is the late date when public school classes start in the fall. International students who miss the start of school in states which begin classes two, three or four weeks before Michigan can still try for a placement in Michigan where public high schools cannot begin classes until after Labor Day.

These late, scrambling and sometimes inadequately vetted enrollments are one of the many problems attendant to the increasing numbers of J-1 and F-1 visa students enrolling in Michigan each year. More serious are the “pipelines” that, for example, direct basketball players to some schools and ice hockey players to other schools.

It makes some people feel warm and fuzzy, but a lot more people get hot under the collar, to observe a foreign exchange student become a suddenly successful basketball team’s high scorer and rebounder, and then later be given a Division I university basketball scholarship. Or be the leading scorer on an ice hockey team that posts its best record and deepest MHSAA tournament run in the school’s history.

My wife and I have hosted an international college level student in our home for almost two years. I know the benefits to both parties. And I also know that there is a growing number of problems related to sports and profit that need to be stopped, or at least sent to some other state.

The Essential AD

March 24, 2015

It’s the final week of the winter sports season.

If there is one time of the year when I hear it, and hear it again – that time is now when local school athletic administrators exhale deeply and admit they’re tired and need a break.

The winter season is long. Almost all the practices and contests are indoors, most sharing the same very limited spaces. Stormy weather wreaking havoc with schedules. Officials turning back games due to injury or fatigue.

Many of these administrators gathered last weekend at the annual conference of their professional organization, the Michigan Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association, which is the best of its kind in the country, unmatched in its commitment to professional development for athletic directors, regardless of their years of service.

It often impresses and inspires me to observe athletic directors, at the time of their greatest fatigue, coming together to be energized with each other’s company and educated by each other’s ideas to improve local programs.

As societal changes cause school competitions to become more complicated and controversial, the case for the full-time, well-trained athletic administrator becomes even more compelling. School districts that cut corners on this essential staff member find only that the resulting problems are worse – even more complicated and more controversial.

This professional administrator is the essential foundation of a safe and sensible program worthy of the name “educational athletics.”