This week is International Education Week, which seeks to prepare Americans for a global environment and attract future leaders from abroad to study, learn, and exchange experiences in the United States.

So just how international are the student bodies at U.S. colleges and which countries are most represented?

We investigate these questions in our book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admissions and Campus Life.

First, analyzing data from eight most selective public and private U.S. colleges, we find that nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of students were either first-generation immigrants (born outside the United States to at least one foreign-born parent) or second-generation immigrants (born inside the United States to at least one foreign-born parent).

By race, about two-thirds of Hispanic students and roughly nine-tenths of Asian students were first- or second-generation immigrants. The proportion of white and black students with such international backgrounds was smaller. Also, unlike for Hispanics and Asians, immigrant representation among white and black students varied by the type of institution they attended. Approximately 15 percent of whites at private colleges vs. about 7 percent of whites at public colleges were immigrants or the child of an immigrant. The proportion of black students who were first- or second generation immigrants was 34 percent at private colleges and 9 percent at public colleges.

Having established the high proportion of students with international backgrounds at our most selective universities, we turn to our second question: Which countries are most represented?

More after the jump.

It’s Gift Book Tuesday once again, friends. Here are this week’s picks from Yours Truly (shhhh! Elves have favorites, too!)

* The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History by Jill Lepore: By now you’ve seen the reviews everywhere so I’ll spare you the singing of praises and get right down to the nitty-gritty. This book is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying. Jill has the rare ability to make you laugh out loud with wry observations (see the sections where she’s meeting with real, live Tea Partiers in Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern) while on the next page, she’s slapping you gently in the face by making you confront the extent of your own ignorance about our nation’s founding. She’s a professor. She can do this with ease and the effect is genuinely staggering. Highly recommended for anyone seeking to brush up on American history and current events without being bored to death. It’s a quick read, delightful and thought-provoking – don’t miss this one.

*Dracula In Love by Karen Essex: Before you judge, consider this: the vampire bubble may be bursting (Seriously. I’m so ready to move on to Banshees or Hobgoblins. Anything but Zombies, please!) but this book stands apart from the “what’s hot in pop culture” sphere. Why? It’s decked out, grown up, literary revisionist, pedigreed fanfic. Heck yeah! You’ve got the original cast of characters with some pleasant feminist twists, plus some outrageous bits of meta fiction that I won’t divulge here but if you love camp, you’ll eat this up. Oh, and when I say it’s “grown-up” I mean this one is not for anyone too young for the original novel. (The blood is the life…and so much more.) The perfect winter read for any discerning historical drama buff with a Gothic sensibility. Essex is a masterful storyteller and she weaves a bodice-ripping good yarn full of suspense, social commentary, and sensuous detail.

*Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach: I would expect nothing less from the author of Stiff and Spook and Roach more than delivers the goods. No topic is taboo here. Again, maybe not the best gift for little nephew Ned (also a bit risky for the in-laws and casual work acquaintances) but this is popular science writing at its best: mind-blowing and fun. Roach actually signs on as a test subject for several experiments and my reactions to some of these trials ranged from “good for her!” to “never in a million years.” By diffusing the initial subject-related awkwardness with humor, she is able to answer all of those questions you’ve been dying to ask. Three cheers for fieldwork!

Stay tuned for our next installment on Tuesday, November 23.

© iStockphoto.com

Edwidge Danticat will be stopping at Queen’s College in New York City on November 23 to read excerpts from her new book, Create Dangerously, as part of the 35th Anniversary Season of Queens College Evening Readings. In addition to reading from her work, Danticat will be interviewed by Leonard Lopate. This is an event you won’t want to miss!

“Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I’ve always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.”
– Create Dangerously

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Over at the Atlantic, Adam Roberts has been writing a fascinating five-part series about contemporary poetry. In the fourth part of the series, Roberts proposes that contemporary verse might take a cue from the Slow Food and other Slow movements and “help us transition away from monocultural reading habits.” He goes on to praise small presses:

In the world of literary culture, the small press is probably the closest equivalent to your local farmer’s market. (The carrots might look funnier, but, after you’re used to it, they taste about five times better.) There are tons of small presses, spread out over the country, and they’re often run at either no-profit or a loss. These are labors of love—not engaged in the production of commodities for consumption, but something closer to Lewis Hyde’s notion of “the gift.” Hand-sewn chapbooks take time to make, the poems in them take time to read, and the poets (most likely) took a lot of time to write them. Their production occurs on a smaller (and less grandiose) scale, and like the Slow Food and broader Slow Culture movement, they want to restore to us a sense of time that our current world system strips away from us. Perhaps they wouldn’t want to be in the airports, even if we let them. But they can, like the local food economy (which is growing at a spectacular rate, nationally), become viable alternatives with our support.

Princeton University Press hasn’t yet made his list of recommended small presses, but with the return of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, which includes Kathleen Graber’s The Eternal City (a National Book Award finalist), and the new Facing Pages series, you can support what Roberts calls “obscure, high-brow lit”–or come spring, the cheeky offerings of Troy Jollimore’s At Lake Scugog and the lush and spiritual poems in Anthony Carelli’s debut collection Carnations!

You can (and should) read his other posts in the series here, and for more information on Slow Poetry visit the Slow Society site. Don’t forget to savor all of your reading experiences!

This week’s book giveaway is Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays by Joel Waldfogel. By reprioritizing our gift-giving habits, Scroogenomics proves that we can still maintain the economy without gouging our wallets, and reclaim the true spirit of the holiday season.

“Waldfogel delivers a badly needed poke in the eye at holiday-time consumer madness, positing that not only is compulsory gift giving stressful and expensive, but it’s economically unsound. . . . This lively, spot-on book may be the one gift that still makes sense to buy come Black Friday.”–Publishers Weekly

“[A] small but very well-written and well-argued book which makes some serious points as well as poking fun at the nightmare of Christmas shopping. . . . Point by point the author demolishes the case for giving gifts. In fact, this is a very sensible book on every level.”–Times Literary Supplement

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTGy8KgYtfk

Anyone who “LIKES” us on our Facebook page is automatically entered in our book giveaway drawings. The free copy of Scroogenomics will be given away to one of our Facebook followers this Friday in the random draw.

“Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays” by Joel Waldfogel.

Two PUP authors have recently received recognition from the International Studies Association (ISA)! Daniel Nexon’s The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change has been declared winner of this year’s International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Book Award from the ISA. Each year, the prize is given to the book that treats the subject of security studies with originality, significance, and rigor. In The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe, Nexon explored the ways in which religious movements can trouble imperial rule by examining key events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, including including the Schmalkaldic War, the Dutch Revolt, and the Thirty Years’ War.

Dan Reiter’s How Wars End also received honorable mention for this award.

The ISSS Annual Best Book Award will be presented at the ISA annual conference, which will be held in Montreal in March, 2011. Congratulations to both Daniel Nexon and Dan Reiter!

To see a list of other recent award-winning PUP books, please click here!

In this issue of Princeton Global Science, David Weintraub describes how a white dwarf is like a baked potato and what both can tell us about the age of the universe. For more on this subject you can read How Old Is the Universe?. We have our final sneak peek (African Lovebirds) at Joseph Forshaw’s Parrots of the World. And this week, November 15 – 19, is International Education Week, so we are celebrating with a few author articles, including one on international mathematics from Reuben Hersh and Vera John-Steiner in which they write “In mathematics, national boundaries are almost (but not quite) meaningless.” Check out another article on how the roots of international education are actually closer than we think by Sigal Ben-Porath. there will be additional articles and features this week so please check back.

Like Princeton Global Science? Subscribe to our RSS Feed here: http://press.princeton.edu/blog/category/pgs/feed/.

Here is one last sneak peek from Parrots of the World by Joseph Forshaw, featuring illustrations by Frank Knight. As promised this is the plate for African Lovebirds. If you click on the image below, it should open up a larger version:

This week we celebrate the international exchange of students, from high school on up through post-graduate. In graduate level mathematics, the tremendous flow of students from one country to another is unmistakable. At our campus here in New Mexico, and at campuses all over the U.S., foreign students play a major role in mathematics, both in the graduate degree programs in mathematics, and in teaching beginning undergraduates at the level of calculus and pre-calculus. On the other hand, many young American mathematicians go abroad, to Paris, to Budapest, to London or to Moscow, to absorb the different flavor of advanced mathematical study in those countries. In mathematics, national boundaries are almost (but not quite) meaningless. Brazilians and Mexicans study in the U.S., Americans teach in Mexico and Brazil. It is perfectly commonplace for a research paper to be signed by co-authors from three continents. Even during the coldest years of the cold war Russian and American mathematicians sustained their personal-mathematical relationships with each other.

This commitment to a community may be fashioned not only by the shared mathematical legacy and language but may also be the outcome of a sense of isolation young people in this field experience, because it is hard for them to share their thoughts and passion with relatives and non-mathematically motivated friends.

More after the jump.

One of the tasks schools are charged with today is preparing students for the global marketplace of jobs and ideas. Often, this task is framed in a competitive way: students and schools should perform well on international comparative tests, so that they can succeed, as individuals as well as nationally, in competing against other nations for jobs, resources, and economic success. International education is thus oftentimes in practice not a friendly forum to exchange ideas, perspectives and cultures but rather a fierce race to the top of the international comparison charts. In this way international education is primarily national, offering a forum for maintaining a nation’s reputation through positioning it favorably in relations to other nations’ educational gains.

Because of this comparative pressure as well as for other reasons, schools are called to foster and promote students’ commitment to the nation, which is seen as important in itself in addition to being a stepping stone toward international contexts and opportunities. An American student would engage in international exchanges of ideas and places not as a citizen of the world, but as a representative of his nation. As such, she has to first become a good citizen, a good member of her nation, and then take this knowledge and values to the international arena where she can befriend, learn from and compete with members of other nations.

More after the jump.

Hope you can join us at Labyrinth Books in Princeton, NJ next week, where Andrei Codrescu will be reading from and signing copies of his latest book, The Poetry Lesson!

Of The Poetry Lesson, Chris Waddington of the New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote, “This genially disillusioned, free-associative romp delivers plenty of pleasures in the course of 118 pages. . . . Faced with time and mortality — the quintessential poetic subjects — Codrescu does what great artists have done for millennia: He tells stories, writes poems, and, yes, he teaches.”

Don’t miss your chance to meet Andrei Codrescu! See event details below.

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