Studying In The Us

Studying in the US: Helping Foreign Students Feel at Home A college or university's international student office is a good place to start getting to know a school and the country. Part 26 of our Foreign Student Series. Transcript of radio broadcast: 18 March 2009 Being a new student in school can be a little scary. Being a new student in a new country can be even scarier. A college or university's international student office is a good place to start getting to know the school and the country. This week in our Foreign Student Series, we talk about support services for international students in the United States. Our example is the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. U.S.C. has had the most international students of any American college or university for the past seven years. So says the Institution of International Education in New York.

Members of the International Students' Assembly at the University of Southern California

Los Angeles area.

U.S.C.'s Office of International Services says the number of students this year is about seven thousand five hundred. The University of Southern California has more than thirty-five thousand students total. The Office of International Services helps explain student life at the university. It also organizes programs to help foreign students feel more at ease in their new surroundings. For example, there are trips to explore the

Most American colleges and universities have a similar office that helps international students. These offices look for ways to get students involved in school life and make American friends. Their job is not always easy. International students often want to spend their free time with friends from their own country or group. India, China, South Korea, Japan and Canada sent the most students to the United States during the last school year. Next came Taiwan, Mexico, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Thailand. The office at U.S.C. also assists family members who come to the United States with international students. The family members can take English classes and go on trips to places like museums. The Office of International Services also organizes other activities. For example, a State of the World Seminar takes place each semester. A group of international students and a professor discuss current social and political issues and take questions from the audience. The most recent seminar, held earlier this month, dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Global Recession Hits the Developing World Economic downturn means poor nations have to depend more on foreign aid.Transcript of radio broadcast: 13 March 2009 Both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund expect the world economy to shrink this year for the first time since World War Two. As recently as January, the I.M.F. had predicted growth of one-half percent. But this week its chief, Dominique StraussKahn, said the world has entered what he called "a great recession." A new World Bank report says the recession may hurt the developing world the most. Those countries depend on trade for economic growth. But world trade is expected to fall at the fastest rate in eighty years. East Asia has been hardest hit. In February, exports from China fell twenty-six percent from a year ago. Rich nations are expected to borrow heavily in world credit markets to finance spending at home. But A trader reacts last week investors are demanding very high returns if they are willing to lend to the developing world at all. Jeff to a fall in the value of Chelsky, a World Bank senior economist, says investors are avoiding higher risk debt in a flight to quality. South Korea's currency, the won

The bank estimates that up to three trillion dollars of public and private loans in developing countries must be repaid this year. Some nations have enough foreign currency reserves, but others will struggle to find new financing to pay their existing debts. The World Bank estimates that developing nations will need between two hundred seventy and seven hundred billion dollars in financing. The amount depends on the depth of the recession. The I.M.F. is seeking to expand its lending ability. And World Bank President Robert Zoellick has called on rich nations to put some of their economic recovery spending into a crisis fund to help poor countries. Bank economist Jeff Chelsky says the poorest countries are in the greatest danger. They cannot borrow in credit markets and they depend on exports of commodities like crops or minerals. But falling commodity prices mean they now depend more than ever on foreign aid. Finance ministers and central bankers from major industrial and developing countries meet this weekend outside London to discuss the financial crisis. President Obama wants all countries in the Group of Twenty to coordinate their separate efforts to strengthen their economies. But European Union officials have rejected American calls to spend more.

There was some good news this week, including better-than-expected reports on spending by Americans in January and February. And financial stocks rose after Citigroup reported a profit for those two months. Recession Spawns an Expanding Lexicon for a Shrinking Economy 11 March 2009 AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: terms from the recession. Dictionary editor Ben Zimmer is back with us. And it sounds like he's going to start with a popular term these days, "shovel-ready." BEN ZIMMER: "Well, shovel-ready is a term that's been used to describe infrastructure projects that are ready to go when stimulus money is available. The new stimulus package has passed the Congress and they are prioritizing those projects that are already planned out. And all they need is the money to get started and people can start digging in and getting to work right away." AA: "And we know that some of these projects are not in the traditional sense of building roads or rebuilding bridges, they're more health care investments, educational investments. Is there a term to describe those, or are those in danger of being left out because they can't claim they're shovel-ready because they don't involve shovels -- " RS: "Or don't involve digging?" BEN ZIMMER: "I think that there are metaphorical shovels at work in those other types of projects. Even though it starts with construction projects, things that are obviously related to digging in with shovels, it's definitely been extended to other things. So you can be shovel-ready even if you don't have a shovel." RS: "What other terms have come about in recent months because of our economic situation?" BEN ZIMMER: "Well, we've heard a lot of terms coming out of the banking sector. The Treasury Department has said that it's going to evaluate banks by using a 'stress test.' In the medical sense, you can undergo a stress test to see, for instance, how strong your heart is. So that's used as a diagnostic method in medicine. "Stress tests are also used, for instance, in information technology to test software, to see how robust the software is given different situations. In the financial sense, it's to determine how robust a bank or other financial institution is to withstand further economic conditions that could increasingly get worse in the future." RS: "And now we have words like 'good bank' and 'bad bank' and 'zombie bank.' What are those?" BEN ZIMMER: "Well, the zombie bank is a term that's been used to refer to a bank that really should have gone bust but it's being kept alive by government guarantees in the form of bailout money, for instance. So there are banks that people are saying 'Well, it's really just surviving because it's being propped up by the government.' So it's a zombie -- it's really already dead, but the government is somehow trying to keep alive a bank that's already dead because its stock is almost worthless, its value has really gone under. And so people are talking about zombie banks in this way. "But there are a lot of banks that are in a kind of a gray area right now, where it's unclear what their future is going to be. And what happens with them will really be contingent on what happens with the government taking over their bad debt, what's often called 'toxic debt' or 'toxic assets.' And so the proposal is to have a government-run bank, which has been labeled a bad bank, that would allow these private banks to unload all of their bad debt. "There are people in the government who don't like that term. They would prefer to call it an 'aggregator bank' because it aggregates all of this toxic debt from the private banks and allows the government to deal with it without the government completely taking over the bank." RS: "With the term bad bank, you really know what you've got, though." BEN ZIMMER: "And oftentimes we need some distance on a particular event before we really know what the terminology is that we're using to describe it. For instance, we don't really even know what to call this current economic downturn. There have been lots of suggestions about calling it the Great Recession or the Great Credit Crunch or various other terms. But like the Great Depression in the nineteen thirties, we probably need some distance before we really have a label that will stick." AA: Ben Zimmer is executive producer of the Visual Thesaurus, an online thesaurus and dictionary. So what would you call the economic situation right now? Give us your suggestions and comments at our Web site, voanews.com/wordmaster where you can also find a whole list of recession-related terms that Ben has put together. And that's WORDMASTER for this week. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti. ___ Words of the Recession Ben Zimmer, executive producer, visualthesaurus.com The Banking Meltdown bad bank: proposed government-run bank that would allow private banks to unload their toxic assets (some suggest a more benign term: aggregator bank). zombie bank: a bank that should have gone bust, kept alive by government guarantees. bankster: combination of "bank" and "gangster" (revival of term from the '30s).

stress test: Treasury Department test for the nation's largest banks, to evaluate whether they have adequate capital to withstand further downturns (metaphor borrowed from cardiac stress tests). clawback: system by which a financial company can take back bonus payments paid to employees in previous years to make up for losses in the current year. malus: like a "clawback," allows executive bonuses to be held in escrow over an extended period and returned based on failed performance. (Union Bank of Switzerland introduced a "bonus/malus" system.) cramdown: involuntary imposition by a court of a reorganization plan over the objection of creditors. (President Barack Obama supports legislation to allow federal bankruptcy judges to "cram down" mortgage loan balances on the primary residences of people who file for bankruptcy protection.) Stimulating Terms shovel-ready: used to describe infrastructure projects that are ready to go when stimulus money is available. Winner of the Most Likely to Succeed category in the American Dialect Society's 2008 Word of the Year voting, with "bailout" the overall winner. (Word Routes column) stim package: journalistic shorthand for "stimulus package" (officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA) -- shortened even further to stim pack. TIGER: Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (a contrived acronym from the Department of Transportation); new transportation projects will be stamped with the TIGER logo. three-legged stool: Obama's metaphor for a multi-pronged approach to economic recovery (restoring jobs, restoring credit, regulatory reform). porkulus: epithet used by conservative opponents of the stimulus package, who see it as more "pork" than "stimulus." Hard Times crecession: a suggested term for the current crisis, mixing "credit crisis" and "recession" (It hasn't caught on. There have been many other suggestions, from "The Credit Crunch" to "The Great Recession." We might not settle on a name until after the fact (much like we haven't settled on a name for the current decade). depression: a dangerous word, as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recently learned. He dared to use the D-word to describe the global economic picture, but then he issued a correction saying that he meant "recession." Ironically, "depression" was originally used by Herbert Hoover as a more benign term for what had previously been called a (financial) "panic." hard times: an old phrase that makes an appearance whenever the economy suffers, going back to the financial panic of 1837. doing more with less: a management cliche used to justify downsizing and belt-tightening. The expression goes back to the 19th century but became a catchphrase during the austerity measures of World War II. The Home Front homedulgence / homedulging: the tendency for consumers in a recession to socialize at home, indulging on a smaller scale (similar to last summer's staycation). chiconomic: style-conscious on a budget (similar to frugalista, recessionista and recession chic). bleisure: the blurring of business and leisure, as more people work from home or for less strictly defined hours. (The last three are buzzwords promoted by The Future Laboratory, a British trend forecasting and consulting business.) US Long-Term Jobless Claims Hit Another Record High By VOA News 19 March 2009

The number of U.S. workers collecting long-term unemployment benefits rose to a record high of nearly 5.5 million last week, indicating that it is taking people a long time to find new jobs after layoffs.

A long line of people waiting to file for unemployment benefits

The number of people collecting benefits for more than one week was up 185,000, while the number of Americans signing up for first-time benefits dropped slightly. Other economic studies published Thursday showed the nationwide economy declining over the next few months, while manufacturing continues shrinking in the key mid-Atlantic area. Unemployment and other problems were on the minds of top U.S. central bank, Federal Reserve, officials Wednesday, when they said they plan to put one-trillion dollars or more into the economy through purchasing government bonds and mortgage-related securities. Officials say this should make banks more likely to make the loans consumers need to buy new homes and goods, and will also help businesses buy new equipment and hire new people. The Federal Reserve also kept the key interest rate at a historically low level. Obama Asks Patience With His Economic Plan By Kent Klein Washington 20 March 2009

U.S. President Barack Obama spent a second day in California Thursday, promoting his economic recovery plan and asking Americans to be patient. The president also announced new aid for California's struggling homeowners.

President Obama (left) with California Governor Schwarzenegger, 19 Mar 2009

President Obama told people in the nation's largest state, which has been hit especially hard by the economic crisis, that "there will be brighter days ahead." But he cautioned that improvements to the economy will take time, and he asked for patience. "We are not always going to be right. And I do not want everybody disappointed if we make a mistake here or there. The important point is, are we moving in the right direction?," he said.

Mr. Obama spoke to several hundred people at a community forum in Los Angeles. He responded to a complaint about cuts in jobs and salaries for California teachers by urging people not to expect "something for nothing" from their government. "Nothing is free. So, the reason I make that point is, you cannot ask local elected officials to raise teacher salaries and cut taxes and balance the budget and increase roads. At some point, you have got to make some choices," he said. Mr. Obama also announced new help for California homeowners trying to avoid foreclosure. He said the state will receive $145 million to help the communities hit hardest by the housing crisis. California's Republican Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who introduced the president, is one of several moderate state governors in his party who support Mr. Obama's economic plan. "I want to thank him publicly for the courageous leadership and the great commitment that he has displayed over these last few months," he said. Congress recently passed Mr. Obama's $787 billion dollar economic recovery plan without a single Republican vote in the House of Representatives and with only three opposition-party votes in the Senate. Some Republican governors have refused to accept federal stimulus money for their states. The president is hoping to get more Republican support for his economic initiatives through his partnership with moderates like Schwarzenegger. "One of the great innovators of state government, somebody who has been leading California through some very difficult times, and somebody who has turned out to be just an outstanding partner," he said. Earlier, Mr. Obama promoted his initiatives to spend billions of dollars on energy research. The president toured an electric car factory near Los Angeles, and said the government will make more than 2 billion dollars available to American companies to produce electric vehicles and batteries. "Even as our American automakers are undergoing some painful adjustments, they are also retooling and reimagining themselves into an industry that can compete and win, and millions of jobs depend on it," he said. Mr. Obama vowed to put one million plug-in hybrid cars on U.S. roads by 2015. His economic recovery plan and his federal budget proposal both emphasize alternative energy. Before returning to Washington late Thursday, the president was to tape an appearance on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno," becoming the first sitting U.S. president to be a guest on a late-night entertainment program.