I'm sorry, but I don't understand how I should "keep this in mind." She teaches at a college which focuses on business. How does this explain the difference she sees between her American students and her international students? (I'm not trying to be difficult - though I'm told it comes natural to me. I just don't see your point.)
He might be intoning the stereotype (which may or may not be true) that there are more "slacker" students joining business programs, whereas engineering students tend to be more focused and disciplined. Therefore, you might see a very different article from an instructor at MIT.
Right, but that difference (if it were real, which I doubt) should cut across the two groups of students (American and non-American).
Or at least, we have no reason to think that "business students are lazier than other students" tracks or causes the difference between Americans and others that the author focuses on.
I'm just saying that all the author is observing is that the students with the most to lose, work the hardest. Foreign students obviously have a lot to lose since they're coming overseas for an education. On the other hand, the American students she interacts with are likely wealthy and don't necessarily need stellar grades to move on to a professional degree program e.g. medical school.
It doesn't explain any difference between American and other students, just that Babson's student body is different than most.
From personal experience i've found the hardest working students to be those needing to get into professional school (law or medicine) as well as low-income/disadvantaged students who couldn't afford the $50k tuition/year to attend a private college.
Sure it does explain the difference, or at least it is easy to see how it could. From my experience interacting with foreign high school students from across the globe, they generally do not understand the hierarchy of higher ed in the US. At least, the ones I interact with have little knowledge of the reputations of colleges outside of Ivies + Stanford + MIT. (Clearly, you could argue that college rep != college quality, but that is a totally different discussion.)
Consequently, you could end up with a student body of pretty highly qualified foreign students but American students that didn't make the cut at more desirable colleges in the US. (Again, there are plenty of reasons why great students choose colleges that are not high on the prestige list, but this effect doesn't need to be large to be real.)
I know a number of foreign students who came to the US as undergrads and essentially threw a dart at a map of the US.
For some reason I have met a number of Japanese students that spent 4 years at schools I had never heard of (like X+State+University+Branch Campus in a tiny town). And they usually were very good students who went on to good grad programs, employment, etc.
The point being that the quality/reputation of the school will not be proportional in the same way to the quality of the domestic students versus the quality of foreign students.
A final anecdote, when I was at a university in Germany, I saw a cheesy poster advertising a scholarship to study in the UK, sort of "Apply Now! Come to England!". The scholarship: The Rhodes. I asked a few Germans and none of them had heard of the Rhodes Scholarship, which is probably the most prestigious scholarship in the English speaking world.
Actually, many people think of the Rhodes as tainted (because it includes an athletic component) and rate the Marshall Scholarship more highly. (If we're ranking go-to-England scholarships, at least...)