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Tag: San Jose State University

Pew: Foreign Students Migrate to Bay Area
Demographics

Pew: Foreign Students Migrate to Bay Area

By Sharon Simonson Not wildfires, mudslides, or monster commutes; not overcrowded and expensive housing, or gender-challenged workplaces. Nothing—so far—can keep them away: foreign students seeking U.S. college degrees and work experience have flocked to the Bay Area in recent years—more than to any other place in the country except New York City. According to new research from the Pew Research Center based on more than a decade of student-visa data, the Silicon Valley and San Francisco metros rank among the top ten destinations for foreign students earning American university degrees and staying to work.  Including the more than 77,000 foreign students who migrated to the region for employment after earning degrees in other U.S. cities, the Bay Area attracted more than 120,000 foreig...
San José Pulitzer Winner Viet Thanh Nguyen: We Are What We Write
Culture, Demographics

San José Pulitzer Winner Viet Thanh Nguyen: We Are What We Write

By Sharon Simonson When seven-year-old Viet Thanh Nguyen arrived in San José with his parents and older brother in 1978 as a Vietnam War refugee, little did he know that his life’s next decade would form the basis of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel nearly forty years later. It was in the tiny downtown San José house at 759 S. 10th Street in the shadow of a freeway overpass that a robber would hold him and his parents at gunpoint when he was sixteen-years-old. It was in his parents’ New Saigon Mini Market on downtown San José’s East Santa Clara Street where his parents were shot one Christmas Eve. Thankfully, neither was injured seriously. “That ten-year period was marked by witnessing the intense sacrifice that my parents gave working as hard as they did in that store and experiencing...
Reshaping the Vietnamese-American Identity
Culture

Reshaping the Vietnamese-American Identity

By Sharon Simonson In 1974, less than a year before the fall of Saigon, Luong La lived a summer alone in a hut on his family’s tiny farm on Ship Island in Vietnam’s Mekong River Delta. While catching and harvesting the bulk of his own food — his mother left him a staple of rice — he avoids grenade-spiked booby traps and navigates a thin strip of political neutrality between roving pro-Communist Viet Cong soldiers and the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese Army. La was 11-years-old. The Viet Nam Project His recollections of those days and nights appear halfway through “Catching Shrimp with Bare Hands: A Boy from the Mekong Delta.” The new memoir, published in this 40th anniversary year of South Vietnam’s final capitulation, captures the tenor and tension of daily life for the La ...
Economists: Google Garbles ‘Diversity’ Discussion
Uncategorized

Economists: Google Garbles ‘Diversity’ Discussion

By Sharon Simonson The ethnic and racial profile of Mountain View-based Google Inc.’s workforce is an irrelevant measure of the wrong metric premised on a weakly defined attribute, say the chair of the San Jose State University economics department and a labor-market expert at Cornell University. The search engine, advertising and invention-driven company released a demographic profile on May 28 showing that 61 percent of its U.S. workforce is white and another 30 percent is Asian. Seventy percent of its workers worldwide are men. “Google is not where it wants to be when it comes to diversity,” wrote Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations for Google, in a blog post where he released the data. Bock does not indicate what demographic makeup would satisfy his company. H...