I am skeptical that this program will be a good signal for hiring analysts. In my experience, there are two things you need to select for:
(1) Understanding statistics. Hopefully this program will take care of this requirement, but it's not hard to find these people anyway. There is an infinite supply of science PhDs fleeing the academic job market.
(2) Behavioural/personality. People who will do well at the actual job. Example: can you tell when a PM is asking you to answer the wrong question, and how do you handle it?
You can easily find (1) with screening questions, (2) is the hard part.
But, I guess if you think you have (2) as a future analyst, this program could be a good way of getting (1).
Usually, when people from another country buy something in our country, we call it an "export" and cheer it on. In this case, because housing construction is limited, we consider it a bad thing. What if instead, we allowed developers to build more housing to sell to those foreign buyers? So we could not only have enough homes for locals, but also improve the national trade balance.
Imagine if we only allowed American car companies to build 1 million cars per year, and them complained about the damn Chinese buying up all the cars.
There is a limit, true, but that limit is 60 story high-rises. I doubt foreign demand would hold up very long if we built a few of those, but in any case, the union construction jobs, the aggregate demand, the development fees, and the letup in competition for ordinary housing would all be welcome.
It is an interesting problem, since the construction of said high-rise buildings would itself affect the value of property in the area for many reasons (beyond just the increase in the supply).
