Yikes… some perspective on the flood of international students from China.
From the WSJ:Why So Many Chinese Students Come to the U.S. http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-so-many-chinese-students-come-to-the-u-s-1462123552
Many people assume foreign students at U.S. colleges are rich, pampered youths out to have a good time before returning home to lives of privilege. Sometimes this is true.
But as the number of foreign students surges on U.S. campuses—nearly a million were enrolled last year, up more than 40% from five years earlier—more are coming from middle-class backgrounds like Fan Yue’s.
They’re eager to escape flawed education systems back home, where low standards are leaving many ill-prepared for a global economy.
The principal of a southern China university sparked headlines recently when he noted that top-ranked Zhejiang University received more government funding in three months than his school, Guizhou University, had received in 63 years.
“It’s like China and the Olympics,” said Chen Pingyuan, a Peking University professor who has written extensively about education. “They get many gold medals, but national fitness is terrible. The goal of sports isn’t medals, it’s overall health. The same should be true of education.”
For students, campus life is heavily regimented, with strict curfews. Every publicly funded school is required to have a Communist Party committee, which is charged with helping direct the ideological, political and moral education of students.
Ms. Wang wound up enrolled at Yangzhou University, where she sat through mandatory classes on Marxist and military theory, the latter which involved studying the various components of machine guns. “It felt like they really wanted you to know how strong the country was,” she said. Students didn’t pay much attention, she said, relying on notes from upperclassmen to cram for tests.
“In China, it’s a lot about memorization. There’s not so much creativity there,” said Ms. Wang, a junior studying English education.
As much as we moan about our own higher ed system in the U.S., it’s still the gold standard.
I’m hoping for middle class Chinese int’l students to get infected by American culture and go back to China to demand change in their corrupt political & educational system.
China and the US each have similar numbers of college and university students, around 20 million each. But China has over 4 times the population of the US, so it is not surprising that getting into a university in China is very competitive, and the percentage of Chinese people (in China, not Chinese immigrants to the US or Chinese Americans) with bachelor’s degrees is far lower than in the US.