If Asian education systems are so rigorous, why do so many Asian students come to the U.S.?

Factual Questions
21

The recent examples from Japan and India show that China could build prestigious schools if it really wanted to.

In India, the Indian Institutes of Technology was founded in 1950 and it has it highly respected today. Google and Microsoft actively recruit their students whereas they don’t have any active recruitment events at University of Alabama.

IIT created a highly ranked school with desirable graduates in less than 2 generations.

I recently read a story about Microsoft creating university campuses in China. Don’t remember if it was a partnership with Chinese government or a totally private endeavor. Maybe the new “prestige” schools will have to be built by some kind of hybrid institution consisting of investments from Western companies.

22

This is anecdote from my wife who’s Japanese but she claims that by the time you enter high school your fate has been decided. By the time you complete what we would call 8th grade you are segregated into 2 groups - those bound for university and those bound for a trade school. For the latter group coming to America is a good path to a degree.

23

Similar in China. Students have very few choices in universities and even their majors.
The majority of my students did not choose their majors, it was all decided for them with tests.

24

Foreign students come to American universities and colleges because they are the best in the world. They do not come to the US for primary or secondary education because America’s primary and secondary education is far from the best in the world.

25

I’d argue that on average American universities are better than foreign universities. But at the top of the top levels, I don’t think you’re going to be getting many arguments that going to Cambridge, Oxford, Tokyo Daigaku, Indian Institute of Technology, etc for their best fields is clearly more or less prestigious than going to Harvard*, MIT, Stanford etc for similar fields.

  • Aside from US Law, obviously, nobody going to say you should go to Britain to become a US lawyer.
26

Somewhat off-topic, I once asked a Swedish humanities professor who had occasion to teach American exchange students in Sweden, whether there were differences between the two populations and she immediately said that the main difference was that the Americans asked way more questions. So I guess it isn’t just Asia.

27

I think that’s partially self selection. At best a question-asker in an American school is a “nerd,” at worst they’re ostricized for “being annoying” (or made fun of for “not knowing the answer”). But they also tend to be the best students. Which American students tend to participate in study abroad programs? The good ones. In my University classes 98% of students tend to be dead quiet except for one or two people asking questions, so I don’t think it’s that different on average. Though certainly it may be true that the best students elsewhere don’t ask questions, I don’t think that necessarily translates to “most American students ask questions.”

28

For graduate programs, most of the Chinese grad students I’ve known have wanted to get jobs in North America (because the pay and/or lifestyle are better), and most North American employers have very little interest in candidates with only Chinese education and employment experience.

I can’t speak for other Asian countries, but the vast majority of the Asian grad students I’ve known have been from China.

29

My son who just finished four years of working for the Japan Exchange Teaching program (assistant teaching and the supervising his prefectures other assistant language teachers) has told me that in Japan the students work very hard to score high enough to get into the college programs, and then consider college a time to relax.

Much of the rest of Asia is a function of that big of an n. With populations that large the number of those more than qualified to do well in a competitive college environment is more than any reasonable number of spaces that countries relatively recently arrived economically have. A few decades and more colleges will open there to meet the demand but it takes time.

Finally it has been said - Asian education often emphasizes listening to the tacher well; American education at the college level often emphasizes learning how to ask the right questions of the teachers. That is actually something of value.

30

That’s a very interesting sentence!

I had to read it more than once! It’s a beauty!

31

Chinese universities are intellectual fraud factories. Here is just one recent perspective. It’s small wonder that anyone who aspires to get out of China would be educated abroad.

32

To bastardize Twain (I think), I didn’t have the time to write less! :slight_smile:

33

I barely had any students from the PRC, several from ROC, South Korea, a few from Japan, and a lot from India.

The Indians I can particularly comment on. Sure, very rigorous educational system, at all levels. But very rote oriented. Just memorize a bunch of stuff, take a standardized test.

A lot of the ones I saw were superior students who hardly would have had a problem getting into a top school. (I taught Computer Science, so we got surprisingly familiar with some IITs. E.g., after we accepted a few grad students from one place, more would apply. The letters of recommendations would explicitly compare the applicants to ones we already had in our program. We got to know whose letters to trust, etc. If we had an Indian faculty member, that was a big help in understanding things.)

These were not rejects in any way.

After a bit we caught on: Great Indian undergrads sometimes don’t make great PhD students. They wanted to be told what problem to work on, what the answer should be and then take a test. But a thesis is all about developing a question and finding the answer yourself. And writing a thesis is a whole different thing from taking a test.

So we looked more carefully at applicants. In particular, what sort of research projects had they worked on, could we get a copy of their papers, etc.?

Korea and the ROC just didn’t have the quality of programs in CS, so going to the US was a must. Japan CS, OTOH, was pretty good. Far less interest in going to the US.

Computer Science might be something of a special case, for the era I taught, the US and a select few other places were the place you had to be if you wanted to really get to the leading edge. People need to be taught how to think.

But “rigorous” is not the same as “good”, in my book. An education needs to be complete. Mere rote memorization isn’t good once you get to the college level.

34

I taught at a large private university in Taiwan (Fu Jen Catholic University 辅仁大学) for several years.

From K through 12th grade students are pushed real hard with the culmination being the extremely difficult Country Wide University Entrance Exam.

The universities in Taiwan are ranked by the government and students who pass the exam are assigned to a particular university depending on their score. Students are even assigned a major!

The really odd thing though is that once they make it into a university, they are “home free”. The professors do not push the students at all. Classes are relatively easy to pass and high scores are the norm. Its almost as if the students are being told that if they were smart enough to get into a university, they get a free pass toward a four year degree.

I didn’t know this about universities in Taiwan and was quite hard on my students as far as homework and class exercises go. My general expectations were high and I taught that way. Often students would come to me and say that mine was the hardest class they had taken during their four years. I started to think that this was a ruse on their part to get me to stop assigning so much homework.

Fu Jen was not alone in this. The "home free’ attitude appears to be the norm throughout Taiwan.

This may be another reason why students go abroad to study. They want a more rigorous educational experience.

35

It takes several generations to change educational attitudes enough to really affect the quality of university education. For instance, German universities were the best in the world from about the mid-nineteenth century to about the early twentieth century. They invented the modern academic world. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was fairly common for students from many countries (including the U.S.) to do their graduate work in Germany. There was a slow movement of German academics to other countries (including the U.S.) to teach there instead. Universities in various other countries were happy to get professors who already had some reputation in Germany. The professors were often happy to move to a university where they would be the most important professor in the department. This was only a slow process though, so up to the 1930’s Germany still clearly had the best universities overall. What really changed things was Naziism and then World War II. A lot of professors (and not just Jewish ones) saw that it would be a good idea to get out of Germany.

For Chinese and Indian universities to reach the average quality of American universities (on the graduate level) would take the same slow process. There are some barriers to it. It wasn’t a big deal for a German professor to move to the U.S. (or various other countries with a reasonable amount of German emigrants already). Nobody in those countries would be that surprised by being taught by a German, and doubtlessly many of the German professor’s students and fellow professors would also be of German ancestry. You’ll know that Chinese and Indian universities are of equal quality to American ones when a major American scholar who is not himself of Chinese or Indian ancestry decides to move to a Chinese or Indian university (respectively) simply because he can put together a better department there. In India that might be possible. In China it’s hard to imagine.

36

Everyone want sot come to the US, because the US is the richest, most powerful country in the world. Why wouldn’t they? I wouldn’t want a Chinese education any more than I would want to drive a Chinese car or carry a Chinese handbag.

You seem to be under the impression that people go into university or any kind of schooling to get an education or to learn shit. Maybe some do but they surely are a tiny minority. A university education is a luxury status good and indicator of social class. The ruling elite of any society will always have some kind of ritual or shiboleth as part of their process of self perpetuation, to initiate the next generation into the ruling heirarchy. Whether it’s joining the Communist Party, being ordained into the Catholic church, or attending an ivy league university the result is the same. The precise manner of the self flagellation used in the ritual, whether it be rote learning of Confucius or rolling around the dirt of the rugby field is irrelevant.

What the fuck do you learn in undergraduate classes that you can’t learn from just reading Wikipedia?

37

You’ve GOT to be fucking kidding. What a load of crap.

38

  1. A professor helps focus and frame. I can’t read all of Wikipedia; I cannot read all there is to know. A class on a subject filters to some smaller portion of the universe of knowledge that is hopefully a more useful subset than what I may randomly choose to read and places it within a context that I might not otherwise have.

  2. How to better critically evaluate the information available and how to develop and articulate more cogent and salient questions. Now the professors (and TAs) are part of that process but classmates are often more important.

  3. And related information and exposures from other students and professors that trigger curiosity and interest in subjects that I had never before realized were so interesting.

To the degree that the class is reading, memorizing, regurgitating, and then often with the same efficiency, forgetting as new information pushes it out of the way, well then all it does is put a deadline on having accomplished one or another task.

Some schools are more one way than the other. Some societies’ schools are more one way than another.

39

Positive reinforcement.

40

Realistic description… especially in China where you can’t get your kids into official schools if you have too many of them I would think alrenatives like an education in a foreign country are very appealing