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Fastest Growing US Export To China: Education
hackingbear writes "While we are importing billions of 'cheap' products labeled 'Made in China,' the fastest growing export from U.S. to China does not even need a label. Chinese parents are acutely aware that the Chinese educational system focuses too much on rote memorization, so Chinese students have flocked to overseas universities and now even secondary schools, despite the high cost of attending programs in America. Chinese enrollment in U.S. universities rose 23% to 157,558 students during the 2010-2011 academic year, making China by far the biggest foreign presence. Even the daughter of Xi Jinping, the presumed next president of China, studies as an undergraduate at Harvard. This creates opportunities for universities to bring American education directly to China. Both Duke and New York University are building campuses in the Shanghai area to offer full-time programs to students there."
From TFA:
So those parents send their kids to US schools to learn "morality"?
I've read that part of the motivation for admitting more international students is purely financial... universities can charge more, so they have an incentive to have more international students. For the foreign students, there's a certain level of prestige associated with attending an American university, especially for Asian countries which place some additional importance on English language skills.
So... when does higher education bubble burst? Everyone is expecting it to. It makes no sense that while the economy is tanking, colleges can just continue to charge more money at rates considerably higher than cost of living adjustments...
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
The US has plenty of excellent public and private schools. These families are aware of that, and will choose where to live carefully. At the primary and secondary level, you also have to consider that these families are interested in obtaining a North American diploma to ensure acceptance in western universities. They also seem to be accutely aware of the cost of education in North America and attempt to establish some sort of residence status in order to pay local rates.
Disclaimer: I am from China.
From where I stand and what I observed from my friends and relatives, one important reason of sending their kids abroad is because they want to evade some of the selection process in the Chinese education system, like the national entrance exam for colleges, which is extremely competitive. Do they really care about the quality of the education? I am not so sure. It is a strategic and trendy thing to do, at least for many families I know.
Why stop giving a loan that's guaranteed to be paid off?
That is the worst description of IQ I have ever read.
Here read this so you know what the hell IQ is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iq
and here is the second part of your post, it is referred to as Emotional Intelligence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_intelligence
each seat filled by a foreign student is one less domestic student in that seat and robs the US of future domestic production
Are you kidding me? Foreign students are doing more than just getting an education here... they are learning the American way. They're being exposed to our values, life-style, religions, government institutions, free-market economy, etc, etc, etc.
Some of those foreigners will one day run their country (or be near the top), and they will have more American values than if they did not attend. You're creating a potential ally, or at least someone who is likely to be more friendly to the US.
That is worth a lot.
Don't we keep getting articles posted about how poor the US educational system is?
I guess our educational system is the same as our democracy, it's the worst kind of that type (education/government,) except for all the others that have been tried?
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You've obviously never taken a real IQ test if you think it is all about "memorization of facts and conclusions". The primary objective is assessment of reasoning and cognitive ability. Analogies, puzzles, spatial reasoning.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
My graduate department had more research money than students. More Americans were going into the booming job force with lower degrees. We and our employers preferred more Americans because they had better English skills. But we all adapted to changing talent pool. Once we became mostly international students, we stayed that way.
Or you are creating the biggest competitor imaginable. Imagine a China in 30 years that can innovate like the US, China where people can think about science and engineering like the US has in the last 50 years. If you are a dairy farmer you want to sell milk, not your best cows to your customers.
Those kinds of things America works real well at because they take SOCIAL SKILLS. It involves dealing with controversy, arguments, and idiots on un-named web message boards.
And America is the king of social skills. We teach people how to get along without the rule of an Iron Fist.
America's definition of "compromise" is "our way or the highway". It's not social skills you're good at, it's might makes right.
You are supposing (wrongly) that there aren't enough seats for domestic students, and so a foreign student taking a seat is depriving a domestic one of a seat.
In that thinking you are completely wrong.
When I was an undergrad I had to take 1st year chem and biology. Both of which had well over 2000 students when the largest classroom was 400 at my school. By your logic this would mean 1600 people got screwed out of their degree. By university logic this meant running a total of 6 or 7 lecture sets for the same class, covering the same material. Multiple profs, a bit of a headache at test time, so they used the gym, a few minor logistical challenges. A course that big employed about 20 teaching assistants (some places this could easily be over 60 TA's per course, depends on how much else they have to do) that work for grad students since they're usually TAs and 6 or 7 lecture sets by itself would be 2 full time faculty for a year, so it works out to a couple of extra teaching jobs.
Some schools, the ones that cap enrollment, sure, a foreign student is taking a domestic seat. But those schools only want the best anyway, and it doesn't do them any favours to take a kid with a 97 average when there's one with a 98 average. They care plain and simple about maximizing talent. Those schools are also small, and even then, they can grow if they want to. But everywhere else more students is nothing but good. Where I am now could easily handle double our current enrollment, but we don't have enough applicants who are qualified (at least in useful degrees, if you want to get psych, drama, business, english, that sort of thing, they might have trouble doubling enrollment). I think we have about 35K undergrads but had over 50k for 4 years due to a change in education around here, we could reasonably bounce back up to 50k anyway.
Even in a programme like medicine or engineering where there's a hard cap on enrollment, the presumption that half or 2/3rds of graduates are going to leave (or whatever the number is, depends where you are) is baked into setting the caps. If you train 100 doctors a year but only really need 50 domestically and you have 50 foreign students you're not really depriving a local of the chance to go be a doctor in china.
In the long run the chinese aren't going to move 10 time zones for school, and by then the populations of the US and canada will grow into needing the space in universities. But right now we may as well take advantage of people willing to cough up tens of thousands of dollars a year in education fees, plus thousands more in living expenses. All these chinese students have proven to be very good for a friend of mine who works at a BMW dealership. The little emperor wants to look good when he's slumming it with us middle class types.
Or you are creating the biggest competitor imaginable. Imagine a China in 30 years that can innovate like the US, China where people can think about science and engineering like the US has in the last 50 years. If you are a dairy farmer you want to sell milk, not your best cows to your customers.
It is not a zero sum game. The industrial might of the US didn't make Europe poorer. In fact a rich US and a rich Europe provide trade opportunities that enrich both.
Right now a poor China is stealing shit from the US. But if a rich China can innovate like the US, it won't need to steal. It will trade with the US and the world will be better for it.
Not only that, many of them want to stay here. It's the Chinese brain drain.
Normal Chinese citizens are not allowed to take money out of China. Many would like to do that just in case things go bust or the political scene changes. There is a loop hole however. Chineese students can take vast sums of money out of China if it is to help them learn abroad. The last previous condo I was renting was worth ~$700,000. The owner a 20 year lady from China studying at UBC. Lots of Chinese parents use their kids to get money out of the country.
Nope. American culture is like crack. Dipped in chocolate. Wrapped in bacon. With hookers.
Oftentimes, they care about maximizing endowment potential as much as they care about talent. And those new wealth Chinese families have cash to burn, and many of them enjoy seeing (and showing off) their name near the top of donor lists.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Mainly because america is the only culture that could come up with bacon wrapped chocolate dipped crack.
Go across the pond and they'd probably try making the crack into a white sauce, or bread it and soak it with balsamic vinegar.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
I'm a professor. My college's strategy for dealing with the economic crisis basically boils down to "let's get us some wealthy Chinese students up in here." They don't qualify for financial aid or tuition reduction, so it's full-price, cash money on the table. And it's a great cross-cultural thing for both them and our American students.
Somebody elsewhere said that bringing in Chinese students is wrong, because they are displacing qualified American students. But for many colleges, that's not how it works right now. With the economy down, colleges are having more trouble filling seats with qualified students who can pay. Chinese students aren't kicking out Americans: they're taking empty seats left by Americans who can't afford college because their Dad got laid off. (That shouldn't be allowed to happen. But trust me, it does.)
One bad effect of the Chinese influx is that it does allow colleges to keep charging high tuitions rather than lowering them as the demand drops. But for a lot of reasons (tenure, pension debt, health insurance costs), tuition prices are not very elastic. For quite a few colleges, the choice is stark: admit more international students, or wither and die.
Although Yamamoto did spend some time at Harvard, he actually graduated from the Japanese naval academy. Ironically, having spent much time in the United States (he was later the Japanese naval attaché), he was firmly against attacking the US as he thought that Japan had no hope of winning a protracted war.
As to how the pearl harbor attack was so successful? Many attribute it be a copy of the battle of taranto (the first all-airplane attack launched from an air-craft carrier) where the UK destroyed some docked Italian battleships. My take is that Yamamoto copied the US war exercise where US Admiral Yarnell performed pretty much the exact same attack on Hawaii with pretty much the same result...
He didn't learn our weakesses in school, but by studying history. Based on Yamamoto's prewar pro-US stance as a function of his time here, I'd say let more folks like him in.
Are you kidding me? Foreign students are doing more than just getting an education here... they are learning the American way. They're being exposed to our values, life-style, religions, government institutions, free-market economy, etc, etc, etc.
You must be speaking abstractly, without any observational experience to back it up.
In graduate school, I noticed next-to-zero foreign students interacting with the american students. They did not socialize with us, or even speak our language. Having had an exercise to critique and evaluate a classmate's written paper, I was downright shocked at the complete lack of any kind of grasp of the English language: half of the paper was plagiarized straight from the textbook, and the other half was poorly constructed syntax intended to glue the pieces together than only a native English speaker would have any hope of discerning (even after a lot of effort).
I'm honestly not sure how this individual made it to graduate school at all, and I'm not sure how they can be learning our values if they don't interact with us and also don't grasp the language. It must be the value of the diploma, not the experience or the education that goes with it.
The grade school system is terrible and needs improvement. Luckily they do not run the university system. The US consistently has more top universities than any other country.
US News and World Report: http://www.usnews.com/education/worlds-best-universities-rankings/top-400-universities-in-the-world ARWU (compiled by Shanghai Jiao Tong University): http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp QS World Rankings (compiled by a London corp): http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2011
One Small example, Stanford, who is #3 in several rankings, has 8 Nobel laureates and 1 Fields Medal among its alumni, pretty good isn't it?
However, this example is completed with the École normale supérieure - Paris (usually out of the top30), despite being very small (compared to the number of Stanford students), it has 12 Nobel laureates and 10 Fields medal.
In France, research isn't as strictly linked to the university (due to the way legal setting is there), as it is in the US, I guess that makes such universities decrease their ratings, and gives US unviersities an advantege in the evaluation (papers and citations generated from the university are evaluated and have weight).
GP is nothing but a lousy troll
If you forgot, here's what GP wrote:
Have you any idea of what Chinese ethics consist of? Typically, it's "I got mine, screw you"
How can anyone ever take such crap seriously?
People, of any racial background, come in all kinds of personalities - some good, some bad, some in between
By saying that only the Chinese have the "I got mine, screw you" mentality, GP has shown off two fallacies:
I. People of all races - not just those from one specific racial background - have this "I got mine, screw you" trait
II. The Chinese, like all people, come in the "Good", the "Bad", and the "Ugly" varieties
Sure, there are Chinese with the "Screw You" POV
But there are also Chinese who do not subscribe to that POV
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I hate to say it, but this AC is right. The average immigrant AND the average american today, are NOT the kind of people who made this country what it once was.. We need to bring some of that culture back, or our 'culture of immigrants' that helped build this country in the last century will become a culture of thieves who come here on scholarships or H1Bs, and siphon wealth back to their home countries before leaving again. America is a country dying a death of millions of tiny paper cuts.
To be fair, it's not just immigrants who cut and run. There's also what corporations, government, and social/financial lobbies are doing to undermine liberties for the sake of power grabs, ideologies, and profits of course. I won't side with left or right here. There's plenty of blame to go around. America needs to step out of this right/left dichotomy for a bit and look at this problem from the multidimensional perspective that it exists in. Once it has done this, then it will become clear where the country should focus its industries, politics, and sense of identity. If it stays mired in stupid shit like the middle east conflict, the UN, and every two bit country's beef with it, it'll never get anywhere and eventually collapse under its own weight. This would be really bad, because, underneath all the recent layers of outright crap that's been foisted upon it, the core concepts America was founded on are still the right way to go for a free society. I do not want to wake up one day and realize that I'm living the same sardine can lifestyle as people do in places like china, under the combinatory guise of safety, insecure emotional egoism, and the protection of too-big-to-fail corporations. There's just no way.
On one hand, the Chinese aren't stupid - they want to get something for their Bernake bucks before their dollars turn to second hand toilet paper.
It will be interesting to see the generational culture clash, when their kids come home from very liberal arts colleges and universities in the US.
Basically, Chinese gov. is trying to sink the west economically, and they are winning because of idiots that keep saying that this is China just building themselves up.
The last time the US had a
positive balance of trade was in 1975, when Mao was still alive and ruling China as a totally isolated Communist economy.
Basically, the US committed economic suicide in 1973, when OPEC first raised oil prices. Instead of raising prices an letting the economy adjust to the new reality, the US federal government imposed price controls and rationing. The result is that the US never abandoned the pick-up truck as a personal transportation vehicle.
People in Europe drive subcompact cars with diesel engines that get 70 mpg, while in the US they drive to work in F-150s.
Blame not China if the US economy is fucked up.