Chart of the Day: Chinese students continue to flood US schools
Thursday, August 18, 2011 at 10:44AM 
An interesting trend amidst the general deterioration of relations (of course, officially, everything is wonderful), and reflective of a growing middle class in China able to pay for overseas education.
But it also shows that far-sighted Chinese prefer the sort of "questioning"/critical thinking education that the US offers over the more rote version offered at home. Last time I was in China, I heard that directly from college execs: they feared they just weren't developing the students the country needed.
Of course, that sort of academia would be harder to control, so China effectively outsources the function. That does delay the eventual impact of making so many critical thinkers happen - but that's all.
Remember how the Middle East starting pushing so many young people into college across the last decade. Yes, it kept off the streets for a while, but when they got back on the streets, my, were their expectations then even more "unreasonable." The Arab Spring is a direct result of that.
Reader Comments (4)
Chinese wanting to study in the U.S. is mostly about credentialism and perception (mostly justified) that the U.S. has some of the best universities in the world. U.S. university research is far more academically honest and thus far more valued. Do Chinese come to the U.S. for critical thinking. I think that's something of a stretch.
Use of the phrase "direct result" is interesting. I also think Chinese graduate students may tend to less politically motivated than their Arab counterparts. Arab cultures seem to be more inclined toward political engagement prior to entering graduate school. This may be due to my misapprehension of Chinese culture today. Care to enlighten me?
In the mid-1980s I was on military duty in South Korea. About that time China opened itself up to Western tourism. My wife and I went on a tour which started in Hong Kong and went through a Chinese Port. Surprise one: The Chinese let their poor be beggars on the border when it should have been easy to control the image they wanted the world to see. Surprise two: The tour took us through the recreated home village of Sun Yat-sen and discussed the China of his time and his hopes for a modernized China. Most of the tourists had never heard of him, and wanted to hear about the Communist Party top guys. Surprise three: on our train ride the car passenger liaison wanted bribes, and other Chinese tour guides wanted to play seating games rather than paying their fares. There were a lot more surprises, my main conclusion was that many Chinese were street folks, not indoctrinated puppets. Later, my history studies, showed that there was a long history of such culture that China's academics, then political leaders wanted to 'civilize.' Their street smarts worked well in US for those that came to work on transcontinental RR. So Americans need to understand regular Chinese, not just their establishment folks.
One of the reasons I like Tom's work is that he always take the time to meet and understand street people in China and elsewhere.
Not sure if these "graduate school" statistics include professional degrees (MD, JD, MBA, etc) or only academic degrees. Even within academic degrees, I'm not sure what fraction of applications are to terminal non-PhD degrees (MA, MFA, MS, etc). However, I believe it's uncommon to pay tuition (though tuition is still nominally charged) in PhD programs. Certainly it does not happen in STEM PhD programs, with which I'm most familiar - no program will admit students for which it cannot provide funding, so you can't "pay your way" to one, regardless of whether you can afford the nominal tuition. In my experience Chinese students in STEM fields are groomed within government-sponsored institutions to successfully apply to PhD programs here. It's still outsourcing, but with the intention of bringing superior technical expertise back to China, not avoiding uppity academics. And the Chinese government is the one being far-sighted here - just in the last ten years or so credible research papers have started regularly coming out of China, where none were to be seen previously.