College in China
I wanted to blog about this NY Times article about college in China when I first read it on Wednesday, but for some reason I didn’t have time to blog.
For the most part, the Chinese college system seems extremely similar to the system we have here in the United States. I think that obviously they must have copied the Western system. They also seem to have partly absorbed the conventional wisdom of the West that college attendance will increase “human capital” and therefore increase GDP.
Yet similar to the problem we have here, China also has the problem of more college graduates than jobs:
While potentially enhancing China’s future as a global industrial power, an increasingly educated population poses daunting challenges for its leaders. With the Chinese economy downshifting in the past year to a slower growth rate, the country faces a glut of college graduates with high expectations and limited opportunities.
The key difference between China and the United States is that “the most popular undergraduate major by far” is engineering. In the United States, fewer than 5% of students major in engineering. And a lot of the students you do see majoring in engineering are actually Chinese immigrants. As well as other immigrants. Hardly any native-born Americans want to major in engineering anymore.
i teach at a major US research university, in a technical field, and i just got through reviewing graduate admission applications for the year. a few things you might be interested in. first, most of our applicants are from china. the vast majority. they are not all brilliant, and their ability in English ranges from basically non-existent to just past barely competent. but, they have spent their last 3-4 years taking rigorously, competitively evaluated technical classes (admittedly mixed with occasional courses on marxism, military history, and “ideological morality”), and not wasting time on anything else. if china is copying us, they are copying the good things we’ve given up.
someone
January 19, 2013 at 12:23 am
Im beginning to feel a “living wage” is going to be essential in the future. With automation and surpluses all round, there is never going to be enough productive employment. Self actualization is only for bobos, so the remaining 95 % will need to be tossed bread and circuses to keep them from getting into trouble.
Grand Mariner
January 19, 2013 at 12:25 am
Only essential when permanent unemployment, population control, and eugenics is unimaginable.
Stupor Mundi
January 19, 2013 at 9:40 pm
One in twenty or less majoring in engineering doesn’t seem like a bad thing and it seems to me to be about the right proportion. There are a lot of other technical majors that are needed besides engineers.
D.H.
January 19, 2013 at 12:34 am
False. Bachelors in nat sci have ZERO prospects. Acct and Fin are not technical any more than law is technical. The complexity or difficulty is unnecessary. It is a man made difficulty complexity.
Stupor Mundi
January 19, 2013 at 9:42 pm
If those natsci bachelors go on to become health care professionals, they may do quite well
Boxthorn
January 20, 2013 at 12:14 pm
not quite true: I teach at the flagship university of a (red-state) state school. Over 90% of the engineering students in my class are caucasian-american. When I was in graduate school at a blue-state school, a large fraction (25-33%) of undergrads – but not a majority – were 2nd generation (predominantly indian or chinese).
dude
January 19, 2013 at 12:55 am
I have heard that most of those Chinese engineering majors are equivalent to US community college majors in machining, electronics, etc.
One really big diff between China and the US is that in China college admissions are determined by a multiple choice test and nothing else. I forget what it’s called.
Stupor Mundi
January 19, 2013 at 6:22 am
Their admission system sounds a lot better than ours. Here, once all of the legacy, affirmative action, sports, ect. slots are taken, the rest are judged by admission officers looking for “leadership” (aka-value transferrence skills). Anything but intelligence.
John
January 19, 2013 at 1:52 pm
The gaokao, I think?
SFG
January 19, 2013 at 3:48 pm
At the undergraduate level, the classes I taught were overwhelmingly native American, but my graduate classes were three-quarters foreign, almost all of them Chinese. This is probably typical of all American engineering schools. Only the most elite schools like MIT have graduate programs that are majority American. Wandering around any campus in the summer, one might think one was visiting Beijing University. The foreign students stay in the US because of travel restrictions on their student visas.
A surprising large number of foreign PhD students manage to stay in the US. My former department has on its faculty a Chinese, a Pole, a Czech, an Israeli, two Turks, two Iranians, an Australian, a Lebanese and an Indonesian. That’s 11 out of 21 faculty. Before they retired a few years ago, we also had a Hungarian and a Mexican.
bob sykes
January 19, 2013 at 7:53 am
I think it’s a matter of incentives. I’d like to be more specific about this, but it would reveal more personal information than I’m comfortable with, so I’m going to be a little bit vague. I went to a very good but not Ivy League school for undergrad and majored in a difficult STEM subject in which I got very high marks. I worked in an unrelated field for a few years and started looking at grad school. Here’s the killer: by default I’d like to get my master’s in my undergrad field and work as an engineer. But I see the world run by an earlier cohort of the guys I went to school with…except that they all got their undergrad and advanced degrees in stuff like IR, PoliSci, Econ. They work for political/governmental organizations (i.e. the Cathedral) of ever-increasing power and influence–not to mention total job security and even travel and excitement for those who want it.
Whereas engineers are fungible labor. If I got a job with the State Department or a similar organization, I would be set for life. If I went to work as an engineer, I’m looking at serious downward pressure on my earnings, and (speaking from some limited experience) might not even have the satisfaction of creating anything worthwhile. One guy I know worked on a project for almost twenty years, rising from junior engineer to project director, only to have it come to nothing.
ivvenalis
January 20, 2013 at 4:10 am
A glut of college grads in China translates to a glut of immigrant Chinese H1B engineers in US working for lower wages than American engineers. The STEM shortage myth is perpetuated by corporations seeking to increase the supply of STEM graduates in order to decrease pay.
bobo
January 19, 2013 at 8:07 am
And these people have fooled themselves. If they must pay more than they’d like but stiil less than they can afford there is, in their mind, ipso facto a shortage. Technical expertise is just another input to production, Experts are just fancy slaves.
Snd that is what they are. They are too STUPID to unionize. If they did then Atlas would shrug, but then again if they are too stupid to unionize they are not Atlases.
Stupor Mundi
January 19, 2013 at 9:48 pm
From the article: “But it is also because a Western college education is better, and Western universities do not require the same high marks as Chinese ones do on China’s famously difficult college entrance exams…”
I have known many people who came to the US bcause they weren’t smart enough to pass their own country’s entrance exams. These countries included Germany, Japan, Switzerland, so the exams weren’t that hard, a high % of school leavers in these countries go to uni. Half of those I knew earned PhDs.
Only in Canada and the US can high educational achievement and mediocre IQ go together. Whetever the subject the correlation of IQ and grades (in the American Canadian sense of grades) is < .5. Corection for restriction of range is very dubious and doesn't increase the correlation that much.
The bottom line is short term subjective assessments, grades, simply don't measure the same thing as long term or life-long objective tests.
Stupor Mundi
January 19, 2013 at 8:14 am
Yep, many non-elite tier 2 and below American Universities are full of rejects from other countries. They often get their degrees here and stay since the employers in the country whence they came from know they aren’t in or above the 90th percentile. America is full of the incorrect kind of immigrants who work fairly decent jobs here who would otherwise have been doing very menial work or been on the dole in their country. US standards are just too low across the board.
bobo
January 19, 2013 at 9:09 am
I’m not so sure getting lots of mediocre Germans, Japanese, and Swiss is such a bad thing. Beats more non-Asian minorities. And most of them will probably become American pretty easily.
SFG
January 19, 2013 at 3:50 pm
Only in Canada and the US can high educational achievement and mediocre IQ go together. Whetever the subject the correlation of IQ and grades (in the American Canadian sense of grades) is < .5. Corection for restriction of range is very dubious and doesn't increase the correlation that much.
Grades can vary for all sorts of reasons other than IQ because of high variability of teacher quality, how the teacher chooses to grade (which varies even within the same school and type of class) and other reasons. Grades are a weak predictor of job performance. The correlation between GPA an performance is only 0.33, not much better than pulling random names out of a hat. This is why college recruiters are focusing more on job experience via internships and less on grades.
The Undiscovered Jew
January 19, 2013 at 1:13 pm
The glut of college grads in China is an opportunity for American employees to discretely outsource their work to Chinese people like this guy “Bob” did while working as a software developer:
“Bob had PDFs of hundreds of invoices from a third-party contractor in Shenyang for developer services. Bob had been paying the contractor $50,000 a year, while he himself made hundreds of thousands of dollars.
While the developer was working 9-to-5, Bob surfed the Web. At 9, he’d roll in and surf Reddit, watching cat videos. At 11:30 he’d grab some lunch. After lunch it was time for EBay for about an hour, when Bob migrated to Facebook. At 4:30, he’d email management, telling them what he had “done” during the day, and at 5, he’d go home.”
http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-man-outsourced-job-to-china-20130117,0,7296290.story
bobo
January 19, 2013 at 8:26 am
Good for him.
Anonymous
January 19, 2013 at 10:59 am
The problem with engineering outsourcing to China is that of dangerous territory. The Chinese are not up to par with American and Japanese ingenuity, and also reliability. I take many of their engineers still regard America as more reliable and stable when it comes to building infrastructure. Just take a look at their careless accidents due to the shoddiness of their engineers and builders. Proof: The bullet train crash last year or the year before, which killed many. In addition, you can find countless news about their construction mishaps due to poor urban planning.
Just Speculating
January 19, 2013 at 3:57 pm
I think a lot of the problems are due to corruption. China is corrupt from top to bottom, including the schools and universities.
melykin
January 19, 2013 at 11:23 pm
Chinese folks tend to be shady. I think the environment the average Chinese grows up in in China causes Chinese people to become very selfish and greedy. They’ll slyly rob and take advantage of you with a smile. When you call them out on their shady behavior, they tend to mention the supposed good things they’ve done for you then talk nonsensical stuff that has nothing to do with defending their integrity. They’ll talk all sorts on nonsense and never ever admit to being being shady no matter how much evidence that obviously brings to light their true selves you present.
bobo
January 20, 2013 at 8:51 am
Bob…you are correct, but the Chinese do what you describe when they get caught, because you are shaming them, so their natural instinct is to save face…the correct response in China is to let them back out of the situation by pretending to believe their B.S. lol No, I’m not kidding.
GrassMudHorse
January 26, 2013 at 2:15 am
I’m curious: what percentage of these Chinese people flooding US colleges are recently-immigrated PRC mainlanders?
The “tell” is that they have Mandarin names written in Pinyin (the PRC’s preferred romanization scheme; the one with all the Qs and Xs and Gs and Bs) with no dashes between parts of their given names, whereas people from Taiwan and most overseas Chinese use the more accessible Wade-Giles (“Tsao Hsüeh-Chin”, “Lo Kuan-Chung”) or have Cantonese names (with syllables ending in m, k, p, and t, which don’t occur in Mandarin).
Even in the 1990s, almost every Chinese person you met in the US was either a Cantonese speaker, or from Taiwan. These days, with economic liberalization in the People’s Republic, it seems like more and more people from the mainland are emigrating.
Kyo
January 19, 2013 at 9:47 am
Hacker News is moderated for political correctness. I posted a couple of comments with links to CH and they got deleted without a world. Wow!
http://news.ycombinator.com/
Ugas
January 19, 2013 at 12:12 pm
Video game forums are also moderated by extreme leftists (I’ve been perma banned from several). The self loathing white men who inhabit the tech world deserve their shitty virgin/chubby chaser lives.
Conquistador
January 19, 2013 at 2:18 pm
GAF, a forum I otherwise really enjoy, is one such, particularly with feminism. I avoid talking about politics there for that reason.
Kyo
January 19, 2013 at 4:44 pm
The entire tech world is just a gigantic mangina central – look at Slashdot for example.
But it’s not surprising – young men are a liberal’ish and highly manginal/beta demographic.
ntk
January 19, 2013 at 5:45 pm
Yes indeed. They produce value and then let theselves be ripped off, the whole time believing they make a good wage and they are smart.
Stupor Mundi
January 19, 2013 at 9:51 pm
Here is a comment about 2nd and 3rd tiered universities in China from the article (from someone alled XL), :
“Students from those colleges barely learned something from their undergraduate studying, they sleep in the classes, they play video games until 11 PM every day, they copy each other’s assignments, and they cheat in their final exams, but the worst part is that the teachers or professors does not seem care about that.
One more thing, the party’s influence is so deep inside those colleges, students with good grades could not get scholarships, instead, the school just give them to students whose father or mother are party officials.”
melykin
January 19, 2013 at 11:45 pm
1/ What engineering degrees did the Wrights, Edison, Jobs, Gates, Ellison, or Zuckerberg get?
2/ If the Chinese engineering degrees are anything like a lot of the Russian engineering degrees then I might hire on of these degree-holders to fix my car. Maybe.
Boxthorn
January 20, 2013 at 12:20 pm