Chris Blattman

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The changing face of graduate education

From The Economist‘s Free Exchange blog:

If you are a PhD student in America, there’s a good chance that your undergraduate degree came from Tsinghua University in China. That’s because Tsinghua and Peking Universities are now the top feeder schools for American PhD programmes. Chinese students have the largest presence in the natural sciences and engineering, and the better funded hard sciences have the most students. Thus, when you aggregate the number of PhD students, the Chinese universities prevail.

It continues to surprise me that there is not more of a reverse move: Chinese universities luring American faculty and students with promises of cash and influence. Is it underfunding of public universities? An absence of academic freedom? Language barriers? American academic snobbery? I know too little of China to say.

Readers?

6 Responses

  1. I’m inclined to agree with kaleberg for the most part. American universities still produce the most and highest quality research (though that’s changing) and just take a look at how the Shanghai Jiao Tong University ranks the top 500 universities: of the top 20, 17 are in the US, of the top 50, 37 are in the US. Their methodology is really geared towards the sciences and so the difference is visible in graduate education and research opportunities.

  2. I think one must consider the value-chain that lures Chinese (or other nationals) students to the U.S vs. the other way:

    1. This may sound politically incorrect, but English is the language of business and technology today. The value of studying and learning in an English system has greater longterm payoffs than doing the Chinese system. With English, you can work globally; with Chinese, you can only work in China (most Chinese companies outside of China speak the local languages spoken there, and English).

    2. Even though Chinese GDP and employment rates are growing, one must consider the high population rates. There is still a high unemployment rate in China, as compared to the US. Essentially there is no incentive for an American to go through a Chinese University, because the job competition after that is insane.

    3. Finally, even Chinese companies pay better and value American degrees better than their own. If you have a degree from MIT or Harvard, the chances of you getting a really good job in a Chinese company is MUCH higher than the other way. In fact, an MIT/Harvard/etc degree is a global degree; Tsinghua is known only in academic circles and in China. Hardly outside of that.

    In conclusion, there are few incentives for Americans (or other nationals) to go to a Chinese university; whereas there are tremendous incentives (job, language, degree recognizability) for coming to the US.

  3. the Language and cultural barriers are profound. its a lot easier to be accepted as a chinese immigrant into american culture than vice versa. I have seen more Chinese profs being lured back to China, there is a ways to go on that before China needs to recruit Americans.

  4. Well, I’m considering a move to one of the institutes in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (in biology). The big unknown for me is the quality of students and postdocs that I would get. How do I judge quality in the absence of standardized tests and reference letters that I can trust? And if things don’t work out, it’s difficult to get rid of the student. Also, there is probably *even more* academic politics in China than in the West, although good papers in good journals count for more.

    One also always has in the back of one’s mind issues like food safety, avian flu, political strife, and so on. Academics are risk averse in their personal lives so as to be able to be risk-loving in their work. A move to China appeals to risk-lovers in general.

  5. One problem is that the US has a great graduate level educational system. A lot of the world is still trying to catch up with our infrastructure. Not only is the US system good, it is also big. There is a lot of catching up to do. (I read Science, so I see lots of articles on university and research restructuring in Europe).

    Another problem is that higher education is extremely decentralized in the US. In most of the world, the government funds higher education and both power and money flow from on high down to the university, to the college, to the department, to the faculty and labs. In the US money flows up and down with government grants and commercial research contracts going directly to professors. This makes things a lot more freewheeling in that faculty and students often straddle the university / commercial boundary. For all its problems and potential for corruption, this structure is hard to transfer elsewhere. It requires the powerful giving up power. It also makes it hard for powerful figures to move from the US since they move from the status of an independent prince to a lowly earl.

    A third problem is that the US is still the land of opportunity. What does a student do after graduation? Sure, you can form a company in China, but how big can you get, and how much of it can you retain? Sure, American VCs are vultures, but if a well connected member of the Communist Party decides he wants your outfit, you are just out luck. In the US you can put up a fight and stand a good chance of winning.

    —-

    Yes, there are a lot of great universities out there, and a lot of good programs. I knew a number of Americans in computer science who did doctoral work at Uppsala in Sweden, but if you wanted to do serious work in software, you had to consider MIT, CMU, Stanford, UCB, and a host of other American institutions.

  6. I don’t have any evidence of this, but I’ve gotten the impression that Americans are less willing to move abroad than most anyone else. I know on the Testmagic (econ PhD) forums, there are plenty of people saying they want to stay in the States for their PhD, but pretty much no one saying they want to stay in Italy or China.

    I know from personal experience that plenty of kids in India and Pakistan are brought up with the whole “US or bust” mentality.

    One thing about Americans going to China: I think that kids with overseas undergraduate degrees coming to the US for PhD, and then going back to their original country to work, is a pretty common phenomenon.

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