The Asians aren't Coming! The Asians aren't Coming!
Published June 30, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT
A quick snippet from "Think Again: Asia's Rise" in the latest Foreign Policy, which I hope makes EdSec Duncan, President Obama, and the rest of the "Asian (education) peril" crowd, um, "think again":
Asia is pouring money into higher education. But Asian universities will not become the world's leading centers of learning and research anytime soon. None of the world's top 10 universities is located in Asia, and only the University of Tokyo ranks among the world's top 20. In the last 30 years, only eight Asians, seven of them Japanese, have won a Nobel Prize in the sciences. The region's hierarchical culture, centralized bureaucracy, weak private universities, and emphasis on rote learning and test-taking will continue to hobble its efforts to clone the United States' finest research institutions.
Even Asia's much-touted numerical advantage is less than it seems. China supposedly graduates 600,000 engineering majors each year, India another 350,000. The United States trails with only 70,000 engineering graduates annually. Although these numbers suggest an Asian edge in generating brainpower, they are thoroughly misleading. Half of China's engineering graduates and two thirds of India's have associate degrees. Once quality is factored in, Asia's lead disappears altogether. A much-cited 2005 McKinsey Global Institute study reports that human resource managers in multinational companies consider only 10 percent of Chinese engineers and 25 percent of Indian engineers as even "employable," compared with 81 percent of American engineers.
Facebook
Twitter
Digg
StumbleUpon
EmailRelated Posts
-
Math Courses Suggest Rigor, But Scores Stagnating Since 1993
-
Student Scores Stagnate: No Country Left Behind?
-
Report: NYC Charters Do Cream, Exclude Neediest Students
Comments (8)
Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the ideas covered in the posts. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments that are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; that contain ad hominem attacks; or that are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion.
Author
-
Clay is an American high school Humanities teacher, technology coach, and Apple Distinguished Educator who has taught for the last eight years in Asian international schools. According to law, he's married to his wife. According to his wife, he's married to his Mac.
I would be interested in seeing what percentage of the 70,000 engineers graduated from American universities were actually American citizens. As far as the Nobel Prize winners in sciences, in the last 30 years the US only garnered 6 laureates and one who was actually a native Lithuanian. Maybe Western countries en total have out-performed Asian countries in Nobel sciences, but toe to toe, Japan can be considered to have provided more than the US.
My point is, I think the data provided is presented as half-truths to appear stronger than it really is.
Posted by Kimberly Jean on 06/30/2009 @ 01:04PM PT
You must be signed in to report content.
Sorry! The previous Nobel data reflects that of the UK, not US. The US's accomplishments in the last 30 years were 59 awarded science prizes, and another 20 of whom were foreign born scientists. Keep in mind we have 3x the population of Japan and 5x that of the UK. While it still puts the US in the "lead", I fear narrow statistics like this (winning a Nobel Prize or not) doesn't reflect accurately the whole picture.
Sorry for confusion, again! No edit option.
Posted by Kimberly Jean on 06/30/2009 @ 01:29PM PT
You must be signed in to report content.
Kim, besides Ray's point below, I used bold print to emphasize the points in the article most relevant to my purposes. The Nobel Prize stats weren't bolded.
Posted by Clay Burell on 06/30/2009 @ 11:31PM PT
You must be signed in to report content.
@Kimberly Jean
I think the report has more to do with the superior quality of educational institutions rather than the nationalities of their students. It makes no claim that researchers and academics of Western backgrounds are more accomplished than those of Asian backgrounds.
Posted by Ray de Mesa on 06/30/2009 @ 07:32PM PT
You must be signed in to report content.
I think the report has more to do with the superior quality of educational institutions in the West rather than the nationalities of their students. It makes no claim that researchers and academics of Western backgrounds are more accomplished than those of Asian backgrounds.
Posted by Ray de Mesa on 06/30/2009 @ 07:33PM PT
You must be signed in to report content.
Hi Clay,
I'll try again to post my thoughts. Of course, they won't be nearly as brilliant as they were the first time I wrote them. Hope they don't get swallowed this time.
Every time I hear someone playing the numbers game with Chinese and Indian students as though they're going to clean our clock (such as the "Did You Know" video), I try to tell them about some of the things that I learned during my past few trips to China.
Generally speaking, only about 10-11% of the college wannabes in China get a seat at the Chinese universities. Another 10-15% get an alternative educational opportunity similar to trade schools as well as online learning, which the Chinese consider to be vastly inferior to the seated universities. Therefore, only about 20-25% of the Chinese high school grads even have the opportunity for some form of higher education.
If someone focuses on the top 10% of the population then yes, it's easy to get frightened by the number of really smart people that they have. However, let's not lose sight of the 80% who are not well educated at all. That is hardly a system to which we should aspire.
One other interesting contrast that I saw while over there: the Chinese seem to have a genuine interest in copying the somewhat American style (in other words, some educators do this) of enhancing creativity in learning and abandoning the lecture-only style of teaching and learning. At the same time, thanks to NCLB and similar testing efforts, we seem to be moving toward their model of rote learning and test-taking. We really need to ensure that these two ships don't pass in the night.
Posted by Barry Dahl on 07/01/2009 @ 11:47AM PT
You must be signed in to report content.
Well they're pretty brilliant for re-runs ;-)
Especially that last paragraph. Obama seems to have chosen a guy who thinks all that testing is good. Let's hope he treads carefully.
Posted by Clay Burell on 07/01/2009 @ 12:11PM PT
You must be signed in to report content.
I often wonder if as American we spend a disproportionate amount of time worrying if we'll get kicked off our imperial throne. Odds are we will.
One of our great strengths is the creative capacity of our people as a whole. I'd argue part of the American Spirit or perhaps the best part of it is our willingness to dream creative dreams and change things. As long as our educational system keeps from drumming out creativity, confidence, and guts we will probably be just fine.
Hopefully being fine will come to mean more a nation's score on the happiness index instead of our GDP. But alas that may be a dream to bold for the here and now.
Posted by Charlie Roy on 07/05/2009 @ 10:24AM PT
You must be signed in to report content.