Name: The Chinese Student Crisis
Uploaded: 2022-03-27T13:02:12.000Z
Duration: 21 min 44 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Each year, 40 million students graduate  high school and make what many consider  

the most important decision of one's  entire life: where to attend college.

Anxious about their future,  pressured by their parents,  

and armed with only the most basic  understanding of compound interest,  

would-be college freshmen make the kind  of customer most businesses only dream of.

An 18-year-old is more informed about the  brand of shoes they wear than the institution  

at which they'll spend 200 weeks of  their lives and $84,000 on average.

The basic problem is information asymmetry.  Prospective students can take tours, deciding  

whether a school's trees are a satisfactory shade  of green and buildings sufficiently old looking,  

but nearly everything else they know  comes from just one source: the seller.

Now imagine making this decision 7,000 miles away,  

having never stepped foot in the country,  and as a non-native English speaker.  

That's the challenge faced by America's  340,000 Chinese international students.

So, what does a diligent  young adult do to compensate?  

They turn to the Consumer Reports  of education: college rankings.

little do they know, they're rewarded  with a mix of fraud and deception.

It's not just that rankings are inaccurate or  misleading — though make no mistake, they are!

In fact, almost everything wrong with higher  education today — the student loan crisis,  

inequitable admissions, academic plagiarism, and  the collapse of tenure are ultimately symptoms.

…Symptoms of one giant,  interconnected web of deceit.

Sponsored by Fabulous, the app  that uses behavioral science  

to help you build healthy habits like  meditation, exercise, and better sleep.

From the day a baby is born in China,  he or she unknowingly enters a race.

Although they won't take the Gaokao, China's  college entrance exam, for another 18 years,  

it alone will ultimately determine  their career and social class.

And “determine” means determine — there are no  letters of recommendation, extracurriculars,  

awards, or alternate pathways. The  Gaokao is the only race that matters.

Because it's held just once a year  and the results highly publicized,  

Every hour of sleep lost, every  hobby forgone, and talent abandoned  

is easily justified — it could be the  difference between one's dream and fallback.

Why do Chinese students collectively sacrifice  what the rest of the world calls “adolescence”  

for a single exam? In a word: fairness. The  poor farmer's daughter and chief executive's  

son take the same exam, in the  same room, at the same time.

Of course, in the real world, the rich and  powerful usually find a way. Contradictions,  

a “Communist” country with the 2nd  highest concentration of billionaires.

For middle and upper-class kids, an overseas  education is a lifeboat on the Titanic — an  

escape from academic pressure and  the public spotlight, respectively.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam's  

son and Chairman Xi Jinping's  daughter both attended Harvard.

Seven in ten Americans attend a public college.  

But despite coughing up over 21,000 US dollars  a year for in-state tuition, room, and board  

on average, students themselves only directly  contribute one-fifth of their school's budget.

Most of the total — about  40% — is covered by state,  

federal, and a bit of local government  grants, contracts, and appropriations.

What this means is that public universities  are largely at the whim of their federal  

and state governments, who, in turn,  depend on a healthy stream of tax revenue.

During “normal” times — which is to say, a long  time ago — this was no big deal. The system,  

imperfect as it was, chugged along mostly…  fine… enough until the 2008 recession,  

when schools were painfully reminded of  the house of cards they're built upon.

People lost their jobs, the  government lost its tax revenue,  

and thus universities lost their funding. Oops.

Not only was there just less money  going around, but because there was  

less money going around, universities were  under greater scrutiny to use it well.

What every good Capitalist does, of  course! They commodified education,  

casting their line further and further  afield in search of untapped markets.

They both exported the product — slapping  their logos on deep-pocketed modular  

architecture everywhere — and imported customers.

International students weren't some  new invention but universities were  

shocked by how deep the wells  were — particularly in China.

It all began as a short-term  solution to an acute problem:  

fill a hole in the budget. But  they soon realized the potential.

The intense pressure of the Gaokao, combined with  

China's growing middle-class had produced an  insatiable desire for overseas credentials.

Today, there are two and half times as many  Chinese international students in the U.S.  

as second place India, which is itself two  point seven times larger than third place Korea.

And that's not just because China  is huge. The country is home to 18%  

of the world's population, but 35%  of international students in America.

Demand, in other words, had accidentally  discovered a huge, under-exploited supply.

There was basically no limit to the number  of keen Chinese students they could attract.

Even a decent state school in the middle of  nowhere could arbitrage the American brand,  

converting its U.S. address plus the vague notion  of “international exposure” into cold hard cash.

But, say you're a Chinese student who's never  stepped foot in the States. How do you pick a  

school despite knowing next to nothing about the  country, much less any individual city or state?

You take out your phone, Google “best colleges  in America” and tap on the first result, duh!

Students and their parents are universally  desperate for objective answers — guidance  

in making the quote “right choice”, and  later assurance that they indeed have.

Rankings prey on this anxiety, and doubly  so in the case of international students,  

whose vacuum of knowledge  is ripe for exploitation.

Chinese international students,  in particular, are both, by far,  

the largest kind, and, according to this survey,  the most persuaded by reputation and prestige.

The only little problem is that rankings  are…well, complete and utter garbage.

Let's start with the low-hanging fruit:  It isn't possible to reduce an entire  

university to a single number. At least, not  without losing all meaning in the process.

In what world does Goshen College,  a Mennonite school with 827 students  

in rural Indiana belong on the same list as  a party school, like say, the University of  

Alabama, whose student population is  larger than the entire town of Goshen?

In fairness, they do share  the same basic mission — the  

proliferation of knowledge. But the  same can't be said of all schools.

The Mennonites look like close relatives of  Crimson Tide when compared to Peking University  

— whose charter replaced “freedom of thought”  with loyalty to the Communist Party in 2019.

One building strives to cultivate  the next generation of thinkers.  