College in the west and college in China are not one and the same. They are not even one country two systems; they are two totally, completely different things. One could make a strong argument that the differences in higher education and the culture surrounding it exemplify the disparities and futures of the east and the west.

In China entering university means you have gotten a good score on the dreaded gaokao and you are finally freed from a decade and a half of test prep and tutorial tyranny. Chinese children on the path to success don’t have weekends because they’re too busy taking extra classes, seeing tutors, and doing homework; don’t watch movies because their parents forbid it; and don’t have friends because there’s just no time.

While Chinese students are arranging with their 7 roommates who will share which bunk and getting ready to go into a course of study already decided for them by a combination of their strengths, their gaokao scores, and their betting insincts; their American counterparts are getting fake IDs (if they don’t yet have them), choosing a schedule of classes with a minimum of classes before 10 or 11AM and certainly none on Friday, and learning which liquor stores don’t card.

Another way to look at the difference is to look at the most popular majors. The number one major in China is engineering. Many of the top CCP officials from Hu Jintao on down hold engineering degrees, usually from Qinghua University. Hard as it is to believe, and I had to check several sites before I believed it myself, George W Bush majored in history at Yale before getting his MBA at Harvard. If many of China’s leaders studied engineering and America’s elected officials studied business is it any wonder the amount of money China is pumping into infrastructure and the percentage of the US economy that depends on business making money off of money made by other businesses?

According to college experts and extortionists Princeton Review – those fine folks who created the GRE and make ridiculous amounts of money selling books on how to pass it – the top 10 majors in the United States are:

1) Business Administration and Management
2) Psychology
3) Elementary Education
4) Biology
5) Nursing
6) Education
7) English
8) Communications
9) Computer Science
10) Political Science

Having never met a biology major I have my doubts about this list but perhaps I’m just hanging with the wrong crowd.

I couldn’t find a comprehensive list for but the recent report on China’s Top Colleges tells us engineering is number one, and agricultural science has recently been demoted to fifth place by management science. Informal research indicates finance, accounting, business administration, material science, chemistry, computer science, physics, polymer science, architecture, IT, and physics are big draws while education and law both rank quite low.

 

 

While Chinese students are enjoying their newfound freedom by downloading loads of movies and hanging out in the dorm until the lights are shut out off at 11pm, Americans are busy learning how to do keg stands and worrying they’ve contracted an STD. In general Chinese students do not seem to be smoking pot, drinking 24 packs of Milwaukee’s Best aka The Beast, doing acid, or eating shrooms.

One of the reasons for this dichotomy is money. And not just that American students have more money because that’s not necessarily the case. Although university in China is often much cheaper than in the US – even when currencies and cost of living are accounted for – the broader admission process in the US admits more students from a much more diverse backgrounds. Lower tuition means Chinese parents are more able to bankroll their single child through college whereas American parents still funding their now adult children are struggling to pay up to 40,000USD a year in tuition fees as well as junior’s health insurance and bar tab.

Because the financial crunch on American students is often much tighter, far more American college students hold part or even full time jobs, to pay the bills and to try to defray the 100,000 dollars of debt they will be receiving along with their literature degree and the mortar board and tassel (which you can either buy or rent, but either way you pay for it).

That extra access to cash and the greater emphasis on earlier independence in American society means that even while they party, American students are living much more ‘adult’ lives – footing rent and other bills and paying for their education.

You’d think this would instill in American students a greater desire to learn something useful, like engineering, but it doesn’t. A recent hilarious list of the 10 most worthless college majors drew a lot of requests from readers asking for their major to be added. “I have a film degree and I use it all the time whenever I have a table that's slightly wobbly,” wrote one auteur; and this philosopher, “I learned just enough in philosophy to screw me up for the rest of my life.” Two general rules of thumb also emerged, “Any degree with "studies" in the name is a waste of your parents' money, “and less scientifically, of course, “if your degree supplied you with clever banter that will actually be interesting to the ladies, it's useless outside of that realm.”

As the economy collapses it would behoove American students to suck it up and go into agricultural sciences. It is true China has its own economic and employment problems and there will be fewer golf courses built in coming years, but the young Chinese woman I met heading to the University of Michigan to do a masters in how to grow golf grass is sensibly planning her future around a different sort of green technology.

No one wants to wake up in the morning to go to physics classes, but it’s a better bet, especially now, to suck it up and learn an employable skill. It’s better than waking up late in a van down by the river.

Looking for a job in China? You’ll find a lot of them here

Related Links
Rank of China's TOP universities of different categories in 2009
Do Chinese Universities Get a Passing Grade?
Peking University: China's Hundred-Millionaire Factory

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