This is South Korea but the
description could fit China equally well.
Recently however, after years of
robust enrollment increases, graduate applications from South Korea to American
colleges have fallen off; and last year the number of South Korean
undergraduates in the United States also dropped. Fewer South Koreans study in
the United States now than did five years ago.
South Korean students who study
abroad often find that they lack the local connections to get a job when they
return home, says Jaeha Choi, director of student recruitment and admissions at
SUNY-Korea, the State University of New York’s campus outside Seoul, South
Korea’s capital.
Softening
interest from South Korea, the third-largest supplier source of international
students to the United States, could serve as a warning to American institutions
that have grown to rely on tuition revenue from China, the largest source.
The two countries differ in
politics, population and economics, but they share common educational traditions
and motivations for sending their students abroad, and their international
mobility patterns have followed corresponding trajectories.
“The Chinese market is very much
like Korea 10 years ago,” said Jekook Woo, an education consultant in Seoul.
And recent hand-wringing in China
about the return on a pricey foreign degree echoes qualms among South Korean
families that overseas study is no longer the guarantee of economic security
that it once was.
For decades, sending top students
abroad was a pragmatic choice for both countries, a recognition of the lack of
educational capacity at home, particularly at the graduate level. But as their
economies and educational systems changed, so did the reasons for foreign
study.
Growing affluence — beginning in
the 1990s in South Korea and within the past decade in China — meant that more
families could afford an American education. In both countries, parents bet that
a foreign degree could help their children in an increasingly global and crowded
job market. Many South Korean businesses, in fact, require prospective hires to
submit English-proficiency scores.
The decision to go abroad may also
reflect a desire to opt out of rigid, highly competitive educational systems.
Performance on the gaokao, China’s national college-entrance exam, and its
Korean equivalent, the suneung, are the sole determinants of college
admission.
Perhaps as a result, students from
both countries are heading overseas earlier. Twice as many South Korean students
go to the United States now for undergraduate study as for graduate-level work,
according to the Institute of International Education. Over the past decade, the
number of Chinese undergrads at American colleges has grown nearly 900
percent.
But the
very popularity of overseas study may be undercutting its rationale. Nearly
240,000 South Korean students went abroad last year, equal to roughly 7 percent
of the college population. About one-third of that number was in the United
States. With such a large share of students overseas, any edge that a foreign
degree gives a South Korean graduate could be blunted.
“Maybe the novelty of studying in
America has worn off,” said Vincent Flores, an education adviser with the
Fulbright Commission in Seoul.
While the share of China’s
college-age population that goes abroad remains small, one in every three
foreign students in the United States is Chinese.
Some American colleges are so well
known for their large Chinese enrollments that they’ve spawned a joke, said
Jordan Dotson, who advises students in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen
about the American college-application process. “If you want to improve your
Chinese, go to America, because you’ll have many, many classmates from Beijing,”
he said.
If the surfeit of Chinese students
at certain institutions risks turning some students off, others may be
discouraged by the difficulty of getting into elite American colleges, despite
excellent grades and test scores. To put it in perspective, this year some 150
students from a single top Shenzhen high school competed for admission to a
handful of select American colleges. That nearly equals the total number of
international students in Harvard’s freshman class.
If they are rejected by leading
American colleges, Mr. Dotson’s students will attend highly ranked institutions
outside the United States, including the University of Hong Kong, the University
of Toronto and Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Next year, he said, their younger
classmates might not even bother applying to America. “The top kids understand
that it’s tougher for them to get into U.S. universities,” he said. “It’s
insanely competitive.”
If getting into college is
competitive, so, too, is the job market awaiting graduates in both
countries.
In South Korea, the employment
rate for college graduates has fallen to just 60 percent in a shaky economy.
Graduates of vocational programs have better job placement. In China, it’s a
numbers game: With seven million graduates, the unemployment rate for the class
of 2013 is nearly 18 percent, according to the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences.
A foreign degree was supposed to
benefit job seekers in a tight market, but now it might even be a
disadvantage.
Returning students often find that
they lack the connections needed to land a job, said Mr. Choi of SUNY-Korea.
Despite the growing numbers of international students, most career-services
offices at American institutions are focused on placing students closer to
home.
“In Korea, kinship is important.
It’s a very relational society,” Mr. Choi said. “You have to have a good network
in your school to get a job. Those students who study in the States don’t.”
The first
of the surge of Chinese undergraduates at American colleges are only now
beginning to return home. But a study of earlier Chinese returnees working in
venture capital found that they were actually less successful than their
counterparts who had remained at home, a finding that the study’s author, Wei
Sun, a research fellow at the National University of Singapore, attributed to a
possible mismatch in skills and weaker social networks.
A survey last year by Zhilian
Zhaopin, a Chinese recruitment firm, found that 70 percent of employers would
give no hiring preference to overseas-educated applicants; nearly 10 percent
said they would prefer not to hire them.
The Chinese
have a name for those who return home after studying or working abroad:
“Haigui,” or sea turtles, referring to those with one foot in the homeland,
another overseas. But now a new term is catching on for those who have gone
abroad: “Haidai,” or seaweed, referring to those who float between two countries
and cultures, unable to anchor in either.
Of course, not all the reasons
behind the declining interest in study abroad are negative. one important factor
is that educational opportunities once obtainable only overseas are now more
readily available at home.
The South Korean government has
emphasized improving English- language instruction in the schools, and many
South Korean universities are now offering classes taught in English.
Both South Korea and China have a
growing number of joint partnerships with international universities, like Mr.
Choi’s employer, SUNY-Korea, that allow students to earn foreign degrees without
the expense of going abroad. Educational exchanges have also picked up between
the two countries, giving students an international experience while remaining
in the region.
Each country has also invested
heavily in research, spending on top-notch laboratories and world-class faculty.
It is probably no coincidence that the first signs of declining enrollments in
the United States appeared in graduate courses: The number of South Korean
graduate students in the United States has been dropping since 2010, and the
Council of Graduate Schools recently reported that graduate applications from
China were down for the second year in a row.
South Korean universities have
historically preferred to hire faculty members with degrees from abroad, said
Jae-Eun Jon, of the Higher Education Policy Research Institute at Korea
University. But that is changing and, as a consequence, particularly in science
and engineering, “top students really debate between Korea and the United States
for graduate school,” she said.
Some of the factors influencing
foreign study trends are beyond anyone’s control. South Korea’s economy took a
body blow in the recent economic downturn. The country also has the world’s
lowest birthrate; by next year, it could have more available slots at its
universities than students. In China, because of the government’s one-child
policy, there will be 60 percent fewer people aged 20 to 24 by 2030 than in
2010.
For American colleges, any changes
in South Korea and China may not be an immediate problem. Declines in enrollment
from South Korea are often offset by rising student numbers from China or
elsewhere. Many observers do not expect Chinese enrollments to crater any time
soon. There are still too few places at Chinese universities to meet demand and
the number of programs and schools designed to prepare students to go abroad
seems to keep expanding.
Indeed, research by Peter G.
Ghazarian, a professor of education at Keimyung University in South Korea,
suggests that there may actually be untapped demand for an American education in
both China and South Korea. In surveys, he found, more students list the United
States as their destination of choice than actually study there.
Still, few expect South Korea to
return to the strong growth it enjoyed in the middle of the past decade. And
many believe that it is not a matter of whether Chinese enrollments hit a speed
bump, but when.
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