July 14, 2008

Graduates of Chinese Universities Take the Lead in Earning American Ph.D.'s

Two Chinese universities have moved ahead of the University of California at Berkeley as the top sources of students who go on to earn doctorates at American institutions.

Tsinghua and Peking Universities, and Seoul National University, in South Korea, also topped the list (in that order) of how many of their bachelor’s-degree holders earned natural-science or engineering Ph.D.’s at American institutions in 2006. By that measure, Cornell University was fourth and Berkeley was fifth.

Fully half of the top 20 institutions on the list were foreign: a total of seven Chinese institutions, and one each in India, South Korea, and Taiwan.

As recently as 2004, Berkeley was No. 1 in the production of all Ph.D.’s, including education, the humanities, and the social sciences. But Tsinghua, often called “the MIT of China,” claimed the top spot in 2005, and Peking moved up to No. 2 in 2006, the most recent year for which data were available.

That’s according to an analysis, first reported in the current issue of the journal Science, of data from the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates. The review was performed by the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, a nonprofit group in Washington that tracks the science and engineering work force.

The trends speak to a growing concern among American educators and policy makers that China and other Asian nations are likely to produce large numbers of scientists and engineers who will help them out-compete the United States technologically. For now, that concern is allayed somewhat because many Asian students who earn Ph.D.’s in America seek to remain there to work. But their choices could change as their home country’s economies — especially China’s — mature.

The numbers reflect the abundance of foreign students pursuing Ph.D.’s in science or engineering — one third of all doctoral students in those fields — at American institutions. —Jeffrey Brainard

Comments

1. Growing concern? There should be full-blown panic. Leftist radicals have destroyed the American educational system, producing far too few quantitatively and technologically literate students for the United States to remain a global leader in the 21st century. Chinese and Korean students from universities unencumbered by PC liberalism will push their countries to the forefront.

   — TRB    Jul 14, 12:11 PM    #

2. TRB,
   What is your political agenda in fanning this fire? Try reading the most credible report yet on S&E education in the US (http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG674/).
   Then get back to us.

   — gl    Jul 14, 12:38 PM    #

3. TRB has shown great ignorance.

   — G Lovett    Jul 14, 03:38 PM    #

4. I’m sure TRB can speak for herself/himself, but one does not need a “political agenda” to boldy face and state the obvious: American public schools, for the most part, suck.

   — formerly known as. . .    Jul 14, 03:47 PM    #

5. formerly known as . . . did you attend an average American public school or did you go to an academic prep school aiming only to equip you to compete with other upper middle class offspring?

   There’s a political, class war against all the things Public Schools do that aren’t related to academic competition. This is widespread in Public universities, even. Your points are no more accurate than TRB’s.

   — Mazvita    Jul 14, 04:19 PM    #

6. ….or Asian schools for that matter!

   — Raymond P. Vito    Jul 14, 04:58 PM    #

7. Hey, people—you’re missing the most salient points here. First, if American (public school?)universities “suck” so badly, why do Asian students keep coming here in ever-increasing numbers to earn their PhDs? Secondly, the more pertinent question to ask is why fewer American students are pursuing those same PhDs in the sciences or engineering. Hmmmm, maybe they have figured out there’s not much point in working extremely hard to get an advanced degree and incur thousands of dollars in student loan debt only to be laid off, underemployed (adjuncts, anyone?), or outsourced after a few years in the volatile American job market. Everyone knows at least a couple of highly educated and competent engineers in their 40s and 50s who used to have good jobs and now don orange aprons to help customers at Home Depot. At the end of the day, the Indian student with his American PhD can return to India and make a reasonable living, which is more than what many engineers and scientists here can do, through no fault of their own. The problem is greedy corporate capitalism, not “leftist radical” American education.

   — wl    Jul 14, 05:12 PM    #

8. You GO wl – when your country’s adgenda is as skewed as this one’s (scientists left to their own means to fund their own disease-curing research through grants while ball-players and idiot scions of wealthy families earn millions) where is the incentive to drive forward? Where is our country’s support of higher education for all with skyrocketing tuition costs and divebombing public funding? We are a nation in the pockets of corporate greed and apparently need to hit rock-bottom before rising again….

   — rbuck    Jul 14, 05:21 PM    #

9. I wonder if any African university is in the top 100?

   — richard    Jul 14, 05:37 PM    #

10. Are we sure that this is not a simple statistical result of the relative sizes of these particular Asian, Indian, and American universities?

    After all, if Berkeley used to lead the way, as good as my alma mater is, mustn’t part of its lead in generating PhDs have been due to its relative size as well as its quality? Else, why not Harvard or Princeton, or … shudder, Stanford?

    — wmgw    Jul 14, 05:46 PM    #

11. TRB: Lefist radicals have destroyed the American Educational System? Please. Seems to me that your run-of-the-mill conservatives are more responsible for this problem by consistently underfunding education as a whole and leaving huge mandates for frivolous test-based learning completely unfunded (e.g., my child got left behind and so did yours). Republicans are so good at breaking things and then pointing out, “Look it’s broken!! It must have been those liberals who did that!!” It was 20 years ago that the so-called liberal academia predicted the current crisis of education and economics in the U.S. Conservatives blocked efforts to really do anything about the problem (through rhetorical and political means) and now just point fingers. TRB not only seems to ignore history but also seems to express a hint of xenophobia (and who knows where richard is coming from). We live in a GLOBAL society, both culturally and economically, and whether you are faced with Chinese engineers or Latin American farm workers, get used to it. The U.S. is has fourth largest Spanish-speaking population in the world, and you better believe that Mandarin in going to be quick to follow no matter how many anti-immigration and English-only laws the neocon nativists get passed.

    — RLW    Jul 14, 06:23 PM    #

12. TRB reflects the typical hyperbole promulgated by the tunnel vision that characterizes our right wing brethren. American students aren’t going to graduate school for one simple reason. Money. The paltry amount paid graduate assistants in comparison to 40 or 50 years ago tells the tale. When I graduated in 1961 a 9-month graduate assistantship paid between 1/3rd and 1/2 of what 12-month employment in engineering paid, and tuition was waived to boot. For the top students, there were fellowships paying even better. How many Ph.D. programs are offering $20K – $30K assistantships these days with tuition waivers? Foreign nationals are far more willing to live in poverty than their American counterparts, who after all, have the choice of high paying jobs based on their bachelor credentials. If TRB and his ilk really want to see this problem addressed, they should be pushing for payments to American students that make it worth their while to continue on to graduate education.

    — CW    Jul 14, 09:02 PM    #

13. TRB, you sound like another rewind/replay addict of hate radio so deafened by its blather that you can’t see how ridiculous and… yawn … how outdated its Blame the “Radical Leftists” in Academia, the Media, the Libraries, Hollywood, New York City, and whatever other Place To Be Feared And Misunderstood By the Fundies really is.

    The truth is among these other responses; America’s star is setting. Its public education system is poorly funded, its oil is running out, its middle class shrinking, its debts and deficits are soaring, and it’s becoming a living tombstone for the Reaganomics, deregulation, and lack of social conscience that is killing it.

    Mature societies, like those in Western Europe, learned long ago that real family values means spending your national capital on educating all your young and keeping them healthy, not bleeding your people dry and feeding their wealth to a runaway war machine and a gluttonous corporate juggernaut.

    Those kids who do manage to complete elementary and secondary school (which is far fewer than most industrialized countries) face ever higher costs, enjoy ever fewer aid dollars, and ever increasing competition from other nations’ students. And that’s as undergraduates; it gets much worse in graduate school.

    Indeed, with the Standardized Test Worship that passes for public education these days, they’re less and less prepared to do it, and the fact that they are so much less likely to speak another language than these other nations’ students makes them even less viable in the multinational, multicultural world that is higher education. Wake up TRB; your star is setting too.

    — DBM    Jul 15, 09:46 AM    #

14. CW – I pay my Masters students 20K and tuition. They live pretty well, seeing as how they are supposed to be students, not employees. I have hired many GA’s (MS and Ph.D.) and I will tell you the diference I have seen – American students (for the most part) show up expecting everything and knowing very little, expect top money and take off when they feel like it – Asian students are here for an education, generally have better subject knowledge, are willing to do the work required to learn the systems and consistently show up, every day. While this is anecdotal data, I do have many years of it. There was quite a drop in Asian GA’s after 9/11, but that seems to be turning around. With less foreign students to go around, they get better deals from Engineering.

    What is it with Americans the last 20 years or so? I worked for a modest stipend and a tuition wavier and yes, I lived like a GA until I was almost 30 – many tens of years later, I live quite well, just as most of my past GA’s are now doing. What kind of country are we now? All the pieces are laid out for academic success – all American kids have to do is pick them up, and many won’t even do that – frankly, I think the problem is the notion that US higher ed is a right no matter how not smart a student is, and US academic institutions are catering to this trend in order to stay in business.

    — ITDir    Jul 16, 10:26 AM    #

15. Some possible motivational factors: many foreign students feel more special (maybe like a US student at Oxford) and have more to lose than US students if they drop out of school, like their student visa, so they are more motivated to stay in school rather than join the US workforce (hard, requires US work visa). I wonder if some earn more money from a graduate assistant stipend than they would back home.

    — Gc    Jul 16, 06:29 PM    #

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