“I am [in Asia] because this is the exciting part of the world. This is the future, and I want my children to grow up knowing Asia, and knowing things Chinese.” — Jim Rogers, global investor and self-made billionaire
I first got the idea that things were changing about four years ago, when I was working as an international student advisor for a small university in Washington, D.C. I got into a conversation with one of my Chinese students, and she told me that while it used to be that Chinese students would do whatever it took to remain in the U.S. after graduation, it was starting to be that many would prefer to return to China, where they found their professional opportunities were better, their stress levels were lower, and their standard of living was higher. I figured then that the next step would likely be that fewer Chinese students would want to come to the U.S. to study in the first place.
So now I've just read a recent article from Xinhua, China's official news service, that suggests that the Chinese are well on their way when it comes to developing a competitive higher education infrastructure. The article explains that they are forming an academic conference of their top nine universities to form a "Chinese Ivy League", whose members are streamlining their cooperation, and who by working together will be better able to compete against any other school in the world.
In the meantime, while it wasn't my intention, I've been following the advice of global investment guru Jim Rogers, who when asked how to prepare for the future advises people to ensure their children learn Mandarin Chinese. As it happens, my twelve year old son is taking Mandarin Chinese as an elective at his school starting this year. I had initially steered him toward Spanish, thinking he'd be more likely to get use out of it, but he was insistent that Chinese was what he wanted to study, and thinking more broadly, perhaps he was right.
Now, I realize that just because there's an article from Xinhua, that doesn't mean that the end of the dominance of American higher education is at hand. And even the annual ranking of world universities from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a member of this new consortium, still shows that American schools still hold most of the top positions, and that their Chinese counterparts are still struggling to get into the top one hundred. But momentum may be on the side of the Chinese schools. And my son has suggested he'd be interested in attending university there rather than in the U.S. If he's not alone, then perhaps it's shaping up to be an interesting century for U.S. dominance of higher education — and I do mean interesting in the Chinese sense.
Next up, what's wrong with for-profit schools?