As those who read these scribblings regularly know, the subjects of the rise of China and the decline of education in America receive a fair amount of my time. Today's NY Times discusses China's push in graduate level education in science and technology. You know: something similar to the push here after Sputnik.
China is recruiting professors from around the world to staff their universities and research labs. And they're able to convince people from places like Princeton, Yale and MIT to come to China to help it become known as having the leading universities in the world over the next ten to twenty years.
The education push has been going on for almost thirty years and has succeeded in increasing the percent of its college-age population who actually are in college from 1.4% in 1978 to 20% now. Many of these students are in engineering: 442,000 undergraduates, 48,000 with masters, 8,000 with doctorates.
While China by no means practices the same type of academic freedom that we have here - and that freedom is really necessary if they are to succeed on a grand scale beyond mere numbers -, I suspect that they will gradually loosen up over time. Whether they move fast enough to keep the people they've recruited is the question.
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