U.S. College Education, Once Denigrated, Is of Increasing Value in Asia

Across Asia these days, a U.S. college education has become a ticket to the top.

National leaders with American college or university degrees include President Corazon Aquino of the Philippines, President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan and Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan.

They also include Rene Saguisag, a U.S. student in the 1960s, who turned down a high-paying job in law and now is the poorest but most popular member of the Philippines Senate because of his activism; and Satyen G. Pitroda, an Indian electronics engineer who sold off a multimillion-dollar electronics company in the United States to return home to help Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi modernize India’s telecommunications system for a government salary of one rupee (6 cents) a year.

Asian students who stay in the United States after graduation are recognized as helping to keep American standards up in science and technology, fields especially favored by students from China and India.

Many more of Asia’s brightest are in the U.S.-bound pipeline.

The new wealth of many Asian countries enables governments and parents to pay the fast-rising tuition, room and board at American universities--approaching $20,000 a year for Ivy League and similar schools--and at the same time add significantly to the revenues of the American institutions.

Asians are drawn to American campuses partly by the availability of places, partly by growing consciousness of membership in the Pacific Rim community, partly by admiration for the U.S. higher education system.

Atsuko Matsumoto, 24, said she hadn’t been forced to study hard for her degree at Yokohama City College and hoped for more stimulation in an advanced American business course. She already has been to an intensive English course at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Ala.

Advantage in U.S. Schools

“I heard that American university students study very hard, so I think it’s good to go to school there,” Matsumoto said, thumbing through university catalogues in the office of the Japan-United States Educational Commission.

The office’s library was jammed with young Japanese exploring course listings or paying 1,000 yen (about $7) for a 90-page handbook on how to get ready for an American university education.

It’s a scene mirrored many places in Asia as youth in the heavily populated arc from Pakistan to China plan their schooling. Some intend to return home after U.S. study. Some stay in the United States for high-paying jobs or research that cannot be done at home. Others seek to leave behind forever the deprivation or oppression or political uncertainty in their homelands.

Soon after the dust settled in Beijing following the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators, young people braved watchful police and lined up at U.S. consulates in Chinese cities to apply for student visas.

They face many barriers, especially if they need the government financing that is given to 35,000 of the 80,000 Chinese studying abroad this year.

Most Chinese who are permitted to study abroad have to pass competitive tests. Also important are family connections--relations in China who will ensure the student’s eventual return--and being “ideologically and morally sound,” in the words of rules issued in 1987.

Despite such barriers, China had more students in the United States than any other country this year, an estimated 40,000.

One is Jiang Mian, the son of China’s new Community Party leader, Jiang Zemin. He is completing work on a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia, where he has studied since 1986 and lives in a modest brick row house near the campus. He declined to discuss his future with an AP reporter in Philadelphia in late June.

The Chinese government gives financial support mostly to graduate students in engineering and business. Returned students play a major role in advanced study within China, accounting for 30% to 50% of the teachers of postgraduate courses, said Yu Fuzeng, director of the State Education Commission’s Foreign Affairs Bureau in Beijing.

In the 1987-88 school year, Asian students numbered 180,500, or 50.7% of all foreign students in the United States, compared to 28.6% in 1979-80, according to statistics in a newsletter of the National Assn. for Foreign Student Affairs.

The academic year 1987-88 was the first in which Asians were the majority of foreign students, and Asian countries held eight of the first 10 places in the ranking of nations with the most students in U.S. colleges.

William K. Cummings, director of the Office of International Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, wrote in the newsletter that “one can reasonably anticipate continuing expansion of the Asian appetite for overseas study.”

Many more may be from South Korea, which liberalized overseas travel in January and now permits anyone to apply for a passport. The Foreign Ministry in Seoul reports issuing 27,000 passports to students this year, 132% more than last year.

The influx from Asia will help U.S. universities withstand a decline in the number of American students and is likely to aid in the development of collaborative programs between U.S. and foreign universities, Cummings said in the newsletter.

“The flow of Asian students to the United States adds over $1 billion to the American economy,” he wrote.

May Be Too Concentrated

But Cummings warned of potential problems if too many Asians concentrate in a few schools or departments.

This already has caused Malaysia to modify its ambitious program of sending students to the United States, which started early in the 1980s after Britain, formerly the first choice for study abroad, increased fees for foreign students. So many Malaysians were concentrated on a few U.S. campuses that some of the village youths among them got caught up in Islamic fundamentalist groups and became deeply religious or even extremist.

Malaysian officials say, however, that most of the students end up with a broader outlook on the world. The government in Kuala Lumpur, nonetheless, is trying to disperse students to more U.S. universities and encourages American institutions to set up branch campuses in Malaysia. The number of Malaysian students in the United States is expected to be just under 20,000 for the next few years, well below the peak of 24,000 in 1984.

U.S. degrees formerly weren’t valued much in Malaysia or some other Asian countries, especially those that had colonial ties to Britain and long-term links with British universities.

But that is changing, as Arjun Fernando of Sri Lanka experienced recently. Fernando, 30, has a graduate business degree from Clemson University in South Carolina, and for a while thought he was part of his country’s brain drain because Sri Lanka didn’t think highly of his U.S. degree.

“I had no intention of returning, but during a holiday in Sri Lanka, I was offered a good job at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in Colombo, which I accepted,” he said. Colombo is Sri Lanka’s capital.