Cambridge Chinese

In Cambridge yesterday, as always impressed by the large number of young Chinese students in evidence. When I lived there, I felt they lifted the tone of the university, and I hoped they were getting value for money from, in effect, subsidising the British students.

So I was primed for an article in today's Telegraph by Peter Foster in Beijing, which reports that Chinese students in Shanghai's elite Jiaotong University - almost all of them in the hard sciences - rate Cambridge fifth among foreign universities for post-grad research, after Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford and MIT. Other British universities are also-rans, the next being Oxford (10), University College London (21), Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine (26) and Manchester (44). Foster says:

Britain and Europe have fared dismally again in an annual Chinese ranking of top international universities. Should we be concerned? I think we should, and here’s why.

Based on conversation with  a single "British-Australian economics Phd candidate that I’ve been talking to at Peking University (China’s equivalent of Oxbridge)", he concludes:

. . . all the really top students want to go the US to study. And they wouldn’t be seen dead in the UK. The reason is partly economic: with their massive endowments US universities can afford to fund places for the best candidates in order to attract the very best to their research programmes. Their focus is all about merit, not money. By contrast, British institutions are seen to be using foreign students as a cash-cow to be mercilessly milked, subsidising the fees of homegrown students and shoring up their books at a time when funding is being cut by central government. Among her classmates, she says, the overwhelming perception is that the students who go to UK universities are the children of the rich and politically well-connected who couldn’t quite cut it at the top level and win scholarships to the US.

It may be that the modest demeanour and total lack of ostentation in the Chinese students at Cambridge is a signature of the children of their country's rich and politically well-connected - if so, it bodes well for China.

An infinitesimally small number of students win scholarships from the vast endowments of Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford and MIT. If Cambridge, without such inducement, is still fifth in preference among Chinese post-grads, its science departments must be extremely attractive in terms of academic excellence.

But then that's just silly old me me being logical. Obviously anecdotal comments from an expat student (does Foster speak Chinese, one wonders?) are far more conclusive.