Swarthmore College in spring.
Somehow three different articles on Asian international students in the US came to my attention in the last 24 hours. Helen Gao writes for the Atlantic about how China’s nouveaux riches are flocking to send their children to expensive US private schools, which they think will better prepare them for expensive US private universities:
Four years of private American high school education can cost around $200,000, a considerable sum for American families, and even more for a family from China, where average wealth is about one fifth as in the U.S. However, China’s many newly minted millionaires see it as a worthy investment and a reliable path to an even higher goal: Ivy League colleges. In fact, the phenomenon reflects more than just the rising economic prowess of China’s middle class. It is also a lens into their complicated and often conflicting psychology: increasingly ambitious and outward-looking, at once sophisticated and perhaps a bit naive, they seem driven by a combination of faith in China’s future and distrust of its present; a belief that education abroad will translate into success at home.
