Each fall, thousands and thousands of students from one East Asian country arrive on American campuses.
They come from a culture that views education as key to success, where mothers and fathers save to send their only children overseas. On top of tuition, parents shell out for test prep and cram schools, supplemental English lessons, and recruitment agents to shepherd them through an unfamiliar admissions process. Once only a small elite pursued advanced degrees internationally; today many sons and daughters of the nation’s emergent middle class go abroad.
The country in question? It is tempting to guess China. In fact, it’s South Korea.
But after years of robust, even double-digit, enrollment increases, there are troubling signs. Graduate applications from Korea to American colleges have fallen off. Last year the number of Korean undergraduates in the United States dropped, too. Fewer South Koreans study in the United States now than five years ago.
Softening interest from the third-largest supplier of international students to the United States is worrisome in its own right. The reversal could also serve as a warning to American institutions that have grown reliant on tuition revenue from the largest source, China—an admonition not to assume that its numbers, too, will continue to go in only one direction, up.
To be sure, China and Korea have marked differences in politics, population, and economics. But they share common educational traditions and motivations for sending their students abroad, and their international-mobility patterns have followed corresponding trajectories.
“The Chinese market,” says Jekook Woo, an education consultant based in Seoul, “is very much like Korea 10 years ago.”
Add to the similarities: Recent hand-wringing in China about the return on a pricey foreign degree echoes qualms among Korean families that overseas study is no longer the guarantee of economic security it once was.
In international education, could a cooling Korea be the canary in the coal mine? Is it a harbinger, a window into a future when the China wave, too, has crested?
Changing Motivations
For decades, sending top students overseas was pragmatic choice for both countries, a recognition of the lack of educational capacity at home, particularly at the graduate level. But as the countries’ economies and educational systems changed, so did the reasons for going abroad.
Growing affluence—beginning in the 1990s in South Korea and within the past decade in China—meant that more families could afford an American education. In both countries, parents bet that a foreign degree could help their children stand out in an increasingly global and crowded job market. Many Korean businesses, in fact, require prospective hires to submit English-proficiency scores.
The decision to go abroad may also reflect a desire to opt out of rigid, highly competitive educational systems. Performance on the gaokao, China’s national college-entrance exam, and its Korean equivalent, the suneung, are the sole determinants of college admission.
Perhaps as a result, students from the two countries are heading overseas at earlier ages. Twice as many Korean students go to the United States now for undergraduate study as for graduate-level work, according to the Institute of International Education. Over the past decade, the number of Chinese undergrads at American colleges has grown by nearly 900 percent.
Saturating the Market
But the very popularity of studying overseas may be undercutting its appeal. Nearly 240,000 Korean students went abroad last year, equal to roughly 7 percent of the college population. About one-third of that number was in the United States. With such a large share of students overseas, any edge that a foreign degree gives a Korean graduate could be blunted.
“Maybe,” says Vincent Flores, an education adviser with the Fulbright Commission in Seoul, “the novelty of studying in America has worn off.”
While the share of China’s college-age population going abroad remains small, in the United States, one in every three foreign students is Chinese. Jordan Dotson advises students in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen and has written a book for Chinese families about the American college-application process. Some U.S. colleges are so well known for their large Chinese enrollments, he says, that they’ve spawned a local punchline: “If you want to improve your Chinese, go to America, because you’ll have many, many classmates from Beijing.”
“It’s a joke,” he says, “and it’s a real problem.”
If the surfeit of Chinese students at certain institutions risks turning some students off, others may be discouraged by the difficulty of getting into elite American colleges, despite excellent grades and test scores. To put it in perspective, this year some 150 students from a single top Shenzhen high school competed for admission to a handful of select American colleges. That’s nearly equal to the number of international students, total, in Harvard’s freshman class.
If “stone-cold rejected” by leading American colleges, Mr. Dotson’s students will attend highly ranked institutions outside the United States, including the Universities of Hong Kong and Toronto, and Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Next year, he fears, their younger classmates might not even bother applying to America. “The top kids understand that it’s tougher for them to get into U.S. universities,” he says. “It’s insanely competitive.”
Sea Turtles and Seaweed
But if getting into college is competitive, so, too, is the job market awaiting graduates in both countries.
In South Korea, the employment rate for college graduates has fallen to just 60 percent in a shaky economy. Those who complete vocational programs actually have better job placement. For China, it’s a numbers game: With seven million graduates, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences put the unemployment rate for the class of 2013 at nearly 18 percent.
A foreign degree was supposed to benefit job seekers in a tight market, but it’s not clear that’s happening in either country. In fact, it might even be a disadvantage.
Returning students often find that they lack the connections important to land a job, says Jaeha Choi, who has worked in international recruitment in the United States and Canada. Despite the growing numbers of international students, most career-services offices at American institutions are focused on placing students closer to home.
“In Korea, kinship is important. It’s a very relational society,” says Mr. Choi, director of student recruitment and admissions at the State University of New York’s campus outside Seoul. “You have to have a good network in your school to get a job. Those students who study in the States don’t.”
The first of the surge of Chinese undergraduates at American colleges are only now beginning to return home. But a study of earlier Chinese returnees working in venture capital found that they were actually less successful than their counterparts who had remained at home, a finding that the author, Wei Sun, a research fellow at the National University of Singapore, attributes to a possible mismatch in skills and weaker social networks.
And a survey last year by Zhilian Zhaopin, a Chinese recruitment firm, found that 70 percent of employers would give no hiring preference to overseas-educated applicants; nearly 10 percent said they would prefer not to hire them.
The Chinese have a name for those who return home after studying or working abroad. Haigui, or sea turtles, are those with one foot in the homeland, another overseas. But now a new term is catching on for those who have gone abroad: haidai, or seaweed, floating between two countries and cultures, unable to anchor in either.
A Matter of When
Of course, not all the reasons behind the declining interest in study abroad are negative. One important factor: Educational opportunities once obtainable only overseas are now more readily available at home.
The South Korean government has emphasized improving English-language instruction in the schools, and many Korean universities are offering classes taught in English.
Both Korea and China have a growing number of joint partnerships with international universities, like Mr. Choi’s employer, SUNY-Korea, that allow students to earn foreign degrees without the expense of going abroad. Educational exchanges have also picked up between the two countries, giving students an international experience while remaining in the region.
Each country has also invested heavily in research, spending big on top-notch laboratories and world-class faculty. It’s probably no coincidence that the initial slides have happened in graduate study: The number of Korean graduate students in the United States has been dropping since 2010, and the Council of Graduate Schools recently reported that graduate applications from China are down for the second year in a row.
Korean universities have historically preferred to hire faculty members with degrees from abroad, says Jae-Eun Jon, of the Higher Education Policy Research Institute at Korea University, but that’s changing. As a consequence, particularly in science and engineering, “top students really debate between Korea and the United States for graduate school,” she says.
Some of the factors influencing study-abroad trends are beyond anyone’s control. Korea’s economy took a body blow in the recent economic downturn. It also has the world’s lowest birthrate; by next year, it could have more available slots at its universities than students. In China, thanks to the government’s one-child policy, by 2030 there will be 60 percent fewer 20-to-24-year-olds than in 2010.
For American colleges, any changes in Korea and China may not be an immediate problem. Declines in enrollment from Korea are often compensated for with students from China or elsewhere. And many observers don’t expect Chinese enrollments to crater any time soon, leaving that important revenue stream intact for the time being. There are still too few places at Chinese universities to meet demand. The number of programs and schools designed to prepare Chinese students to go abroad seems to keep on expanding.
Indeed, research by Peter G. Ghazarian, a professor of education at Keimyung University, in Korea, suggests that there may actually be untapped demand for an American education in both China and Korea. In surveys, he found, more students list the United States as their destination of choice than actually study there.
Still, few people expect Korea to return to the strong growth it enjoyed in the middle of the past decade. And many believe that it’s not a matter of whether Chinese enrollments hit a speed bump, but when.
“It happened in Korea, it will happen in China,” says Parke Muth, a former director of international admissions at the University of Virginia, who now works as a consultant. “It’s not that the end is near. But there are changes ahead.”
