Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/041392/0413121.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 10KB | 200 lines

                                                                                EDUCATION, Page 59

COVER STORIES

The Pursuit of Excellence


For all their abiding troubles, U.S. universities and colleges
are a powerful magnet for foreign students in search of freedom
and diversity

By JILL SMOLOWE -- With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington,
Rhea Schoenthal/Bonn and Sidney Urquhart/New York


    Sometime around the seventh grade, many American students
are introduced to the tale of 10 blind men inspecting an
elephant. When each blind man reaches different conclusions
about the creature, the students are invited to consider whether
truth is absolute or lies in the eye of the beholder. College
professors and administrators might want to remember that fable
when they take the measure of American higher education. Many
of them, who tend to see only what they stand to lose, perceive
the beast as wounded, suffering from the shocks of rising costs,
dwindling resources and life-draining cutbacks. But foreigners,
who compare America's universities with their own, often reach
very different conclusions about the nature of the beast.

    If sheer numbers provide any proof, America's universities
and colleges are the envy of the world. For all their abiding
troubles, this country's 3,500 institutions were flooded with
407,530 students from 193 different countries last year. Asia
led the way with 39,600 students from China and 36,610 from
Japan, followed by India and Canada. Many of the foreigners, who
entered graduate and undergraduate programs in roughly equal
numbers, felt they had to go abroad to escape narrow and
restrictive systems at home. They came in search of academic
excellence certainly, but they also came looking for freedom,
diversity and the cachet that an American degree continues to
provide.

    Some students come simply because they are shut out of the
system at home. Most European and Asian universities provide an
elite service to a small and privileged clientele. While fully
60% of all U.S. high school graduates attend college at some
point in their life, just 30% of the comparable German
population, 28% of the French, 20% of the British and 37% of the
Japanese proceed beyond high school. German students who survive
the Abitur or Britons who pass their A levels may still not
qualify for a top university at home, but find American
universities far more welcoming. Some U.S. schools acknowledge
the rigor of European secondary training and will give up to a
year's credit to foreigners who have passed their high school
exams.

    "The egalitarian conception that everyone has a right to
an education appropriate to his potential is a highly
democratic and compassionate standard," says Marvin Bressler,
professor of sociology and education specialist at Princeton
University. True, not all U.S. collegians can match the
performance of their foreign counterparts, but American
institutions do offer students from rich and poor families alike
the chance to realize their full potential. "America educates
so many more people at university that one can't expect all
those who go to be either as well informed or intelligent as the
much narrower band who go to English universities," says Briton
Christopher Ricks, professor of English at Boston University.
Having instructed at Cambridge, Ricks knows that teaching T.S.
Eliot to British undergraduates is an easier task. Yet he finds
teaching at B.U. very rewarding. "I'm not against elitism," he
says. "But I happen to like having people who are more eager to
learn."

    The democratic impulse to reach out to so many first took
seed after World War II, when the G.I. bill made funding for
higher education available to all returning soldiers. As
universities expanded to handle the sudden influx, they
developed the flexibility that has become one of the hallmarks
of American higher learning. "In the U.S. there is a system of
infinite chances," says Diane Ravitch, Assistant Secretary of
Education. "At 35, you can decide to go back to college, upgrade
your education, change your profession."

    While Americans take such flexibility for granted,
foreigners do not. To French students, who are commonly expected
at age 16 to select both a university and a specific course of
study, the American practice of jumping not only from department
to department but also from school to school seems a luxury.
Japanese students find it all but impossible to transfer credits
from one school to another. Thus students who initially enter
a junior college and subsequently decide to earn a bachelor's
degree must head overseas.

    Many are attracted not only to the academic programs at a
particular U.S. college but also to the larger community, which
affords the chance to soak up the surrounding culture. Few
foreign universities put much emphasis on the cozy communal life
that characterizes American campuses: from clubs and sports
teams to student publications and theatrical societies. "The
campus and the American university have become identical in
people's minds," says Brown University President Vartan
Gregorian. "In America it is assumed that a student's daily life
is as important as his learning experience."

    While curfews and dorm-visitation rules have long been
relaxed, university administrators and staff members still
perform an in loco parentis role. They are expected to provide
counseling and supervision on everything from career and family
planning to the dietary habits of vegetarians and anorexics.
Indeed, such painstaking attention is paid to the personal needs
of students that Gregorian likens running a U.S. college to
presiding over a Greek city-state. "You have your security
force, your dormitories, your food services, a judiciary to
impose discipline, whether somebody harassed somebody, and so
forth," he says. "I can't imagine the president of the Sorbonne
being bothered with these things."

    Foreign students also come in search of choices. America's
menu of options -- research universities, state institutions,
private liberal-arts schools, community colleges, religious
institutions, military academies -- is unrivaled. "In Europe,"
says history professor Jonathan Steinberg, who has taught at
both Harvard and Cambridge, "there is one system, and that is
it." While students overseas usually must demonstrate expertise
in a single field, whether law or philosophy or chemistry, most
American universities insist that students sample natural and
social sciences, languages and literature before choosing a
field of concentration.

    Such opposing philosophies grow out of different
traditions and power structures. In Europe and Japan
universities are answerable only to a Ministry of Education,
which sets academic standards and distributes money. While
centralization ensures that all students are equipped with
roughly the same resources and perform at roughly the same
level, it also discourages experimentation. "When they make
mistakes, they make big ones," says Robert Rosenzweig, president
of the Association of American Universities. "They set a system
in wrong directions, and it's like steering a supertanker."

    U.S. colleges, on the other hand, are so responsive to
cultural currents that they are often on the cutting edge of
social change. Such sensitivity -- some might argue
hypersensitivity -- to the culture around them reflects the
broad array of constituencies to which college administrators
must answer. The board of trustees, composed of community and
national leaders, serves as a referee between the institutional
culture and the surrounding community; alumni and corporate
donors, who often earmark monies for specific expenditures;
student bodies that demand a voice in university life;
legislators who apportion government funds; and an often feisty
faculty.

    Smaller colleges are particularly attractive to foreign
students because they are likely to offer direct contact with
professors. "We have one of the few systems in the world where
students are actually expected to go to class," says Rosenzweig.
With the exception of Britain, where much of the teaching takes
place in one-on-one tutorials, European students rarely come
into direct contact with professors until they reach
graduate-level studies. Even lectures are optional in Europe,
since students are graded solely on examinations, with no eye
to class attendance or participation. In Japan students are
expected to ingest their professors' teachings so passively that
it is possible for a student to graduate without ever opening
his mouth.

    In some respects, the independent spirit of the American
university that foreigners admire comes down to dollars and
cents. All U.S. colleges, private and public alike, must fight
vigorously to stay alive. They compete not only for students but
also for faculty and research grants. Such competition, though
draining and distracting, can stimulate creativity and force
administrators to remain attentive to student needs. "U.S.
students pay for their education," says Ulrich Littmann, head
of the German Fulbright Commission, "and demand a commensurate
value for what they -- or their parents -- pay."

    Most universities abroad have state funding, but that
luxury has a steep price: universities have less opportunity to
develop distinctive personalities and define their own missions.
"There isn't a lot of competition or innovation in Japanese
higher education because there's too much government control,"
says Nana Regur, an international-education specialist.

    If the financial crisis besetting U.S. campuses is
mishandled, Americans may discover they don't know what they've
got until it's gone. "By the year 2000, American higher
education will no longer be dominant in the world," warns Joseph
Duffey, president of American University in Washington. "Our
general belief in education and our ability to finance it are
running out." Unless real corrections are made -- and fast --
the U.S. will relinquish its standing as the most desirable
place in the world to get a higher education.