A few notes on all those Korean Ivy-League suicides...

A few days ago I posted a short mention of the statistic that Koreans comprise 10% of Ivy League students, bu 60% of Ivy League suicides. This immediately struck me as something akin to the "big men" of Easter Island, who according to Jared Diamond killed their societies by cutting down all the trees on order to erect massive monuments to their own greatness. I suppose the common thread is a country's elites being so unwilling to settle for less that they will kill themselves competing for a few top slots, which in Korea's case means wiping out the smartest and most talented people it has.

On further thought, that's not it. Retract that.

Today's NYT provides the best glimpse into the lives of tomorrow's dead Korean Ivy Leaguers, with this account of two schools that specialize in creating ultimate Ivy League applicants. While the article is a very well-written account of the brutal preparation Korean students undergo in order to be accepted to elite American universities, it never tells the reader how well the students do once they actually go to American colleges. My bet would be that the best explanation for the 10/60 figure is that building the ultimate college applicant is not the same thing as building the ultimate college student.

Korean education by most appearances looks Western, but its underpinning is deeply traditional: by 1600, Korea had more Confucian schools than the whole of China, and one learned Confucianism by memorizing sayings about it. By now, anyone who's every read anything about East Asia knows its educational systems are built to emphasize rote work and memorization over critical thinking, but the subtext in Western eyes has always been one of "poor Asian students suffering under a stifling educational system." It appears more accurate now to regard them as poor Asian students suffering under liberal arts regimes.

These Asian super-students are worked to the bone by their schools, true, but they're not killing themselves. They know what they need to do, and they can do that by working hard to memorize lots of stuff. It's putting together disparate bits of information into a whole that's challenging, and it's not easy even for American college students. Check out today's WaPo:

Anna Johnson is a George Washington University freshman from Iowa, who can sympathize with Grill's students: "I got through my first semester without ever checking out a book," she says sheepishly.    

But during her second semester, she had the mandatory freshman seminar, which partners each section with a librarian to combat the decline of information literacy and is all the rage in liberal arts programs these days. At first, "I got really overwhelmed" by all the information, says Johnson. "The idea of having original thought completely terrified me." Once she realized how much information was out there, the idea of synthesizing it seemed impossible.  

How much more impossible would it seem if none of your high school teachers had ever prompted you to debate something or write an original essay? How much worse would it appear to have that essay come back as a "D" after working so hard on it and having gotten nothing but "A"s all your life?

Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of Koreans are lining up to take a crack at a chance to study at a university they know might kill them. It's not as if there aren't universities in Korea. Why all the rush to study at an overseas institution that will make you miserable?

It would be tempting to blame the Ivy-League craze in Korea on the power of fad or the grip hierarchical thinking has on the country, and those are both decent partial answers. Fads do have a power on small homogeneous countries that Americans would find hard to understand. Koreans (and Japanese) do see the world in terms of rankings, from #1 on downward, and Harvard is ranked #1. But the broader question is why Korean universities are content to be so pathetic in a country so clearly not content to put up with second-rate educations.

Koreans are rushing abroad to study because American universities are better than Korean ones. Korean universities know this, and yet they are virtually immune to change. Thomas Friedman wrote long ago in the NYT that,

"A society that makes a best seller about how to get its teenagers into Harvard will eventually build Harvards of its own."

I beg him for an example. He wrote that six years ago, and I now peruse the list of the world's top 500 universities to see only one non-Western institution, Tokyo University, in the top 20. Not far behind it are Kyoto, and later at 54, Osaka universities. In the top 100, there are no Korean or Chinese schools (Friedman was writing in reference to China).

Nor will there be any time soon. The example of Korea University should be enough to hold back any would-be reformers: KU is the 3rd-ranked university in Korea, but it was a leader in terms of quality of education and global outreach. Hoping to better compete for foreign rankings with better-known Yonsei University (where I studied for two semesters), its president, Euh Yoon-dae, began ramming through reform measures to bring in more foreign talent, offer more classes in English, become accredited by more foreign institutions, and conduct more quality research.  He was booted from his position by a revolt of Korean professors.

The wave of Korean students to the United States and toward certain emotional punishment says less about the quality of our institutions and more about the hopelessness with which Koreans regard their own. Universities are appealing not just by how they stand in the rankings now, but how they'll stand 10 years on, when its current applicants will be out looking for jobs and graduate educations. Koreans are voting with their feet and their passports against the ability of their schools to reform.

Given this situation, it looks like the best option would be for American universities to block all Korean applicants. Koreans would then be forced to demand better domestic education, instead of abandoning it, while talented American students would not have to compete for slots in their own universities with test-taking machines who won't know what to do when they actually start school. Yes, I know this will never happen.

I just can't think of a reason now why it shouldn't.