First, the numbers shrink when taking a closer look:
Popular reports of India and China graduating 12 times as many professional engineers as the United States are way off. Considering only four-year professional degrees, the researchers found that the United States awarded 137 437 compared to 112 000 in India, while China reported 351 537, using broad criteria.Then, elite status university in China is still on a different level than in the US and Europe:
The two countries have excellent institutions producing world-class engineers. Only the top 3 percent scorers in the national entrance exam get into the elite Indian Institutes of Technology. About 40 universities in China enjoy elite status thanks to the government’s 985 Project, which funneled billions of yuan to establish research centers and improve education. China awards the second-highest number of science and engineering doctorates in the world and is rapidly catching up with the United States, according to the National Science Foundation.... However, says Wadhwa, these elite institutions’ graduates are no better than average American graduates from his own university, Duke. And as you move down the ladder from these top establishments, education quality declines steeply.And again, a typically China problem, where the party has to control everything:
In China, where nearly all the universities are public, a top-down push for ”mass education” in 1999 traded numbers for quality. The number of engineering bachelor’s degrees awarded jumped by 225 percent in a decade. ”In many cases they didn’t add enough teachers or the teachers weren’t qualified, or the funding didn’t increase for all schools and universities equally,” Wadhwa says. ”The government wanted more engineers, so schools gave them engineers…even technicians were called engineers.”
