Eh, you're posting on HN in fluent English. Your personal friend group is probably nothing close to what's average in China. It's a straightforward sampling bias.
Did you go to a Western university? A good one? And now work at some Western company? You can add atypical points for all of those.
Most of the Chinese people I know are fine in terms of education, around the same as any other demographic. But most of them I know from a top European university, or from highly skilled work in China. Most of China is not like that at all.
I'm currently working in the bay area but I got my master degree in China and never attended any colleges in the west.
I was born in a city ranked 45th in China by population (from wikipedia). K-12 is 100%. My grandpa lives in a very small village with annual income just a few thousand dollars, K-12 is also 100%. My close cousins come from the same small village, now bank staffs and doctors.
I have friends who's family so poor that the roof got torn away by a typhoon. And I have friends whose parents are simply peasants.
My friend group is definitely biased since I graduated from one of the top universities, but they are selected by exams, so many families are actually not wealthy. In China money usually cannot help you directly on exams, people need to study hard.
Hmm, another thing I'm curious is that what gives the original post the impression that "Chinese people are uneducated". That's a rare heard haha.
Maybe? Another possible explanation is that some people try to correlate income in USD to education levels.
It's not a direct comparison since the cost for education is also cheaper in China. Also since K-12 is almost free (at least meals are not included 20 years ago when I was a kid), parents just send kids there.
In recent years the trend is that even assembly factories require high school education, bachelor preferred... That's another interesting topic though.
The top 45 cities are what, 200 million people? So 85% of Chinese people live somewhere more rural than where you grew up, and in China that's correlated with poverty and all sorts of negative things.
This is exactly what I mean; the relatively advantaged Chinese are under the impression that they are the average. They're not at all. The average Chinese person lives no place they're likely to escape for the Bay Area. Most people can't even escape to a normal life in a tier 1 city within China.
Rural China is the opposite of many rural places in the West. In the West, there are small towns seen as desirable, where you go to live when you're richer and have kids or just want more space. In China rural is almost always poorer.
I don't think K-12 attainment is an appropriate metric. Like I said elsewhere it's like comparing hygiene standards by saying we all have access to soap. But that's the most basic standard we can achieve.
I think if you compare the % of Chinese who go to world-class universities, it's a lot more relevant. China has maybe 2 or 3 such universities, so saying it's equal and fair because you have the gaokao or whatever doesn't make much sense. The biggest intake for world class universities is rich Chinese kids going to the West, not poor kids from the village going to Tsinghua. If you managed to do that then great for you, really, but it's not an average story.
Even if we don't want to go that high-end, tertiary educational attainment at any calibre of university in China is much much lower than in the US.
I think there are good things about the Chinese approach to education, but it's kind of silly to say they've caught up to the US and others.
> I think it's pretty significant that they are able to run a country with that demographics most of whom were not even educated.
and then eventually switch to
> I don't think K-12 attainment is an appropriate metric. Like I said elsewhere it's like comparing hygiene standards by saying we all have access to soap. But that's the most basic standard we can achieve
> I think if you compare the % of Chinese who go to world-class universities, it's a lot more relevant
This seems like a major shift in goal-posts. If your concept of "uneducated" means not going to a world-class university, then most of the world, including most people in the US are "uneducated".
Whether they're form China seems pretty irrelevant. You could very well make the opposite case that people from China know even less about its actual KPIs.
It's trivial to pick a relevant metric and look up the median value for China. A quarter of the people there live on less than $5/day. They're not swanning off to do a Masters at MIT any time soon. They're not even able to move to the better cities within China, for the most part.
This person is a total anomaly. Taking them as representative is quite ridiculous and rather insulting to the hundreds of millions "with a K-12 education" that somehow are still living in abject poverty with no opportunities. It's an arbitrary and meaningless claim to make. It's like saying China and America have the same hygiene standards because most people in both places have access to soap.
I would say K-12 education and unemployment are different issues here, do you agree with that? For the latter that's another story and I agree it's more complicated.
Sure, I'm really saying that it's fine to be K-12 educated but it doesn't seem to be translating into further educational opportunities for most people. They often don't go from K-12 to university, rather they go into some not great job and never get such opportunities. Same happens in the West of course, just to a lesser degree.
That doesn't change the fact that all tests and statistics shows Chinese students are better educated than American counterparts. Since more Chinese are in poorer schools those numbers are loop sided against Chinese students which make it even worse.
But that you think you both know better than a Chinese person and didn't even bother to put in some links to facts (unlike those liked that disagree, like the Pisa test) says enough.
The PISA scores are not for “China”. They’re for a tiny percentage of China’s population, living in the wealthiest districts, with the most sought after 户口.
The gathered statistics are in no way comparable to Western countries which gather scores from all districts, rich and poor alike.
Since Americans started leaving schools without knowledge of basic English skills. We were talking about English skills, not how top universities fare in tests.
Did you go to a Western university? A good one? And now work at some Western company? You can add atypical points for all of those.
Most of the Chinese people I know are fine in terms of education, around the same as any other demographic. But most of them I know from a top European university, or from highly skilled work in China. Most of China is not like that at all.