Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
On the heels of the news that Chinese students who are 1/5 of the foreign students in the US, and taking spots from good Asian American students is a small bomb of news. What kind of safeguards exist for those overseas students who are getting into decent schools in the US? According to Global Post, “A 250-student survey by Zinch China, a Beijing wing of the California-based Zinch education consultancy, suggests college application fraud among Chinese students is extremely pervasive. According to the survey, roughly 90 percent of recommendation letters to foreign colleges are faked, 70 percent of college essays are ghostwritten and 50 percent of high school transcripts are falsified.” The article goes to say that the agent who takes care of the grades and or test scores earn thousands when the student gets into the bigger schools. Yes, it’s not that easy to get into a school and even with large sums of money for tuition, the grades still count. (Global Post – Students)
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Okay, after reading this you may not feel so bad about your university degree in Lithuanian Renaissance literature or Myrmecology. Higher education in the west, in the United States in particular, has been trending for years towards majoring in fields of study which seem odd, sound even more odd, but speak to the passions, individuality and specialized interest of our young scholars. But it seems the trend toward studying esoteric disciplines is no longer particular to western countries anymore. At the link, you’ll read that in South Korea, one can currently enter college to study fields as disparate and odd as smartphone media studies, coffee-chocolate studies, golf and sports studies, and (our personal favorite) dessert café studies. It is all part of a new and growing trend in South Korean vocational schools and technical colleges to provide fields of scholarship in areas for which there is a need or growing demand in South Korean society. Most of these subjects are currently taught at the South Korean equivalent of the junior college level. Those who graduate with these odd majors are encouraged to either transfer to four-year colleges, or go directly into the industry for which they’ve trained. In that regard, the system is pretty much the same as the junior college system in the U.S.or the U.K. And honestly, we’d love to take a class on South Korean traditional fermented food studies. (Asian Correspondent – Odd Korean College Majors)
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