|
CCB School is a typical Korean-style crammer in New York¡¯s Flushing Korea Town. But recently, Chinese students have been taking over this private academy. It was a Chinese student, Charles Lin, who became the first of its alumni to gain a place at Harvard University.
When the school opened in 1998, Korean students accounted for 80 percent of enrollment. Now, Chinese students make up 70 percent of students there. ¡°Since 2003, private tutoring has become explosively popular among Chinese parents,¡± says CCB principal Choi Jong-seung.
Korean students in the U.S. increasingly find themselves in competition with their counterparts from China and India. In major U.S. cities like New York and Washington D.C., an influx of Chinese and Indian students have emerged as rivals for Korean students when it comes to places at university and jobs. Even overseas, in other words, Koreans find themselves ¡°sandwiched¡±, as the catchword has it, by economically and academically more agile powers.
 |
|
Elementary schoolchildren leave Incheon International Airport to spend their summer holidays overseas.
|
 |
|
Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, which boasts intense competition for admission, is one of the best public schools in New York. The number of Chinese students is 1,058 or 35.1 percent while the number of Korean students is only 206 or 6.8 percent. South Asian students including Indians make up 6 percent, while half are Caucasian Americans.
The biggest issue for students is how many Advanced Placement (AP) courses they should take. Besides good school records and high SAT scores, the number of AP courses is a critical factor in admission to Ivy League universities. Most Korean students take four to seven AP courses.
This year, 18-year-old Chinese student Damon Chan got all As in 12 AP courses. It seemed a reckless decision to take 12, but Chan¡¯s score vindicated him. ¡°There are rumors of education fever among the Chinese, to the effect that their parents beat them if they don¡¯t study hard,¡± says Lee Ji-sun, a teacher at the school. In primary schools, the situation is little different.
Local teachers and instructors at tutorial colleges link the superior achievements of Chinese and Indian students to parents gripped by a private tutoring frenzy. In Flushing, there was a single Chinese cram school five years ago. Now there are 200. CCB principal Choi said, ¡°Chinese students are rushing to crammers due to a rumor that private tutoring is the key to the high scores of Korean students.¡±
Chae, a Korean student at George Washington University in Washington D.C., has been unable to land a job in the U.S., and at home the situation is little better. Chae applied to about a dozen U.S. companies but was rejected ? though admittedly half of them limit applications to U.S. citizens and U.S. immigration authorities have recently been strict about issuing the H-1B visa for professional employees. That means Korean students compete with Chinese and Indian students in visa applications as well.
The U.S. government reduced the number of H-1B visa from 195,000 in 2003 to 65,000 in 2006. The ratio of Korean students who got the H-1B visa was a mere 3 percent, while the ratio for Indian students increased from 33 percent in 2002 to 44 percent in 2005, and the figure for Chinese students stands at 9 percent. Things just keep getting tougher for Korean students in the U.S., where they have traditionally excelled.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
|
