[yuncun]

There's no doubt the substance is actually more important, but the question is what folks end up caring about.

As an interesting anecdote, I found that when I'm around my Chinese friends or family, I'd hear the question "where did you go to school?", but when I had conversations with White or Black folks we'd talk about "what did you study?". I think that's a pretty interesting cultural nuance. For me, the second question is more wholesome.

[guessthat]

My ex girlfriend was Chinese. She thought I was making a mistake by deciding to go somewhere other than Stanford for graduate school, that I was settling for something beneath me.

When I explained to her that as a professor, she or I would probably teach at places other than the school she or I studied at, she conceded that maybe she too would be willing to study at a place like Harvard.

It seems in China, theres only a couple of good schools. In America, the quality of 100 or 200 of the more prominent schools is probably rather indistinguishable. I never even applied to the Ivy league schools in undergrad, I just applied to the state schools and went to the one I liked best.

Also in China, people seem to go to great lengths to prove that theyre not one of the peasants. In America, people dont seem to need to make that distinction as often, if ever.

[50CNT]

In part it's that in China your network matters a lot in life. There's somewhat of a subdivision into friends, family and strangers, and university is viewed as THE place to broaden the first group, preferably with influential people. Tsinghua, Beida, Renda are the places where future party functionaries, intellectuals and businessmen go, which is why there's such an obsession with getting into these few universities. If the only thing students cared about was an education, any of the 101 重点大学s would do just fine.

Then there's this cultural obsession with investing into your offspring that stems back to the Imperial Exams. Hell, the words that are used for the student rankings still harken back to those practices.

Further pressure is put on the children of academics, where admission to one of the top 10 Chinese universities or an Ivy League university is used as a measurement of parenting prowess.

I've experienced the insanity from a bystander perspective, and it's not without cause. I would also like to differ on the point that Chinese people go to great lengths to prove that they're not one of the peasants. They may go to great lengths to show that they're wealthy, or for the old cultural families, to great lengths to show heritage, but there's plenty of things very well to do Chinese will do that wouldn't really go for class abroad.