How come USA has double the number of universities compared to China?

29 comments

1. [removed]

2. Why do you think those two would be so strongly correlated?

3. Because you don’t need a University education to manufacture nearly 1/3 of the World’s total goods.

4. China wasn’t really a “developed country” until the 70s or 80s. They industrialized very quickly.

5. Because socalism can’t predict supply and demand correctly. Hopefully the Chinese will recover soon.

6. Universities were being founded in the British colonies a century and half before the United States was even formed. China’s first wester-style university was founded in 1895. Three centuries of a head start probably helped with the numbers in the US.

7. Go to College Station, TX, and take a look at some of the shit we pass off as universities in the US.

8. China is a developing nation. They’re catching up.

9. I don’t think China subsidizes student debt like the US.

10. Because in the US, most universities are about profit/ employment and not about education.

11. Do you think reputable universities can be shit out like a meal high in fiber?

12. Lots of people in China are dirt poor.

13. Number of schools is not a valuable metric. I went to undergrad at a school with 4k students and did my masters at a school with 35k students.

14. A big reason is the Morrill Act of 1862.

    It established the land-grant system of universities as we know it, which quickly became some of the biggest universities in the world.

    That showed the success of state universities, and and several more were started in the years that followed. 73% of university students are at state schools, and nearly all of those can trace their existence either directly or indirectly to the Morrill Act.

15. China attacked many of their academics in the Cultural Revolution. They attacked anyone in higher education and the institutions themselves.

    China’s academic tradition has really only been a thing since that time.

16. Religious colleges and frontier colleges sprouted up like crazy in the 19th century. Kind of an interesting route, where a lot of countries had centralized colleges and didn’t bother educating out in the rural spots so much. Then came the big land grant universities and each state having its own system of colleges. But yea, the US also had a 100 year head start on China. We have so many universities that education is one of our biggest exports (students coming here to study is an export service oddly enough). Over $30 billion in foreign tuition dollars each year.

    This is an interesting history of some of it:
    https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-us-college-went-from-pitiful-to-powerful

17. My state has a state-chartered university and a Morrill Land Grant university. The requirement for the land-grant university to cover agriculture, engineering, science and military science allowed both to specialize in certain fields. That’s two.

    Another was financed and constructed by heirs of the Ball fortune, sort of like Rockefeller built the University of Chicago.

    A fourth was started as a “normal college” to prepare teachers.

    The Roman Catholic Church needed to train clergy and provide outlets for Catholics to study without fear of forced evangelization by Protestants. Enter Notre Dame, two St. Mary’s colleges, St. Joseph’s (defunct) and others.

    Protestant churches wanted to train pastors, so enter at least one Baptist college, one Episcopal, one Brethren, several Lutheran.

    After WWII, it was realized that some students could not be resident on campus, so the two flagships spawned several extensions that grew into degree-granting institutions.

    Finally, community and vocational colleges were created…in my state most were vocational until the state transferred remediation to the vocational colleges and these colleges enriched their offerings.

    So that gives our state of seven million seven state-run colleges plus a community college system and at least fourteen other colleges, or twenty-one colleges. If the community colleges are separately considered, then the number jumps to 33 colleges.

18. 🤷🏻 Many churches founded universities and we have a lot of churches. It’s a very Western thing to have a ton of universities, I guess.

19. Traditionally, Chinese academia tends to be more centralized.

20. China is actually a very poor country. They have a few gleaming cities like Shanghai, but otherwise, it’s actually very backward.

21. Because it’s a business and quantity trump’s quality every time over here.

22. Most of our more prestigious universities were founded during the founding of our country. Then for awhile due to sexism and racism we needed separate colleges and universities for women and BIPOC to attend seperate from white men. We have a very large country as well and because of this it’s not always feasible for people to attend higher education outside of their home states so we built more as we expanded the territory. We also have many different types of higher education facilities. Community colleges which offer two year degrees, state colleges/universities which are often a more affordable option, and we have technical colleges also known as trade schools.

23. Because we’re number 1

24. Because of Christianity, which puts a high emphasis on literacy and education for everyone.

    In 1642, Massachusetts passed a law ordering the selectmen to monitor children’s ability “to read & understand the principles of religion & the capitall lawes of this country.” [source](https://research.colonialwilliamsburg.org/Foundation/journal/Winter11/literacy.cfm). Literacy rates for the mid-1700s for men in New England were estimated to be about 90%.

    And, the importance of high levels of education for clergy goes back a long time. For example, harvard was founded in the early 1600s as a divinity school, while yale was founded in the early 1700s for the same reason.

    In [china](https://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/cgi-bin/moreabout.pl?tyimuh=chineseliteracy), the literacy rate for men in the mid 1800s is estimated by one source to have been 30-45%, while in 1949, the literacy rate was 20% (the 20% is everyone, men and women).

    For women, the china literacy rate was 2-10% in the mid-1800s, while women in the american colonies towards the late 1700s was close to 50%.

    edit: it really is interesting to read things like the federalist papers with this in mind. The audience of the federalist papers wasn’t just elites, but the people of New York in general, and it is said that they were widely read. But the federalist papers have a grade level of about grade 17 (college level).

25. Maybe it’s has to do with the profits being made from the education system here in America? College sports is Big Business

26. Wealth.

    We had a lot more money to invest in education for much longer than China. China didn’t really industrialize until very recently.

    I have a friend who is an economist at Columbia and he focuses on Chinese economics. He described China to me like this. “Take the US and all it’s land area and economic distribution then add around a billion poor peasants.”

27. It takes a lot to indoctrinate the minds of a historically free people.

28. Many of our universities are quite small. I went to one with only about 4000 people.

29. Because they are too busy working for slave wages inside of factories making bullshit products for our idiotic consumption habits