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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   20891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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My own personal preference is a complete meritocracy. If that results in a 55% Asian, 40% white, 5% other split, so be it. Nothing else seems fair to me.

Whats merit though? Standardized test scores? if you go that route, you might get a class completely filled with international Chinese students.

Whats merit though? Standardized test scores? if you go that route, you might get a class completely filled with international Chinese students.

Hyperbole aside, how realistic a possibility is this?

It has actually happened multiple times in Australia, but that's more due to corruption than to test scores.

https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/student-at-top-australian-university-claims-classes-taught-in-chinese/news-story/b0e21f920299c71a794aa5c2b58c86d5

At least by numbers, it's absolutely possible.

There's 37 universities in the top tier in China, which used to be known as project 985. It's super competitive to get into them, you need an extremely high score on the Gaokao national exam, which is like a series of AP/IB tests on crack. Top student basically devote their teen years to cramming for it. I don't know the precise score breakdown, but this comment: https://www.quora.com/In-China-what-percentage-of-students-get-admitted-to-tier-1-universities-and-how-hard-is-it says you need to be roughly in the top 1% of the general population to make it in there. This comment https://qr.ae/pYvrbd is in agreement, saying that 0.79% make it in there, which is 150,000 students per year.

By way of comparison, most ivy league schools are a little under 2000 students in each class. I'm not sure what you want to define as a top school, but let's say there's 20 of them each with 2000 students average. That's only 40,000 students in total. So you could easily fill every single spot at top American schools with Chinese kids, and it wouldn't even shrink the Chinese universities very much.

In the UK there's simply a cap on international places for many courses. I know the relationship between higher education and the state is different in the US, but I imagine there'd be some way to legally enforce that a certain % of places are reserved for domestic students. It's not something I see being hugely politically polarised either.

Only really for Medicine. For most other courses at non Oxbridge they prefer international students because of the much higher fees they pay.

The US can completely cripple Chinese youth talent by skimming off their top 20,000 scoring high school graduates each year and stapling a green card to their Ivy+ diplomas. This is probably the most effective weapon they have against the CCP. Sure it'll take like a decade and a half to have significant impact but when it does it'll by extremely good at keeping China down and let the US continue its hegemony.

There's the old joke: "Don't worry about China leapfrogging us technologically, our Chinese are smarter than their Chinese", it should be made a reality.

I think if we actually started doing that en masse, we'd end up with a lot of youths much more loyal to China than to the US, and in some cases outright agents of the CCP.

Our current system gives us a lot of students more loyal to Hamas than to the US.

Both are bad methinks

Sure, I'm sure you'll get some CCP agents. Just forbid them from working on sensitive things. The question is whether the damage the agents do to us will be more than the benefit we get from slicing away their highest potential humans each year and the damage that will do to them. Even it we pay them to literally sit at home playing video games for the rest of their lives it still benefits the US because now they aren't helping China.

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