<p>I visited Beijing University, and I was actually quite surprised at the difference between US colleges and Chinese universities (even Taiwanese ones are very different from the ones in China).</p>
<p>The students there study very hard in their classes, eat their meals in drab cafeterias, and return to their dorms, which are often overcrowded (no such thing as a double room exists, all rooms contain 4+ students) and have very unhygenic bathrooms. I guess the same situation would be appalling in the western world, but I heard from many students that conditions there are better than the conditions in their hometowns.</p>
<p>To many people in China, getting into Beijing University is an incredible dream that people don’t dare to dream about. Harvard’s admission rate would look like a joke compared to the difficulty of getting into Beijing University. People who get there have already proven themselves a notch above the competition, and that same spirit continues when they get to University. There is almost no such thing as a social life or EC activities, as everything is centered around the assimilation of knowledge. Living conditions, “fun,” extracurriculars…etc. can all be sacrificed. There’s no time for that anyways - the competition in the University is cutthroat - there’s just simply too many people in China.</p>
<p>When you’ve got 10.1 million students applying to get into college, when compared to the ~2 million students in America, the college scene would be drastically different (and this is not even taking into account the wide availability of higher education in the US and the large amount of money allocated for research at the top private universities in the US). I don’t think it’s fair to compare Chinese v. American colleges because they are inherently different on socioeconomic, cultural, and academical levels.</p>