<p>Looking for some (preferably small) schools which offer East Asian Studies programs and are less selective. Thanks for any suggestions.</p>
<p>Until you get up to a certain level of selectivity, it’s difficult to find a good small school that offers more than a couple years of coursework in East Asian languages. Here are some to check out:
Furman; Earlham (Japanese Studies); Trinity U (TX), Whitman; Valparaiso (Chinese Studies). At a higher level of selectivity, check out Oberlin, Hamilton.</p>
<p>If you are interested in Southeast Asian Studies Northern Illinois University is #1 in the field.</p>
<p>In general smaller non top schools will not have EAS programs because it is still considered a niche program. If you are a serious student of East Asian Studies but feel that you wouldn’t be a candidate for top schools or cannot afford them, many state schools have excellent east asia programs, UIndiana Bloomington, UC Irvine, etc. I know you want small schools but unless you can get into top small schools like Middlebury or Amherst or Williams that have a historical connection with the region that started as the foundation for their modern day program it will be difficult. The only one that I can think of that fits your qualifications really is Soka University in California. It’s a new school (not even 15 years old) so not sure what the quality is like. I know a few students from there but they are all international students from Asia. From what I’ve read Japanese and Chinese are one of the 5 languages that are mandatory to study for at least 2 years. But if you are serious about EAS I’d suggest looking at state schools like Washington Seattle, UC Irvine, UC Riverside (has the top China specialist in the world that ran Princeton’s China program for ages), UIllinois, UHawaii, UWisconsin, UTexas Austin. If you can afford it GWU has a large east asian studies program that surprisingly evenly weights Korea, Japan, and China studies.</p>