True for the average newly arisen upper-middle class who are fixated on crass social climbing in the materialistic SES sense and not really interested in genuine intellectual learning.
Personally, I found the ones who has some family in academia and/or intimately familiar with the US college landscape like some Mainland Chinese academic families I’ve met in the late '90s are much more openminded and will encourage and send their kids to attend US LACs.
There were plenty of mainland Chinese students attending Oberlin in the '90s…and not only in the conservatory. Also, when I mentioned to Chinese academics and their families where I was attending college during my study abroad, I was treated with the level of respect they usually accorded to students attending the topmost Mainland Chinese universities or internationally known US elite universities*.
Also, older generations of Chinese folks with some exposure to academia in the family or familiar with the US college landscape were similarly openminded.
For instance, he tried encouraging me to apply to UWisc-Madison because he and many other Chinese students of his generation had such high regard for the institution. Sometimes he still asks why I never bothered to apply there(Too big).
- Oberlin has had a long historical association with China going back more than a century and has some notable Chinese alums like H.H. Kung( 孔祥熙) (Class of 1906).