The chart details below the student numbers enrolled at Harvard College from various countries in Asia for the 7 year period for the academic years 2009 - 2016. It shows that admissions from Asia are declining. In the peak year, '12-‘13, there were 152 of this cohort on campus. In the current year, there are only 127, a reduction of 25 students, 16% of peak and almost 20% of prior year’s’ average. It looks as though South Korean and Singapore?Malaysia admissions have been the most adversely affected, with Korean campus presence declining from a peak of 47 in '12-'13 to only 33 in '15 - 16, a 30% reduction; Singapore has gone from a high of 22 to 11, a 50% reduction; Malaysia has gone from 10 to only 2. And, both of these declines are year-over-year and not just one-off.
I wonder whether the domestic US itself now supplies a sufficiently diverse and cultural “Asian” ethnic community so that Harvard admissions no longer actually has to go to Asia itself to get this cohort. What is lost in Asia can now be replaced by other countries.
YEAR: 09-10 10-11 11-12 12-13 13-14 14-15 15-16
China 36 41 40 50 51 49 45
Hong Kong 2 3 4 5 4 3 9
Taiwan 2 1 4 5 4 6 3
All China 40 45 48 60 59 58 57
Who replaces the Asia students in the international pool? Brazil has gone from 4 to 17 over this period, and Australia has gone from 20 to 32. Again, year-over-year growth taken from these countries. I believe, on this evidence, it will be harder than ever for overseas Asians to get in. We here in the US have sufficient Asian populations to suffice for diversity in admissions from this ethnic cohort.
Interesting shift. What about India/Pakistan? I’d be curious about if there is growth from Eastern Europe.
Curious: your use of the term “collapse” – are you posting this to express displeasure? Or are you in agreement? Or neutral?
In your seven year sample, I see don’t see 127 as any sort of “collapse”. The average is 138.1. The peak of 152 is +14 while the 127 is -11. I hardly see any collapse unless this continues. But in your set of seven figures – 127 is not a collapse
Or maybe the fact that China has institutionalized cheating has impacted on Harvard’s willingness to accept students whose scores they can’t verify. There has never been a need to import international students to fill some sort of need.
This is a very positive move from my standpoint. I’ve known tons of students from China and Korea who were college seniors and could not write a sentence in standard English. They got through college begging faculty members for passing grades and they supplemented with courses that did not require mastery of college level English. This was at a mediocre college but it makes a travesty of a US degree. They all had scores over the minimum, probably purchased in their country of origin. And, US public schools knew long ago that these students were cheating.
Let’s remember, too, that a huge percentage of East Asian students have been full-pay, and there has been an economic slowdown happening for several years there. The decline may reflect fewer overseas Chinese in Malaysia/Singapore (in some fundamental ways, the same place) willing to take this particularly expensive educational option, especially as compared to something like Yale-NUS. That plus a one-year dip in South Korean admissions due to the SAT fiasco could explain the whole thing.
I think Harvard is demonstrably committed to maintaining at least the current level of international admissions. But the national composition of those admissions is going to change over time. Over the past few decades, Asian students have largely replaced Europeans and Latin Americans. When I was in college 40 years ago, there were a few people from Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and a Laotian in my entryway, but I can remember meeting exactly one South Asian student: none at my own university, but once when I was visiting Harvard I had breakfast at the same table as Benazir Bhutto. I suspect now there is increasing interest in students from Africa and the Middle East / Asia Minor.
I will not be surprised if Harvard accepts more and more students from China. It will not because Chinese students can pay the tuition. It will be more like China is getting more and more influentially worldwide and it is no brainer Harvard will want their alumni to be part of it.
Yes, the entire premise is flawed. First, the numbers for the total swelled and ebbed, but overall the decrease is < 5% so not even material, much less a collapse. The numbers for individual countries are so small that one cannot talk about treating them with general statistical methods. If I have 2 students from a country one year and 4 the next, that is a 100% increase! Whoo Hoo!! Then it goes back to 2 the next year, a devastating decline?? This is silly.
Second, and more important even, is that the OP has made a serious error of fact. The numbers are for enrolled Asian nationals, but the statement is
No, it shows that matriculation of Asian nationals is declining, slightly. And only at this one school, which hardly would tell us anything of import anyway without knowing what is happening at Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Duke, etc. if one is focusing on what is happening at the most selective schools. The OP has no idea how many were admitted from these countries. Universities in China, for example, continue to improve. Maybe more students have chosen to stay home, and yields have simply declined from these countries. Who knows? Without knowing this there is no intelligent analysis to be made, even if the change in the numbers were of statistical significance.
IMO, poor thread all the way around because the numbers are anything but alarming or “material”, there was no accounting for the fallacy of small numbers, and we don’t have an important facet in the data set to know the real picture.
Collapse? What Collapse? That looks more like noise around a more or less constant number. You are reading way too much into differences from one year to the next. To spot a true trend you should consider a rolling mean rather individual points.
Any given Harvard undergraduate’s experience of the campus will be spread over four years of enrollment. In the above total Asian enrollment numbers the 4-year rolling means look like this:
139, 142, 143, 141
Having smoothed out the year to year bounce you can easily see there is no significant trend and certainly no collapse. The degree of “diversity” provided by foreign Asians that a student who enrolled in 09 experienced vs. that experienced by a student enrolled today is almost exactly the same.
I did think about editing the title, which we do sometimes when they are purposely misleading. But between not being 100% (or close enough) sure it was purposeful and the fact that any title I can think of that is appropriate results in the conclusion that the thread no longer has a purpose, I left it alone. I am still considering the latter, i.e. closing the thead as meaningless, but I wanted to give the OP time to respond.
