Korea’s “Sky Universities”
We visited Korea University, where a two-time Bates parent, a KU alum who is heavily involved with their alumni Advancement efforts, had made extensive arrangements for us, including using one of their lounges for our Bates reception. We had a very formal meeting with the President, two of their VP’s and a tour, which included some buildings stunning in their modernity, space and design.
Korea University is, along with Seoul National University and Yonsei University (founded by American missionaries), the equivalent of America’s Ivy League. They are called by Koreans the “Sky Universities,” partly for their initials, partly because they have such stringent admissions requirements that being admitted is tantamount to reaching for the sky. Like most Korean universities, they rely heavily on a national entrance examination, normally drawing their classes from the top 2% of test takers.
The whole subject of the dominant role of national entrance examinations has come up repeatedly in our Asian stops. Partly it is the tests themselves, and partly that the countries, with huge populations of students seeking entrance, do not begin to have the capacity to meet the demographic needs, so that students without “sky scores” on the entrance exams can be frozen out of higher education completely. The pressure this puts on students and parents has drawn wide public attention.
In contrast, Bates’ highly competitive but complex, subtle, and individual admissions process and its optional testing policy drew favorable comments everywhere. Bates has fielded contacts from the press in places like India and Korea, seeking information on how we do admissions.
While Korea University has exchange relationships with dozens of other universities around the world, none of them are with American liberal arts colleges, and that was the focus of our preliminary conversations. For a few of their students, the opportunity to consider a semester or year at Bates would be a remarkable opportunity, and KU is already sending a thousand students a year abroad to other institutions for a semester or year, so are well-experienced with the same issues with which our Bates Off-Campus Study office deals.
For our students, the opportunity to study in a Korean Ivy would be remarkable — there are 20,000 undergraduates and 10,000 graduate students, a full medical school with 3 hospitals, a large and impressively modern business school, and a very forward-looking and imaginative approach to designing international education.
Their summer programs are designed for non-Koreans, taught by faculty from all over the world. In some of their programs, up to 40% of the courses are taught in English, and their international MBA program is planned with major segments taught in Korea, China and the US. So a Bates student without Korean language to start could find plenty of courses taught in English, and like so many other hundreds of Bates students who have gone abroad to places where they did not speak the language, quickly learn enough to function socially and on the street.
International schools in Seoul
Visiting two more international schools provides another snapshot of variety.
Cheongshim International Academy is new, only open for about four years. Unlike most international schools, it is not in a city, but about an hour outside Seoul, perched on a steep mountainside outside a small rural village. (Most of Korea is steeply mountainous — finding enough level ground to support agriculture is a challenge.)
Bates visiting Cheongshim International Academy
A boarding school for students at middle and high school levels, Cheongshim serves students from all over Korea who want to attend colleges and universities outside Korea, so the language of instruction is English. It is functionally a private school, open only to Korean students, funded by Rev. Moon of the Reunification Church, though very few Reunification Church members attend the school.
It feels like one of America’s public boarding magnet schools (like the Maine School of Science and Mathematics in Limestone) that draw talented students from rural areas that cannot meet the needs of their most talented students. It is a fascinating, promising school — it was a heartwarming experience to teach an application essay workshop to 35 students in rural Korea. The students paid sharp attention, and asked on-point questions in flawless English.
Future Bobcats...
In contrast, the international school visit later that same day was at a very elegant campus in a residential neighborhood of Seoul. Most of their students are well trained, and from international backgrounds. By the school’s charter (and originally Korean government requirements), the school serves only international students, and therefore requires a foreign passport for admission — the only Korean students are those coming back to Korea after living for long periods of time elsewhere.
The college counselors at both these schools are real pros — both spoke of how much they admired the work of the other. The counselor at Cheongshim has visited Bates, and was very pleased to have a return visit from Bates. The counselor at the other international school had an entire wall of his office filled with snapshots of students at graduation, and like most good counselors, had a box of tissues tucked inconspicuously behind an easy chair in his office, and a bowl of chocolates as comfort food.
...by the class loads from Korea.
Outside his office, a dozen students were eating lunch and talking, finding the counseling office a quiet and calming place for their lunch break. A beautiful Christian chapel, with a massive rough-carved alter fashioned from the bedrock under the school, speaks to the school’s founding by American missionaries to Korea.
Seoul: new and old
For both Hieu and me, it is the first visit to Korea. In contrast to other Asian stops, with layers of history and modernity often jostling each other for space, much of Seoul seems new.
Seoul changed hands four times in the Korean War and was almost completely leveled, so most of the city has been rebuilt in the last several decades, fueled by the Korean economic miracle. Coming in at night, we found an immense, architecturally dramatic airport — hosting the Olympics creates commitments to infrastructure, as we saw both in Seoul and Beijing. By the highway into the city, a huge brightly lighted space turned out to be a 72-hole golf course, completely lighted for night play at 10 PM!
Seoul is bewilderingly complex, home to 10 million in its immediate city and 25 million in the larger area. Like other Asian cities, traffic and air pollution are both major issues, some of it home-grown, and some, in Korea and Hong Kong, drifting in from the heavy smelting and other manufacturing industries in China. The buildings are spotlessly clean, modern, functional and efficient. As in Japan, all cabs have modern GPS units and can take credit cards.
Underneath our hotel is an immense underground mall covering about 4 city blocks–the largest such underground structure in Asia, and in a country with both the huge population and very wide climate variations of Korea, a sensible approach. Miles of roads are covered with steel plates as a major new subway line is constructed to reduce car congestion, and building cranes fill every vista.
But just when you think all is new, a reminder of Korea’s ancient culture appears: immediately across the street from the underground mall with its hotels and 50-story trade center is a Buddhist shrine complex. It was founded in about 600 AD, and has been staffed by Buddhist monks ever since, who at various times took roles from spiritual advisers to warriors to protect Seoul from its many waves of Chinese, Japanese or Mongol invaders.
Several shrines occupy the site, most open for prayers and devotions. They are hauntingly beautiful, with thousands of glittering small statues of the Buddha in the walls, lanterns hanging from the ceilings with prayer streamers left by worshipers drifting gently in the breezes, and inlays and paintings of ancient monks, saints and warriors. Watching the people praying silently in front of the various shrines, reading their scriptures, or turning to bow in respect as they leave the complex, one thinks of the parallel traditions of the great Catholic shrines.
Much of what we saw would seem closely familiar at Saints Peter and Paul in Lewiston.
Recruiting across boundaries
Depending on the country, we have had broad alumni and parent gatherings with a few dozen people or small dinners, or both.. In all places, we are finding wonderful evidence of the world-wide and often life-long connections of Bates people.
One alum in Hong Kong, running a very successful financial firm, told a lively, funny and sometimes comedy-of-errors story of how he happened to find Bates. He was playing pick-up basketball in New Jersey when a middle-aged corporate CEO drove up in a Mercedes, looking to play in the game, to the raised eyebrows of the teenage players, who thought this fossil could not keep up.
The fellow turned out to be Dave Boone, for decades a Bates Trustee and lifelong recruiter and advocate for the College. Dave encouraged the young man to look at Bates, to the enormous surprise of the young man’s parents, who thought Bates too expensive and too academic.
But Dave persisted, made telephone calls to Bates, found transportation to campus, and at every point, made the young man feel that he was with him as as an advocate. The young man went on to become the Bates quarterback with the best winning record in modern Bates football, and it seems apparent that his athletic leadership skills have served him very well in high-stakes international finance.
Almost the same day that we had our dinner in Hong Kong, Dave was being inducted into the Bates Scholar-Athlete Society for his own great athletic record and life-long service to Bates, so we are putting the two of them back in touch with each other.
Kudos to the alums, students and parents
Another Bangkok traffic note: the city is bisected by the river, and with relatively few bridges, being on the wrong side of the river at rush hour can bring one to complete gridlock for long periods of time. My Bates student driver picked me up at 7 AM for a school visit, and an hour later, we had gone less than a kilometer and could look back at the hotel we had just left. Happily, once across the bridge, things opened up, and we made our appointment at the school, with some mutual jokes about blood pressure and stress relief.
Bangkok traffic makes NYC or Boston look pretty calming in comparison–it is not for the fainthearted. When we left the hotel a couple of days later, we followed advice and loaded all our bags onto the graceful hotel shuttle boat for one last quick trip across the river to meet our airport car on the other side.
Kudos to the alums, students and parents who have helped at every stage of this complex three-week trip. In many cases, we simply would not have been able to do our work without their interest and support. They have arranged locales for events, hosted dinners, drove or sent cars to get us to or from an event, accompanied us on school visits, and especially spoke out about the value of their Bates education. It was fascinating to hear, in Japanese or Korean as parents and alums spoke to assembled groups, some English phrases like “personal attention,” “friendships with professors and deans,” “playing soccer,” “thesis” and “graduate schools” creeping in. And yes, we also heard some suggestions for changes or improvements in the Bates education from those working in Asia, which we will bring back for consideration.
We have principally been re-establishing personal relationships and developing friendships, getting to know the alums and parents whom we are meeting at each stop. Occasionally we were able to have serious and productive initial conversations with alums and parents about Bates’ planning and needs for the future. The reconstruction of the Bill and Hedge and the rebuilding of Garcelon Field are starting even as we travel, and these are only the immediate visible parts of the commitments to strengthen Bates. We have also had conversations with some alums and parents about college rankings – widely influential in Asia as people try to understand American institutions from long distances – and the role that Bates’ endowment plays in some of those rankings.
The structure of the international schools can vary quite a bit. In most cities, there are one or two with long histories of providing an education for young people from the international populations in that country, but also relatively new schools serve new populations. Originally the schools served children of diplomats, international business and financial execs, missionaries, etc. There were sometimes even different international schools for different foreign nationalities, so an American school and a British school, sometimes side by side. But over time the international populations of these schools, like those at Bates, have widened considerably. Seeking directions at a Tokyo train station, I chatted with a Bangladeshi hotel exec, who invited me to stay in his home on my next visit to Japan. Far more nationalities are represented than just Americans or Europeans–at one high school in Bangkok, the students in my session were Korean. Other times we saw dual citizens, or citizens of the home country who have spent most of their lives in several other countries, and for whom the international schools are the most logical option, even as they return home.
At several international high schools, we gave workshops on admissions essay writing which Kristin Crosby, the Associate Dean for international applicants in Admissions, and I had worked up together. There is always appreciation for the American liberal arts to approach to higher education, but the enormous variety of colleges and universities, while entrancing, also makes it hard for families and counselors abroad to understand American admissions procedures, in contrast to the brutal simplicity of scores on national entrance exams for Asian universities. These essay workshops, given from a PPT of bullet points of advice with five sample essays that range from poor to clever-but-miscast to several successful efforts, have been enthusiastically received. We give the PPT to the counselors so that they can use it themselves, or reproduce it as a set of guidelines and encouragement for the students. (Yes, the “Bates College” logo is on the top of each page, for follow-up visibility…) In general, we have been very impressed by the students’ abilities to read quickly and accurately in English, and offer their thoughts.
In Thailand, we explored visiting one or two of the top public magnet high schools, the Thai versions of Bronx Science or Boston Latin, but the social disorder had thrown most of them for a loop, and they were either not open or not ready for visitors.
Traffic in Thailand
Almost all visitors to Thailand comment on the amazing driving and traffic.
A three-lane road becomes, with four lines of motorcycles and scooters running up the narrow spaces between the cars, trucks and buses, presto, a seven-lane road, except that the motorcycles and scooters are constantly weaving in and out of the cars, trying to get ahead. I haven’t seen any accidents yet, but several pretty startling close calls.
Leader of the Pack via Flickr Creative Commons
The sister of the Bates student who is driving me to the school visits — who is studying to build and fit prostheses — said most of her patients are ex-motorcycle riders. The motorcycles and scooters are so close to the cars and buses around them that they often graze one or both as they go by.
Thailand is an elegant society in many ways. but the traffic and driving have some “wild west” overtones.
Another Bangkok traffic note: The city is bisected by the river, and with relatively few bridges, being on the wrong side of the river at rush hour can bring one to complete gridlock for long periods of time. My Bates student driver picked me up at 7 AM for a school visit, and an hour later, we had gone less than a kilometer and could look back at the hotel we had just left. Happily, once across the bridge, things opened up, and we made our appointment at the school, with some mutual jokes about blood pressure and stress relief.
Bangkok traffic makes NYC or Boston look pretty calming in comparison — it is not for the fainthearted. When we left the hotel a couple of days later, we followed advice and loaded all our bags onto the graceful hotel shuttle boat for one last quick trip across the river to meet our airport car on the other side.
Transformation in Thailand
We had been worried about the Thai political situation for some weeks, but the public strife was, to all appearances, over by the time we arrived.
Thailand is a fascinating mixture of various cultural threads: faithful Buddhists, a constitutional monarchy with a revered King who is now quite elderly in and in poor health (apparently a factor in his not being about to bring about a resolution of the crisis by the enormous respect awarded him from almost all areas of society), and a quite liberal and entrepreneurial society.
Bangkok backstreet via Flickr Creative Commons
The political troubles have clearly had a major impact on tourism: we had changed our hotel three times in the weeks before the trip to stay away from the occupied areas (and in fact our original hotel, where the Bates reception was to have been held, was burned.) Our hotel, a very comfortable and gracious place on the other side of the river from the downtown, is almost completely empty — Hieu and I often find ourselves the only people in a dining room that could hold 100.
But the Thais are resilient, and they already seem to be rebounding and trying to sort out the right next steps for the country. To be sure, there are lots of unresolved disagreements about how the economic pie should be developed and divided. In some ways Thailand seems now like America between the 1880′s and 1940′s, with strongly felt and real disputes over economic development, owners versus workers, rural versus urban, native residents versus immigrants.I kept thinking of my childhood, listening to Peter Seeger singing all the 20′s and 30′s union and labor songs, calling for economic justice.
Perhaps the Thai people are part way through a similar transformation — with a magical and gracious historic civilization, and lots of economic growth — into a modern society, but with the balances not yet right.
At Hong Kong University
We scheduled a visit to Hong Kong University, where a recent Bates alum has recently been appointed to the Faculty of Arts, in comparative literature.
We met with the Dean/professor who supervises all exchange study from HKU, both coming and going, to explore having Bates students and HKU students be able to study at each other’s institutions. There would seem to be much to offer on both sides. They would welcome interest from Bates students in HKU for either a semester or a full year, and offer a summer term, either on a stand-alone basis or linked with a fall or spring semester.
Hong Kong University photos via Flickr Creative Commons
HKU is an urban university with about 12,000 undergrads and another 9500 grad and post-grad students. Their major problem is housing, so while they prefer to have visiting students living in a dorm, these spaces are hard to get. Their dorm for international students is a roughly 15-story high-rise with a lounge on the first floor, in a high-rise campus, true of all of land-challenged Hong Kong. Housing generally in Hong Kong is expensive and sometimes hard to find—there are about 1 million people in the city of Hong Kong itself, where HKU is, and other 6 million or so in the nearby territories. (In contrast, the entire population of Maine is 1.1 million, with L-A, at about 65,000, being the second-largest urban area.)
One of the real strengths for visiting students at HKU is being very close to China for study and cultural learning, but also enjoying Hong Kong’s freedom of speech, and the arts and cultural opportunities of an international city.
Hong Kong has, perhaps like San Francisco or Minneapolis-St. Paul, accumulated money and strong interests in the arts. We had lunch yesterday with Bates parents in an elegant hotel, and they pointed out the brand new Asia Society museum nearby, quite a facility.
HKU might be a terrific place for Bates students. The language of instruction is English, the campus is perched on the steep side of a hill over the downtown with a literal 5 minute cab ride down to the city, and they have about 400 international students arriving each year in their classes, so a very international student body. (It is also the land of the street Maserati — we saw higher concentrations of very high end imported race and luxury cars than anywhere else — though a Ferrari, Maserati or Lamborghini on the tiny and crowded streets of Hong Kong does seem like a curious choice.)
Their Dean would love to have more students looking at Liberal Arts colleges like Bates. The students’ parents, knowing little except the Ivies and a few big publics and focused on prestige, will need some convincing. But the Dean thought Bates would be perfect for their students, to get them out of HK to experience smaller environments. So a promising first conversation.
International schools in Hong Kong
While this trip is largely focused on alumni and parents, I have also been visiting an array of international schools, a few in each city, to help Admissions. The Chinese International School and the Hong Kong International School have very distinguished histories of preparing students very well for colleges and universities all over the world.
Hong Kong International School by Julie Lindsay via Flickr Creative Commons
As the name would suggest, CIS is a fully bi-lingual school, teaching both in English and Mandarin. (Interestingly, Mandarin is the most widely used language in China, but Hong Kong itself speaks Cantonese.) Both schools are far larger than one might imagine, since they are pre-K through 12th grade, with 100-200 students per grade — many of the international schools are bigger than Bates, with 2000-2500 students in all grades. Their students are fascinating mixtures of international families from all over the world, with strong contingents of some of the most talented students from Hong Kong who have ambitions to study abroad.
Each school is located far up in the mountains outside Hong Kong city, CIS on the opposite side of the harbor from Hong Kong, and HKIS on the other side of the mountains behind Hong Kong. The latter requires a sometimes hair-raising taxi ride through the mountains on very narrow and twisting roads, sharing the road with hundreds of motorcycles and motorbikes, heavy trucks, and buses.
Surprisingly, since land is at an absolute premium in Hong Kong and the city seems to be built straight up on any available postage stamp of land, the entire middle of Hong Kong island is completely undeveloped. Beautiful steep peaks run up from the road, covered in near-tropical greenery. Coming around a corner, a mountain lake will appear, and then at lower altitudes, thin twisting fingers of the South China sea, like fjords, wind into the interior of the land.
The students at HKIS were having end-of-year class competitions, with 750 students in the gym in their brightly colored class shirts having noisy tugs-of-war. But perhaps with a sigh, some came to hear my workshop presentation on how to write their college essays and sign up for Bates information. The Headmaster turned out to be a high school classmate of mine, 50 years later.
Toward Thailand
In the weeks of preparation for the trip, we have been watching carefully the struggles in Thailand, and even wondering if we would be able to go. We had to cancel the reception to be hosted by a pair of Bates brothers and their parents, as the hotel in which it was to take place was right in the middle of the protest area and apparently damaged.
Bangkok seems to be quieting down, and so we will go to visit schools and meet with our alums and parents in a smaller dinner, but now Korea is heating up. A Bates alum in Tokyo told me that North Korean artillery can reach Seoul, it is so close to the boarder. Great…
But I consider myself very lucky, to be able to both live on a dirt road in Maine and have the experience of a trip like this. Flying into Hong Kong from Beijing yesterday was jaw-dropping: the South China Sea with hundreds of islands, and then the steeply pitched mountains of Hong Kong with every available square foot seemingly with a skyscraper perched on it.
Flickr Creative Commons photo by Dennis Wong
Hieu and I walked around last night to get some supper and see a bit of the streets. There is a part of Hong Kong called “Times Square,” and it is very similar, with garish lighting, thousands of people jostling in the streets, noise, barkers–a kind of Chinese version of a NYC street festival scene in Times Square or the lower East Side or Brooklyn.
My hotel room looks out through 3-4 big dramatic office buildings to some slivers of views of the harbor, and last night at dusk a old-fashioned fishing junk with its sails set moved across the sliver between the glass and metal. Now, as I was writing this at dawn, I looked up and a shimmering white cruise liner was moving across the same sliver.
