he American Education Disadvantage?
11 Apr 2019. www.insidehighered.com
By Elizabeth Redden
New research finds that graduates from U.S. universities are less likely to get a call back from Chinese employers than their counterparts with degrees from Chinese universities.
Employers in China are more likely to call back job applicants who graduated from Chinese colleges than from American colleges. Even job applicants with degrees from very selective U.S. universities are less likely to get a call back than applicants with degrees from the least selective Chinese institutions.
Those are the top-line findings in a new working paper by Mingyu Chen, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Princeton University. Chen sent more than 27,000 fictitious job applications for entry-level positions in business and computer science to employers in China. His study, he writes, is to the best of his knowledge “the first study to provide causal evidence on the value of U.S. postsecondary education in foreign labor markets.”
Chen estimates that the 111 American universities he used on the various fictitious résumés account for about 72 percent of all Chinese enrollments in the U.S. Over all, he found that applicants who had graduated from U.S. universities were 18 percent less likely to get a call back than applicants who had attended Chinese universities. Even applicants from the most selective U.S. universities — as defined by U.S. News & World Report rankings of national universities — were 7 percent less likely to get a call back than applicants from the Chinese universities he categorized as least selective.
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