I grew up in Taiwan, so I think I can shed some light on this. IMHO "the average" Taiwanese student will work harder than the average American student, but not by a supremely gross margin as this article would imply.

The bottom-barrel students never end up in American colleges, after all.

The chief difference is cultural - in Asia intellectualism is celebrated and demanded. Parents don't push their kids to football, they push them to academic achievement. Not being able to make it into college isn't worn as a badge of honor, it's downright shameful. I have personally known people who've shipped their kids away from home to some backwater third-rate academy, just so they can hide the fact that the kid couldn't get into any school locally.

Beyond parental pressure, peer pressure also largely pushes people to academic achievement. Having high marks won't get you beat up - in fact it commands respect (within reason). Having poor marks likewise isn't cool like it is here, but is similarly embarrassing.

Keep in mind though, that this has some consequences that academics who opine about the lack of American work ethic consistently fail to mention:

- Appreciation and participation in the arts, both as a college study, and as extracurriculars, is ridiculously low. People who study the humanities are looked down upon, I even know one guy who got disowned for it.

- Social integration takes a backseat, often to disastrous results later. In Taiwan is it not irregular for a middle school child (age 12 or so) to be at some form of school for 14 hours a day. There's literally only spare time to eat and sleep (and sometimes not even). Socialization is minimal, and add this onto the culture of living with your parents well into your 20s, it produces some seriously socially inept people.

Japan is already dealing with these consequences - look up "hikkikomori" if you're interested.

Great post, I'd also mention...

It take a certain to 'laziness' to solve a problem elegantly rather than through grinding effort.

This kind of laziness, the kind of laziness that great programmers laud, can require a bit of effort. It's the kind of effort mathematicians go through when they look at problem for five minutes before saying "it's trivial".

The America that built Silicone Valley sometimes had this right balance between effort and "laziness". Present America certainly seems to have taken a wrong turn.

I would say that you speak of 'cleverness' instead of laziness. If I look at a problem that looks like a ton of tedious work, it is eminently useful to spend time just thinking about the solution.

If anything, its an appreciation for elegance.

But maybe its just laziness as you say. If a solution looks like a grind, I will spend just as much time trying to find an elegant solution (probably more) because I don't want to just grind out the solution.

You know what they say, "All good planning eventually degenerates into work."

The key here is that the average foreign student who came to America for college has already demonstrated a tremendous commitment to education. The average American student at any college, particularly one that is not world-renowned, does not harbor this extraordinary signal. Expectations with regards to work ethic should be calibrated accordingly.

Thanks for sharing your account of student life in Taiwan. It's always nice to hear firsthand about life in other cultures so that we don't hang onto our misconceptions. On that note, let me suggest that your caricature of American student life is a little cartoonish. Yeah it's like that in a lot of schools, but if your son or daughter goes to one of those schools then you live in a shitty neighborhood and should move. You're probably right about the means, but the variance is much higher in the US and its very possible to find an academic environment where a student can excel without fear of getting beat up. (Also, the bit about not making it into college being worn as a "badge of honor" is just silly. Why would they even apply?) FWIW I went to public school in Northern California (the central valley even) and I definitely got positive feedback from my peers for doing well in school, because my peers also took advanced classes. Apart from schools with gang problems, I would characterize it like this: In the US it's your choice whether or not you want to succeed academically. Your peers generally don't care because there are a myriad of other reasons to like or dislike you (looks, sense of humor, clique membership, etc.) So yeah there is not the social pressure to succeed, but for the most part there is no negative pressure preventing success (again, except in very troubled schools.)

For those folks who live in a large enough urban centre, I think you're right. When I was in high school (public HS in Converse, Texas, just outside of San Antonio), I was fortunate enough that most of my classes were AP or honours classes and we were highly intellectually competitive. Those classes that I didn't have AP for were, on the other hand, sheer torture (on many levels).

The introduction of AP and other advanced classes was a godsend for intelligent kids being able to be reaffirmed by their peers. But a lot of kids don't really want to be in school, and like to pick on kids who do. (Which was my experience as one of the "smart kids" at a private school in Charleston, South Carolina.)

That was my experience growing in the US too. But that was 30+ years ago. About when did you graduate?

I share chancho's experience and I graduated in 2007.

I agree that the work ethic is higher here and that smarts are cool. However, I don't really agree about appreciation for the arts. I hear children practicing the piano or violin every day here in Taiwan and there's also a shop or two for classical instruments and sheet music near most elementary schools in Taipei. Children who can't draw also seem to be quite a bit more common in America than here.

Yes on the social integration, though. People don't really have the time for much socializing until college.

Another fact you forgot to mention is probably asceticism in east-asian culture. This has some serious damage to social skills, too.

Yeah, if the validity of your visa hinges on passing all of your classes, you will do what it takes to pass those classes, language barrier or no.

More to the point, the only ones who got the visa in the first place are the ones who already were top performers.

I agree that foreign students are above the average level of American students, generally speaking. But in this particular case? I had never heard of Babson College, and I'm pretty sure top students in any of the mentioned countries wouldn't choose Babson.

You probably never heard of them because they didn't go to your area to recruit. When I was looking at schools recruiters were coming to the school practically everyday. Some were bundled up in the same day.

And you never know why a student chooses a college until you ask. They might be offering something in their major. They may know an alumni who can get them a spot (with the proper grades of course), or they might offer more scholarship money. If you're family income is $200 a month are you really going to turn down a free education?

Also keep in mind that the author teaches at Babson, which is a private college devoted entirely to business administration students.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand how I should "keep this in mind." She teaches at a college which focuses on business. How does this explain the difference she sees between her American students and her international students? (I'm not trying to be difficult - though I'm told it comes natural to me. I just don't see your point.)

He might be intoning the stereotype (which may or may not be true) that there are more "slacker" students joining business programs, whereas engineering students tend to be more focused and disciplined. Therefore, you might see a very different article from an instructor at MIT.

Right, but that difference (if it were real, which I doubt) should cut across the two groups of students (American and non-American).

Or at least, we have no reason to think that "business students are lazier than other students" tracks or causes the difference between Americans and others that the author focuses on.

I'm just saying that all the author is observing is that the students with the most to lose, work the hardest. Foreign students obviously have a lot to lose since they're coming overseas for an education. On the other hand, the American students she interacts with are likely wealthy and don't necessarily need stellar grades to move on to a professional degree program e.g. medical school.

It doesn't explain any difference between American and other students, just that Babson's student body is different than most.

From personal experience i've found the hardest working students to be those needing to get into professional school (law or medicine) as well as low-income/disadvantaged students who couldn't afford the $50k tuition/year to attend a private college.

Sure it does explain the difference, or at least it is easy to see how it could. From my experience interacting with foreign high school students from across the globe, they generally do not understand the hierarchy of higher ed in the US. At least, the ones I interact with have little knowledge of the reputations of colleges outside of Ivies + Stanford + MIT. (Clearly, you could argue that college rep != college quality, but that is a totally different discussion.)

Consequently, you could end up with a student body of pretty highly qualified foreign students but American students that didn't make the cut at more desirable colleges in the US. (Again, there are plenty of reasons why great students choose colleges that are not high on the prestige list, but this effect doesn't need to be large to be real.)

I know a number of foreign students who came to the US as undergrads and essentially threw a dart at a map of the US.

For some reason I have met a number of Japanese students that spent 4 years at schools I had never heard of (like X+State+University+Branch Campus in a tiny town). And they usually were very good students who went on to good grad programs, employment, etc.

The point being that the quality/reputation of the school will not be proportional in the same way to the quality of the domestic students versus the quality of foreign students.

A final anecdote, when I was at a university in Germany, I saw a cheesy poster advertising a scholarship to study in the UK, sort of "Apply Now! Come to England!". The scholarship: The Rhodes. I asked a few Germans and none of them had heard of the Rhodes Scholarship, which is probably the most prestigious scholarship in the English speaking world.

Actually, many people think of the Rhodes as tainted (because it includes an athletic component) and rate the Marshall Scholarship more highly. (If we're ranking go-to-England scholarships, at least...)

Would be nice if we could get a slacker statistic like percentage of slackers by country.

Yeah. I wish someone else would do that.

I don't usually upvote comments like these on HackerNews, but that genuinely made me laugh-out-loud.