The one difference I have noticed is that some of those Asian countries are more extreme in that more people choose to not have kids and more people choose to have only one kid instead of two.
I didn't get into any of my Ivy first choices and ended up going to a mid-tier state school and still wound up living well, except without the massive private debt burdens of my peers.
This is different from South Korea or most of East Asia. South Korea's unemployment rate among graduates is pretty high and underemployment even higher, because the system is producing too many university graduates. From Wikipedia:
> As of 2007, 80% of college graduates were job seekers while only 30% of jobs demand highly educated workers.[7] With the recent overabundance of high school and college graduates,[8] the requirements of the labor market mismatch the skills provided by the education system.
This times 100. The US education system has a lot of flaws, but for the most part, school placement is usually based on geographical location (which comes with its own set of problems), the SAT and ACT are not terribly difficult, and more importantly those college exams can be retaken multiple times a year.
East Asian education is extremely competitive with competition for spots starting as early as pre-K (age 3). Japanese media often shows how students get their grades ranked and posted outside of the classroom. The college exams are more comprehensive than the American ones; the South Korean Suneung is scheduled to take 9 hours. The Suneung (and Chinese gaokao, Japanese Center Test, Singaporean GCE) are only held once a year, so if you want to retest you have to wait the whole year.
And then there is the problem of school bullying: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/metoo-style-reckoning-ove...
> “A lot of the people used to say bullying matters in school were merely immature scuffles between teenagers,” she said. “Some would even blame the victims, saying that it is their problem that they cannot fit in.”
> Two decades ago, her daughter was beaten by a dozen schoolmates and spent five days in a coma. Yet, when Jo attempted to hold the students accountable, the wider community viewed her as a troublemaker, and her family was forced to move to another area.