The right lessons

US author Mark Ferrara offers in his new book a comparative study on higher education in China and the United States.[Photo provided to China Daily]

A new book says that, while the higher education system has progressed in China in the past 30 years, it has declined in the US. Mei Jia reports.

Has China's higher education system succeeded in producing top talent for the fiercely competitive global market? The question tends to yield mixed responses from Chinese.

But Mark Ferrara, an associate professor of English at State University of New York, has a definitive answer: Higher education in China has been on the rise in the past three decades while there's been a "corresponding decline of it" in the United States.

His latest book, Palace of Ashes: China and the Decline of American Higher Education, recently published by Johns Hopkins University Press, is a comparative study of changing trends in higher learning in the two countries and it points to China's scale of development in the sector.

"In my view, the US remains ill-prepared for convergence in higher education and the race to establish research universities of 'world-class' standing," Ferrara tells China Daily in an e-mail. "China positioned itself to steadily catch and eventually surpass the US as an undisputed leader in international tertiary education."

Ferrara, in his 40s, has authored books based on the Chinese classic A Dream of Red Mansions and on US President Barack Obama. He has also taught in universities in China, South Korea and Turkey. Through the years, he has witnessed the sprouting of many new campuses in China.

"I was continually amazed to find sprawling new campuses outside of almost every Chinese city or town," he says. "China now boasts the largest higher education-delivery system in the world with upward of 30 million students, and it produces roughly 8 million graduates per year, about 5 million more than that in the US."

Some government efforts in China are also clearly visible, he says. For example, when he visited Fudan University in Shanghai to give a lecture on William Blake in 2012, he found a new and spacious humanities library that has a room with high-tech gadgets for global conferences in place of the "dark and dank" library he had seen there in the 1990s.