The Worse the Student, the More He Should Come to America

The sense of agency that took me more than twenty years to grow, these seventeen and eighteen year old students got far more easily, just by being at Stanford, being in America, or maybe going to high school in Shanghai first.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

My years in America, watching scientists, founders and investors, have opened my eyes. But what moved me most was the Chinese students around me. Talented, and full of agency. That feeling of knowing who you are, what you want, and that the call is yours to make.

I do not think they were born more gifted. The environment gave it to them.

So if you want your child to experience agency, they should study abroad, and that means going to college in America. This has nothing to do with ideology.

People with the budget will go to America anyway. And now that AI is here and knowledge matters less and less, experience matters more. Where should that experience happen? It has to be another continent sized country.

So every time parents with a budget come to me and ask, my son is a poor student, could he go to Hong Kong, or Singapore, or Australia?

I am honestly puzzled. What are you thinking? The worse the student, the more he should come to America.

Coming to America is the experience that forges energy.

America is a dark forest where you really can get crushed, and that is where agency gets forged. It is an individualist society with endless options and tangled paths, where you have to take care of yourself, and that is where your energy opens up. It turns a boy who depends on his mom and dad into a real person.

If you have the budget and want your child to study abroad, of course you send them to America. There is nothing opportunistic about it, even though opportunism is everywhere. Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Britain, Europe? Those are not options.

Once you have the budget and decide on study abroad, treat it as an experience, a gift to your child for the journey of their life. You have no choice. Only America.

If you have a child born after 2010, I want to tell every parent born in the 1980s and 1990s this. The globalization of Chinese people depends on us.

And the core of that globalization is to let a completely different cultural self collide with our Confucian soul and our agrarian way of thinking, and with our own souls and our children’s souls, which have been held down countless times.

That is everything America means for Chinese people.

Right now everyone is watching two things, US China relations and AI. Where those two meet, the scarcest thing is a person who understands China and has truly been forged by America.