American Undergraduate Education from an Internataional Perspective

Abstract

In America one should begin with a joke; in Korea one should begin with an apology. Since I am in Korea, I should apologize. I have no qualifications for being asked to write other than being American and having attended an undergraduate college in America many many years ago. On the other hand, I have spent the last nine years in international education. I deal with American undergraduate education daily in the form of American students studying at Yonsei and by sending Yonsei students to American undergraduate institutions as exchange students. Thus my focus in this paper is comparative, on American and Korean undergraduate education. As prof Dai-Kwon Choi said in his research proposal, a de facto comparison is implicit in all we are doing. As a result, my focus is not on the disciplines which are taught, but on the culture in which they are taught. I notice that there are many papers on the individual disciplines of American undergraduate education. Such a focus on the disciplines is not wrong, but it implies an emphasis on undergraduate education as product, the knowledge which is obtained. Such knowledge cannot be separated from its context. My focus is on the context the process, the culture, of American undergraduate education.