Talking about the priveledges of a small, liberal arts College

Many of the roommates here are very interested in what college life is like in America, understandably. They like to ask questions about how big our classes are, our schools are, what the dorms are actually like as far as singles, doubles, genders, hours, etc, what the food is like, relationships with professors, etc. Basically everything one might get asked when hosting a prospective student. Now, I am only speaking from what I know from friends, because I have obviously not attended a large state school, but I\'m going to venture to say that HIT (Harbin Institute of Technology) is much more similar to a large state school than it is to a small liberal arts college. I think this double tier of differences makes describing school in America difficult.

A few obvious similarities: There are 50,000 students at HIT. Dorms are all single sex, and I think some significant proportion at some state schools are. Tuition here is very inexpensive ($500-$1000 per year), much cheaper but comparable to instate at most state universities. Social life here is organized around your 社团(she tuan) which are groups close to co-ed fraternities of around 100 people that most people choose to join. They organize social events, speakers, live together (but split by gender), and generally form tight groups which correspond somewhat to the fraternity culture of big universities which seems to be as alive as ever. And also your major is very important for who you know and see regularly here. Here you choose your major before you arrive at school, which I think is true for most technical programs at American Universities.

A funny story about choosing majors in china. You actually choose them (I\'m pretty sure) when you get the results from the national college entrance exam. They give you a list of the universities that you can attend based on your grade (pretty efficient, huh?). I was talking with a student here who chose a major that turned out to be something very different from what he thought he chose, which apparently isn\'t an uncommon ocurance. He picked 电子科技与技术 from the list, which literally translates to \'electrical science and technology\' but actually is the word for \'laser\' which he didn\'t know at the time. Now his entire academic life at school is devoted to studying lasers, plus the required courses on Chinese political philosophy.

Anyway, I got into a bit of a discussion with him about how they were probably getting a very distorted image of American education, since such a small percentage of Americans attend small, liberal arts colleges, and yet I think 13 out of the 16 of us CET students here do, or did. Sometimes I feel a little guilty because I think the American system of education, with experience based learning and an emphasis on individual, original thought is superior in most ways. This is somewhat reinforced by the fact that large foreign firms operating in China prefer most of their employees who do creative or high level work to be western educated. But at the same time it does feel good to describe the richness of the different kinds of education philosophy (or political systems or rural lifestyles) possible in our pluralistic society.