Better teachers could stem student exodus

Even as US citizens stand in awe of the Shanghai high school performance in the recent International Student Assessment, more and more Chinese middle school and college graduates are flocking to US universities. One has to ask, what has gone wrong with our higher education.

The answer for many is a lack of good professors. Going to seminars, watching the news and reading articles by leading scholars in the United States, I feel constantly reminded of the kind of professors our schools urgently need.

Larry Summers, professor at the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government, talked about Asia and the global economy at an Asia Society meeting last week. Summers was director of the White House National Economic Council until the end of last year. A former treasury secretary, former World Bank chief economist and former president of Harvard University, he is teaching two courses this spring semester, one on the policy response to the Great Recession and the other on US economic policy.