Private or Public? Depends on Where You Are

In the US there is a tendency to look at private universities as “better.” Maybe because they are more expensive, maybe because some states have established easier admission standards for their public universities, maybe because schools like Harvard and Stanford have set the bar pretty high…whatever the reason, we often view private universities as more elite. Even the best state schools are referred to in “private” terms, like calling Virginia and Berkeley “Public Ivies.” As an employer from the US, you may be tempted to favor job applicants from private schools over public ones.

But if you are hiring internationally, you need to watch that. In many places overseas, the public schools are viewed as the elite ones, whereas the private schools are often for-profit businesses that have a different focus from a traditional university in the US.

As I found while teaching in Singapore, and as my colleagues in Malaysia and Hong Kong have reiterated to me recently, public universities in Asia can be very selective in their admissions, requiring extensive standardized testing for admissions and selecting only the best among local students. The public universities tend to attract the top faculty, both domestically and internationally, and tend to be home to research centers and institutes where advanced academic work is done. When the government needs research done, they turn to the public schools. Also, because many countries do not have a large number of public universities, the ones that do exist tend to be well-funded.

The common US model of a non-profit private university is not as common overseas, especially in Asia. Private schools instead are often for-profit businesses rather than non-profit research institutions; in 2010, nearly 40% of higher education in Asia was private. The impact for students is that their professors are not necessarily the experts that you expect from professors who are immersed in the intricacies of their field. The number of schools like this has grown in the US during the last few decades (though the business model for these may be changing), but overseas they are often the norm rather than the exception.

This is not to say that students cannot get a good education in for-profit schools. As with any educational experience, the ultimate value of the education is determined more by the student than by the institution. The schools also tend to be a little more narrowly tailored, so students can really specialize in their field, and if that is what you’re looking for in an employee, then this can work well for you. Also, many of these schools are international in nature — quite a few schools in Singapore are Australian, for instance — and many of the faculty may be very active academicians who saw this as an opportunity to live abroad for a few years. While they may still be very good, though, the paradigm of “private is better than public” simply does not apply here.

Obviously, your hiring decision should not be based solely on whether a student went to a public or private university. You should be more interested in what they studied, how they did in their courses, and what skills they had by the time they finished. But for those who do emphasize one type of school over the other, be sure you understand what that means in the context of the society where the education took place.