US colleges are primarily institutes for education. The target being to help people improve their career or personal prospects. 

Chinese colleges are primarily institutes to generate money and they don't care what they have to do to generate income. Just cram bodies into a classroom is the target.

The two philosophies are poles apart and the people that feel this the greatest is the students. Teachers should be competent professionals recruited on a salary that reflects their status. Chinese teachers are forced to top up their salaries using many underhand methods available to them, all of which further degrade the already appalling education system.

I think the difference is that theoretically western education is designed to make you effective as a person, where chinese education is designed to make you effective at a task.

You can laugh about dumb-sounding classes like gender studies or something, but in most places that would just be some kind of sociology GenEd elective for people in other programs. You could take that or you could take something else like I took a class on third world development issues taught by a guy who really hated the world bank. It was kinda interesting.

But the point was originally to make you into a well-rounded gentleman, fit to converse on a variety of subjects at fancy balls. I would agree that for a strong majority of people being well-rounded isn't relevant to them, but hey...I think americans are a pretty effective group of people on average. At least in the business world. We're doing something right.

This is an unreasonable question begging for unreasonable generalities. It's typical of questions I hear from locals such as:

1. How much is rent in a foreign country?

2. What do you think about China/Chinese people?

3. Do you like America or China?

4. What do foreigners eat?

So Hal, why do you ask? Are you thinking about attending a Chinese or American University? It would be nice to hear some context for your question.

What kind of university do you mean? An Ivy League school? Large state school? Small liberal arts college? Community college?

In the US, people have entirely different college experiences based on what kind of school they attend and what they study there. I'm sure it's likely the same in China. A pre-med student at a large state school has a much different experience than a visual arts student at an art school.

One major general difference would be in student life - in many American universities students are treated more like adults who can come and go from their dorms with few restrictions whereas there seems to be less freedom for Chinese students in daily life.

Also, as expatlife26 said, the emphasis on being well-rounded or receiving a liberal arts education doesn't really seem to apply in China. Education is more geared towards learning how to perform specific jobs or tasks.

Chinese colleges try to brainwash you with CCP propaganda to make them loyal citizens of the country.

American colleges try to brainwash you with gender studies, ethnic studies, and other SJW studies to give you the feelbads toward SJW causes that normal people don’t need to be bothered about, and charge you 30,000 dollars per semester for it. 

I think another difference to discuss is that school here looks like it's set up to convert grinding effort into a result. That is you can pass the exam but you must spend hours and hours memorizing all the crap you need to pass it. But you don't have to be an exceptional person, you can be pretty mediocre but as long as you grind through it it's almost a direct relationship between time spent and result.

I think what that does is prop up the mediocre minds to muddle along at the expense of exciting the exceptional minds to do great things. There's not much engagement or creation of the genuinely gifted because it offers no room for the development of intuitive thinking or creativity. But it does a better job than the west of making it possible for dummies to pass calculus exams.

Failure doesn't seem possible either