Opting For The Arts.(Special Report; THE EDUCATION RACE)(liberal arts)

Byline: Duncan Hewitt; With Melinda Liu in Beijing and Sudip Mazumdar in New Delhi

Thanks to newfound wealth, liberal arts courses are starting to bloom in the developing world.

China's academies are obsessed with getting ahead in engineering and the hard sciences, so the subject of the master's program Dalian Medical University introduced three years ago--photojournalism--seemed surprising. In fact, Dalian, despite its name, was already home to one of China's most popular photography departments. The new program, run in cooperation with Britain's Bolton University, mixes foreign and Chinese students, features top-drawer lecturers from abroad and will expose participants to fresh ideas in composition and journalistic ethics. "Chinese photographers are pretty good technically," says course leader D. J. Clark, "but this is really about getting them to think more critically."

Not long ago, such esoteric pursuits were almost unheard of in a nation obsessed with building a modern economy. It's no coincidence that 17 of 25 Chinese Politburo members are engineers by training. But the boom they've created is granting a growing number of students (at least among the elite) the luxury to explore arts and design courses long taught in the West but relatively neglected in Asia. For now, many of these programs still have a pragmatic bent, turning out the industrial designers, advertising illustrators, and other creative types that China needs as its industries move from copying foreign products to creating their own. Students must be equipped "not just to find jobs, but to create new jobs as well. Society needs new things," says Zhao Zhongjian, director of the Center for Global Education at East China Normal University in Shanghai and a specialist in innovation. "For example, we're now holding a lot of international exhibitions in China, so now we [offer] a major in exhibition design." But some of the programs popping up are much less practical.

This evolution is already well underway in Asia's richer states. Singapore's government exhorts students to "have fun" and is expanding academic programs in soft sciences and the media. And the campaign to inspire creativity is expanding into poorer states besides China, such as the Philippines and India. In India, for example, students can now study subjects ranging from desktop publishing to fashion technology (designing, ...