Ayodeji Okusanya, James Keane, and Fiona O’Regan are among the newly arrived international students absorbing their first day of class at Renmin University of China’s International Summer School here. As they devour bowls of rice topped with spicy sauces and shredded meat and vegetables in a campus canteen, they explain why they decided to enroll at Renmin for their first taste of China.
Ms. O’Regan, from University College Dublin, is studying commerce and Mandarin. If she enjoys the four-week course, China could be a major part of her future career. “It’s better to find out early if you don’t like it,” she says. For Mr. Keane, also from University College Dublin, the experience “is more of a cultural visit.” And Mr. Okusanya, who is studying physics at the University of Warwick, in England, says he is road-testing his “just above beginner” language skills.
Renmin’s summer school, now in its fourth year, is one of the most ambitious efforts so far to meet China’s goal of bringing half a million foreign students to its shores by 2020. To reach the bold target, the Ministry of Education is pouring money into colleges to establish programs friendly to Americans and other international students.
Traditionally, China has attracted two types of foreign students: the committed Mandarin-learners who want professional-level skills, and students from developing countries who want better bachelor’s and master’s programs than the ones offered back home. Now China is looking to attract a broader swath of international students, like Ms. O’Regan and her classmates.
Programs like Renmin’s are key to that strategy. The summer school mixes domestic and international students and faculty members, and classes are taught in English. The courses also last only a few weeks, which is a popular feature for many foreign students. Short academic programs accounted for more than half of China’s foreign enrollments last year.
Whether China can actually increase the number of international students it attracts by more than 70 percent—293,00 foreigners studied in China last year—remains to be seen. With improvements to university facilities in recent years, once-frequent complaints by foreigners about doorless squat toilets, a lack of hot water, and bare concrete dorms have subsided. But concerns about more intangible issues, like the quality of teaching, have arisen.
And the stakes are high for China. In the same way the Beijing Olympics propelled refurbishment and expansion of the entire city’s infrastructure, China’s educational planners view better English-taught courses for foreign students as a lever to internationalize university campuses. Ultimately, they hope the programs will help improve the international standing of the country’s higher-education system.
The 500,000-student target is part of a package of higher-education reforms that includes inviting overseas universities to open China campuses, attracting foreign academics as visiting scholars, enticing Chinese educated in the United States to return, and coordinating more research with top-ranked universities overseas. Study-abroad programs are awash with public money, mostly channelled through universities, which get a subsidy per student for opening new programs.
“Internationalization is necessary for universities in China,” says Zhang Xiuqin, who heads the ministry’s Department of International Cooperation and Exchanges. “This isn’t just a challenge for international students. It is also a challenge to reform teaching methodology for Chinese students. Every university has put this on the agenda.”
Even more than most countries, China sees universities as “economic drivers” that signal its ability to compete globally, says Robert Daly, who heads the University of Maryland’s Maryland China Initiative, which provides training in management and pedagogy to Chinese universities.
“This is a policy that aims at a certain kind of prestige. The Chinese will not be satisfied unless they’re attracting American, European, and Australian students,” says Mr. Daly, who advises Chinese universities on how to improve courses taught in English.
Although Chinese universities offer some 20,000 courses in English, many are of poor quality, with professors unable to speak well enough to teach effectively. “We’re still at the beginning” of offering such courses, says Ms. Zhang.
Universities are also still learning how to design courses that would interest foreign students, particularly students who may not want to study the traditional subjects of Chinese language and literature. While the country is drawing students in a wide variety of fields, including business and engineering, course offerings have not necessarily kept pace with demand. “This is also something we can’t solve in a day,” says Ms. Zhang.
Blended Classrooms
Given its national education goals, the ministry wants to support programs for foreign students that strengthen Chinese universities over all. For instance, it would prefer a program in which a foreign university brings in a team of faculty members who work alongside a host university’s instructors. Renmin University’s summer program is something of a showcase in this regard, as it flies in dozens of faculty members from abroad. This summer’s lecturers include academics from Yale and Michigan State Universities, and the Universities of Cambridge and Melbourne.
Of the 3,000 students who enroll in the program, 300 are international. They receive Mandarin instruction, attend classes on tai chi and calligraphy, and mix with Chinese students in the English-taught segment, known as Academic Frontiers. All students, foreign and Chinese, get transferrable credits.
Reformers hope that by learning to teach Western students, Chinese educators will shed their commitment to rote learning and instructor-centered classes. “Chinese professors are used to too much respect,” says Yang Huilin, Renmin University’s vice president of internationalization.
While the education ministry hopes that all of its 2,000-plus colleges will eventually attract foreign students, in practice most of its efforts have gone into the elite universities.
One particular focus is the development of master’s programs in English at leading universities such as Tsinghua and Peking Universities, and at Renmin. American colleges with major study-abroad programs are on the ministry’s radar screen as potential partners, says Ms. Zhang.
It’s unclear how much China is spending on the effort, because it involves multiple budget pots at national, provincial, and city levels, Ms. Zhang says. However, the money goes to universities to strengthen their capacity to absorb foreign students. They may use it to build facilities, or pass it along to students as tuition-and-fee waivers.
Renmin University’s summer program is “almost free” to foreign students, says Mr. Yang, the Renmin vice president. Ms O’Regan, Mr. Keane, and Mr. Okusanya said their dorms and tuition are free thanks to scholarships.
Universities are also rethinking what they teach. Less than a decade ago, discussion of contemporary China was hard to find in fusty textbooks and culture courses, which usually focused on rare pandas and endangered folk customs. Elite universities are now modernizing course content to appeal to Westerners wanting to understand China’s swift rise and future trajectory.
Beijing Normal University started 61 English-taught courses in 2011, exploring such topics as pollution, urban migration, and population policy.
Today’s students are more picky about subject matter than previous generations of would-be Sinologists, says Xiao Kai, deputy director of the university’s Office for International Exchange and Co-operation. “In the past everything was in Chinese. Even the culture course was in Chinese,” he says.
The Shanghai Education Commission, mindful of the city’s heady international reputation as China’s Manhattan, is commissioning textbooks examining its economic and social policies during the last 30 years of economic reforms.
A number of lesser-known Chinese universities, and those outside major cities, have attended international education conferences to promote study abroad at their institutions. But, says Zong Wa, deputy secretary general of the China Education Association for International Exchange, they’re not ready to take in many international students. Rather, they are themselves learning about the field of international education, he says.
While short-term programs are improving, four-year degree programs for English-speaking foreigners remain weak. In addition to the poor English skills of most instructors, communication between faculty and students falls far short of what students from the United States would generally expect. Exam dates are announced or altered at a few days’ notice, and titles of courses or even whole degrees changed without consultation, say Western students studying in China.
For example, Elizabeth Gasson, who is enrolled in a journalism master’s program at Tsinghua University, in Beijing, says an abrupt change in test dates forced her to cut short a valuable internship. “It was very inconvenient as I was doing some work for the European Union,” she says.
Mr. Daly, of the University of Maryland, says such problems would deter some international students from seeking a degree at Chinese universities. “These are not yet places that American students could accept,” he says. “Students have to have certainty about stability of faculty, of majors, titles of degrees,” but the reality is “an opaque and shifting landscape, which Chinese students accept because they have to,” he says.
Open Arms
For American colleges who want to send students to China, the way to guarantee a successful program is to have their own faculty on the ground, properly vet potential partners, and if problems do arise, to stick with the collaboration to iron them out, advise international educators who have worked in China.
“There isn’t a Chinese university that isn’t willing to sign a partnership. They’ve become very entrepreneurial. Quality is another matter,” says Stephen C. Dunnett, vice provost for international education at the University at Buffalo. The institution set up one of the first American academic programs in China when diplomatic relations were renewed in 1979.
To help ensure a high level of teaching for its students, the University at Buffalo brings junior faculty from Capital Normal University, where the university operates its Beijing study-abroad program, to the United States for training."Chinese teachers don’t have any expectations they’re going to have a student-centered classroom, with a lot of give and take, but that’s what American students are used to from high school on up,” Mr. Dunnett says. “When it’s only six weeks, and our students have pulled a lot of summer jobs to pay for it, they’re very demanding about the quality of that experience.”
Another challenge is getting students to consider venues other than major cities. “In their minds if they’re not in Shanghai, Nanjing, or Beijing, they’re not in China,” says Mr. Dunnett. “Their knowledge of geography is very poor, and Shanghai is considered the place for young people, and Beijing is the capital.”
With the growing interest in studying in China, new private educational services have also emerged. For example, the start-up Global Maximum Educational Opportunities established the Chengdu American Center for Study Abroad at Sichuan University with funds from the city of Chengdu, in southwest China. Courses will be imported from four American partners: Concordia University Chicago, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Georgia State University, and Merrimack College. The center plans to enroll up to 100 students next spring.
Sherry Sun, acting president of the company’s China operations, says students at the center must take a course in Mandarin, but they don’t need any prior study of it—a reflection of how study-abroad programs in China are opening their arms to a new breed of student.
“We don’t require students have any Chinese-language background,” she says. “If they know zero, they can come.”
