The invitation came in the form of an e-mail passed along by his department chair.
“Dear Professor,” it began. “Would you like to diversify your teaching background with an exciting summer in China? Would you like to enrich your life experience in the biggest developing country while earning generous monetary compensation? Would you like to explore Chinese culture and society for free?”
Five months later, Josh Beach, a lecturer in the writing program at the University of Texas at San Antonio, found himself on the campus of a Chinese university, teaching philosophy to Chinese college students.
But these were no ordinary students. They were actually enrolled at colleges back in the United States. Home for the summer, they were taking classes from American professors like Mr. Beach in hopes of earning transfer credits at a fraction of what it would cost back in Indiana or Michigan or Ohio. The program itself, however, was not actually run by an American or Chinese college.
Confused? You’re not alone. American-style summer programs in China, catering to Chinese-born students, have taken American universities by surprise. They are yet one more player in the complex and often opaque Chinese education industry, an industry in which American colleges are finding themselves increasingly entwined.
These programs have become a booming enterprise, hiring professors from high-profile institutions, Harvard and Berkeley among them, to teach for a few weeks in the summer. They recruit Chinese students through friends and social media to check off a few college credits while visiting home, and they have persuaded American universities to accept their credits. At Indiana University at Bloomington alone, more than 175 students enrolled in 10 different programs this past summer.
Many professors and administrators wonder with whom exactly they are doing business. By and large, these are for-profit companies, say those familiar with the industry. They are run by young, American-educated Chinese who know how to navigate both the American and Chinese education systems, and who have the connections and resources to create businesses from scratch.
These entrepreneurs have taken an American product—the Western college course—and created a shorter, cheaper version to sell to their peers. In doing so, they have tapped into the seemingly insatiable demand for Western education by China’s growing middle class. Today there are more than 74,000 Chinese undergraduates enrolled at American colleges. These students may have the means to pursue an American degree, but they are also time- and cost-conscious.
Yixin Mei, a student at Michigan State University, took three courses in Shanghai last summer. They cost just a third what she would have paid back in East Lansing. “If summer school provides me the credits and it’s cheaper,” she says, “why not choose that?”
Smart 20-Somethings
The first such program was created by a Wabash College student, Hao Liu, and a friend of his from Harvard Law School.
Mr. Liu says he came up with the idea during his sophomore year at Wabash, when he realized that Chinese students had little opportunity to take classes for credit at home during the summer, unlike his American counterparts.
SIE International Summer School opened on the campus of East China Normal University, in Shanghai, in 2010. Mr. Liu and his friends worked through their contacts and found 13 faculty members, including some from Wabash, willing to teach that first year. He expected no more than 60 students. He got 240.
Today SIE has 52 employees, and the Renren Network, known as the Facebook of China, is a major investor. More than 3,200 students have passed through the program, and the company has a Los Angeles-based director, Grace Hu, whose job is to connect with American universities.
While they have no hard figures, Ms. Hu and Mr. Liu say about 90 percent of transfer-credit requests have been approved, at more than 240 institutions. SIE expects to operate on eight campuses this summer.
SIE’s success has spawned a slew of competitors with names like ONPS International Summer School, Summer China Program, and Fujen Summer School. New ones are popping up seemingly on a monthly basis.
The programs vary in quality, oversight, and structure but contain common elements. Their clientele so far are almost exclusively Chinese students enrolled in American colleges. The programs provide short courses tailored to help students fulfill general-education requirements: introductory classes in subjects like American government, marketing, and Western art. The Web sites heavily promote the transferability of their credits, saying that the programs meet U.S. standards in terms of course hours and credits per course. Some post their course syllabi online or list course equivalencies at American universities to make it easier for students to talk to their advisers about which courses might transfer.
The programs arrange to have their Chinese host universities issue transcripts, meeting—superficially at least—a common requirement in the United States that transfer credits be earned at a government-recognized or accredited university. And they build their networks through a combination of word of mouth, cold calling, and social media.
Dennis H. Sullivan, former senior director at the Farmer School of Business at Miami University, began scrutinizing these programs early last year after the number of Chinese students in the business school participating in them jumped to well over 100. He talked to program administrators and faculty members at various summer schools. “It took me a lot of work to figure out how it actually worked,” he says.
Having retired in June, Mr. Sullivan now acts as a consultant for Summer China Program, or SCP. “We’re dealing with smart, aggressive twenty-somethings who don’t know the true details and, in many cases, the folkways of American academic life,” he says. “There’s a great deal to know about American education that nobody writes down.”
Who’s in Charge?
Understanding these programs is tricky in large part because of their often opaque chain of command. Their Web sites typically say nothing about ownership or management structures, instead emphasizing the institutions from which they recruit instructors. Harvard, Berkeley, Columbia, and other elite institutions are mentioned prominently.
The programs also emphasize the prestige of their host universities and describe them as partners.
But Mr. Sullivan says it would be a mistake for American universities to judge the quality of a program by judging the quality of the institution housing it. “These programs have absolutely nothing to do with the academic operations of their host institutions. Nothing,” he says. “They are completely freestanding.”
As a result it is not always clear who is in charge.
Summer China Program, for example, says that it is supervised by the China Education Association for International Exchange, or CEAIE, a high-profile nonprofit organization that operates under direction of China’s education ministry. Last year Summer China Program drew 550 students to its campuses in Beijing and Shanghai.
But SCP is owned and operated privately: by Yin Yu, a recent graduate of Michigan State University, and her husband, Xianwei Meng, a Wabash College graduate.
Li Xudong, deputy director of CEAIE’s department for cooperation and projects development, explained in an e-mail that CEAIE staff “examine and verify the list of professors and supervise the running condition” of the SCP program. But he added that the couple’s company “directly runs the program.”
JNC International Summer Program, which now runs the site at Jinan University where Mr. Beach, of UT-San Antonio, taught, is run by several families, says Feng Liu, a student at the University of Minnesota who wrote the invitation letter that led Mr. Beach to China. “It is parents who see the potential of the market, and they have connections in the Chinese education system, they have money, and they trust their kids.”
Other programs are less forthcoming about who owns and operates their ventures. Ping Chuan, one of the founders of Fujen Summer School, and a Boston University graduate, declined to describe the program’s ownership structure or talk about how it formed a partnership with Fudan University this past summer, during its inaugural year.
“It is really hard to make everything make sense,” Mr. Ping said. “This is China. You don’t understand the connections. You don’t understand the really complicated stories.”
The role of the host university is not easy to figure out, either. The Chronicle contacted 16 campuses that are partners with these summer programs. Most did not respond to interview requests. Of those that did, administrators said they closely supervised the programs.
At Shanghai International Studies University, the Confucius Institute oversees the Summer China Program site there, assigning three employees to it in 2012, said a staff member who requested anonymity. At East China Normal University, SIE’s summer program is overseen by the Global Education Center, said Huang Meixu, the center’s director. The university vets instructors’ qualifications and course content, she said, and issues transcripts after verifying grades. “We want this program at ECNU to be honorable,” she said, noting that hosting the summer program helps internationalize the university.
The Chronicle also interviewed more than a dozen professors who have taught in these programs. None said they had any substantial interaction with university administrators or faculty members.
“Nobody with any academic credentials came to check whether I was teaching students,” says Stephanie J. Nawyn, an assistant professor of sociology at Michigan State, who taught in the SCP program at Shanghai International Studies University. “I was the academic control.”
As for the quality of the programs themselves, Ms. Nawyn and others pointed to a number of structural challenges. Students are typically charged a flat fee for the first two courses—roughly $2,900—and can add more courses for a few hundred dollars each. (Some programs cap the maximum at three while at least one allows students to take up to five courses.)
As a result, professors say, many students attempt to maximize the number of credits they can accumulate, often to their detriment. It’s not uncommon for students to drop a third course a week or so into the program, professors say, while others do poorly.
Faculty members often say that being faced with a classroom of Chinese students is not something they’ve experienced before. In addition to cultural differences, like a lack of class participation, faculty members and some administrators say cheating has been a pervasive problem.
Flora Fu, a senior at the University of Denver who has been both a student and a teaching assistant in summer programs, says there is often a big disparity in the motivations of the students, which contributes to cheating. She thinks administrators could cut down on the problem by weeding out weak students upfront: “Those who want to finish college as soon as possible, they work very hard. Another group, they can’t finish the courses in their own school, and they think summer school will be easy.”
Administrators at some programs encouraged instructors to be tough on cheaters, professors say, and even advised them what to look for, like drink bottles with the answers written on the inside label. But several professors said the young staff members were simply in over their heads, and that instructors worked together to crack down on cheating, improve class participation, and deal with unprepared students.
“It was the most challenging teaching I have ever done,” says Martin Bloomer, an associate professor of classics at the University of Notre Dame, who taught at the SIE program in Beijing last summer. “The very good students were magnificent. But you also had students whose English was not up to discussing classical literature.” He ended up failing about a third of his students.
Several program heads said they were aware of professors’ concerns and had been beefing up their programs, adding more teaching assistants, office hours, writing labs, and the like.
Mr. Liu, who graduated in 2011 from Wabash and is chief executive of Sinoway International Education Group, which runs SIE International Summer School, said that this fall the program established a four-person advisory board, with faculty members from American colleges, who are responsible for academic oversight. “We’ve handed over authority to this academic committee,” Mr. Liu says.
Melissa A. Butler, a recently retired political-science professor at Wabash, is on that board. She has taught at SIE for all three years of its existence and believes that it is improving. “There’s a greater movement toward institutionalization,” says Ms. Butler, who this fall agreed to become SIE’s first dean of the summer school. “My hope is that students will become better students after having been through this program.”
Summer China Program is also improving, says Ms. Yu, the co-owner. In addition to hiring Mr. Sullivan as an adviser, the program is expanding to six weeks, following faculty members’ complaints that a semester’s worth of material could not be taught in four weeks.
‘A Cheap, Chinese Program’
Most professors said they signed on—despite a limited understanding of how the programs operated—because it sounded like an interesting academic adventure. Pay ranged from about $3,000 to $7,000 a course, according to instructors, which was an additional incentive for some. (Programs typically pay airfare and provide housing as well.)
Some said they would be willing to return, as they viewed these programs as well-intentioned start-ups providing a useful service to students, and willing to improve. More commonly, though, professors came away with reservations.
Student performance was at the root of many faculty members’ concerns. Professors noted that many students had spent only a year on an American college campus, yet were attempting to take two or more college-level courses in the span of four to six weeks.
Some students could barely function in an English-speaking classroom or lacked the necessary background to participate in discussion of Western literature or politics, instructors said. A number of professors said that many students seemed only to want to earn passing grades, so they could transfer the credits back to their home institution.
“I was hoping these students would want to learn,” says Mr. Beach, who wrestled with challenges such as a lack of interest or academic preparation in the three courses he taught in China. Although he adjusted his expectations to account for the five-week term and the fact that his students weren’t native English speakers, they “really couldn’t handle the work,” he says.
Ms. Nawyn, of Michigan State, says she walked away feeling that she was undercutting herself. “Essentially what Summer China did was create a cheap, Chinese program,” she says. “I was providing an inexpensive product students could buy in lieu of better developed courses back home.”
Literally. A quarter of her students were from Michigan State.
Not a Part of the System
According to these programs, hundreds of colleges in the United States have already accepted their credits. That may be true, but some colleges are starting to scrutinize them more closely, following a surge in participation from students last summer. Case Western Reserve University approved a number of credit-transfer requests this fall, says Molly Watkins, director for international affairs, but will be looking more closely at these programs going forward. “We’re trying to figure out, Is this really study abroad?” she says. “There’s not a consensus in the field about how to handle this.”
Some institutions—Michigan State and Indiana University at Bloomington among them—now refuse to accept credits from programs like these, administrator say. Indiana rejected the transfer-credit requests from virtually all of the students who had enrolled in these programs last summer. The sticking point is that the Chinese government-authorized agency Indiana asked to review transcripts has determined that they are stand-alone programs, and not part of the national education system.
Not surprisingly, summer-program operators are fighting back, saying that these are international programs and thus naturally not part of the national education system. Some are adding courses in Chinese language and culture to better position themselves in the study-abroad market.
Whatever the future of these summer programs, American universities should expect to have to deal with more entrepreneurs and their answers to the Chinese demand for Western education. It is all part of the ever-expanding educational boomtown in China—and its increasing entanglements with American higher education.
This spring, in fact, SIE unveils its latest venture: a semester-long study-abroad program, offering courses on Chinese business, language, and politics. The first students, including some Americans, are set to arrive on the campus of East China Normal University next month.
