The streets of Nanjing, China, are quiet at 6:30 a.m. Much of the early traffic consists of young people on bikes and city buses, on their way to a school day that begins at about 7:15 and ends after 5. American parents would never dream of letting their kids navigate a city of six million—there are no school buses—but Chinese parents think nothing of it.
The students at High School Affiliated to Nanjing Normal University, where I work, settle into their desks each morning and quickly put their noses in a book or laptop. But unlike most of their peers, these kids do most of their reading in English. They are part of the first International Baccalaureate diploma program at a government-run school in China. Last May, 28 older classmates became the nation’s first IB graduates. About 2,000 schools in 132 countries offer the program, which is widely recognized as one of the world’s most rigorous college-preparatory curricula. With two exceptions, last year’s graduates have enrolled at American colleges and universities.
I was hired in 2008 as the IB program’s director of college counseling. (The school is known as NSFZ, for the Roman-alphabet abbreviation of its Chinese name.) There are no guidance counselors in Chinese public schools, where everyone takes the same curriculum, and I am surely among the first American-style college counselors to work in one. I counsel only students in the IB program, a relatively small part of NSFZ, which has 2,400 students on its main campus. Because of budget constraints and the program’s small size, I am in China for only four months a year.
The Ministry of Education approved the IB program for public schools in 2006, and my students pay about $10,000 a year in tuition, including a hefty surcharge for the privilege of a Western education. They are among the newly affluent Chinese who are beginning to arrive on American campuses. Applications from China to leading U.S. institutions have skyrocketed in the past three years—up more than 100 percent at many institutions—and the number of students enrolling has also risen steeply. Reputable Chinese universities have limited space compared with the demand, and increasing numbers of savvy parents want their children to get American degrees. In a society where unrelenting competition is a fact of life, the allure of the world’s best system of higher education is growing by the year.
It is hard to imagine the students I work with rubbing shoulders with undergraduates on American campuses. Most can do college-level math without breaking a sweat, but in other respects they remind me of fifth graders. They are sincere, enthusiastic, and completely removed from the world-weariness that infects American teenagers. They are also at arm’s length from the Western obsession with sexuality. Everyone, male and female, wears the same blue-and-gray uniform. The girls don’t put on makeup, and the elementary-school-style ponytail remains almost universal. Chinese students are very aware of Western culture, but it is remote from their daily life. I have a recurring nightmare that one of those innocent young souls will come to mischief at the hands of a party-animal American roommate.
Chinese high-school students are very much under the sway of their parents, a fact that is partly responsible for my biggest professional headache: the chaotic state of American admissions for Chinese students. Chinese parents are just as invested in the process as their American counterparts, but most don’t speak English.
With no reliable source of information that they can understand, the parents turn to a motley collection of agents who purport to offer the inside track to American colleges. A Chinese colleague recently told me about a friend who paid $10,000 to an agent who guaranteed her child five acceptances from among “the top 100 universities” in America. Such promises are standard procedure among the agents, who create or doctor transcripts, manufacture essays and letters of recommendation, and package everything in a neat bundle. Americans would call this fraud. In China it is simply the procedure for applying to U.S. institutions.
When I first arrived in China, I underestimated the challenge of dislodging the agents from the admissions process. During my initial group program with parents, conducted in translation, the coordinator drew spontaneous applause when she announced that my presence would eliminate the need to use agents. But it was too soon to declare victory. Despite our advice, assurances, and occasional warnings, we estimate that about five of the 28 families of students in our graduating class did pay agents various sums for real and imagined services. Through the grapevine, we heard that one girl told her classmates that while using an agent had not helped her admissions results, it had made the process easier because someone else wrote her essays.
This year I had a run-in with one of the parents. He wanted me to hand over his daughter’s transcripts and recommendations so that an agent could review and mail them. My answer was an emphatic “No,” made simpler by the fact that I don’t speak Chinese and he doesn’t speak English. (He later bent the ear of the program coordinator for about a half-hour.) By all accounts, he is an honorable man who simply wanted the best for his daughter and could not understand why we were forbidding a practice that had previously been commonplace.
A high percentage of Chinese transcripts come from agents rather than schools, in part because the schools have no central office that issues academic transcripts. Domestically, university placement is determined almost solely by students’ scores on the National College Entrance Exam, or Gaokao. For students applying to American colleges, transcripts can come from any number of school officials, usually the student’s homeroom teacher or someone else with whom he or she has a personal relationship.
With transcripts, essays, and letters of recommendation in doubt, the SAT tends to be the only thing in a Chinese student’s file that American admissions offices can count on. But that, too, is an imperfect indicator. The math section often fails to make distinctions among students—even Chinese who are relatively poor in math can score 700 out of 800 (our lowest math score last year was 690). Scores on the critical-reading and writing sections may be a barometer of English ability but reflect mainly the months and years that Chinese applicants have devoted to preparing for the test. Since those who are bound for the English-speaking world often do not take the Gaokao, they are routinely allowed time off from school to study for American standardized tests, a fact that is almost never revealed on their transcripts. A final wrinkle: Since the SAT isn’t offered to Chinese nationals on the mainland (except in Hong Kong), students must fly to neighboring countries in order to take it. And although many U.S. institutions proclaim the SAT “not required,” the odds of getting into a selective college without it are akin to those of winning at Powerball.
Recently, NSFZ hosted an admissions officer from the United States who delivered a standard homily: He told the students that they should pay attention not only to college rankings, that America has a wonderful variety of institutions to consider, and that what really matters is not whether they have heard of a college or university, but whether it is a good fit for them. The students nodded politely and believed not a word. In their minds, the best fit for a person does not mean much compared with the aspirations of family and the esteem of society at large.
I often feel overwhelmed by the panic and misinformation that prevail here. But there are also signs of hope. Our program coordinator, a first-rate Chinese educator, has gone to the mat to root out plagiarism and promote critical thinking. A new generation of Chinese educators who speak English is rising through the ranks, and as China’s economy continues to expand, so will the people’s understanding of good practices related to higher education.
American institutions can do their part to help. My greatest wish is for them to be more proactive in communicating with Chinese parents, many of whom send their children to some far corner of the globe without a word directed to them from the institutions where they will enroll. Even a brief communication about the admissions process, offered in perhaps half a dozen Asian languages, would lessen the rampant confusion. Colleges that do not commission agents should say so on their Web sites, which will let Asian students and their parents know that they don’t need to hire an agent to apply to, or be accepted at, those institutions.
Finally, American institutions need to cultivate relationships with Chinese high schools. A few schools, like mine, are eager to work with American colleges to deal with the systemic chaos that plagues the submission of academic records. At most schools, small steps such as designating a contact person for American institutions would be a major breakthrough.
The coming of the International Baccalaureate is an important development for China. My students love the fact that activities and service are now part of the curriculum. Courses such as “Theory of Knowledge” are helping them to develop a critical perspective on the world. When those imports begin to take hold throughout the nation and blend with China’s homegrown ability in quantitative fields, there is no telling how many thousands—maybe millions—of superior students will arrive on our shores.
