Before they begin to recruit, universities need to understand what they are dealing with. Every admissions office needs an employee who is not only fluent in Chinese (putonghua), but also knowledgeable about China's educational system and the agent system. For smaller colleges and universities that admit less than 200 Chinese students per year, it is a good idea to interview admitted Chinese candidates before making a final decision. This should be done via Skype or videoconference. It should only take 3 to 5 minutes. An interview will allow the university to confirm and document 1) what the student looks like, and 2) the students' level of fluency in English. If the student's alleged TOEFL score does not match the reality of the interview, obviously admission must be refused. If the student who eventually shows up for class is not the same as the person from the interview, obviously admission must be refused. [as of right now, there are cases when a wealthy Chinese "applicant" has no knowledge of what was even written in the application. As the article mentions, some even expect to simply buy their way through coursework.]
... Zinch China was contacted by the provost of a large American university who wanted to recruit 250 Chinese students, stat. When asked why, the provost replied that his institution faced a yawning budget deficit. To fill it, he told Mr. Melcher, the university needed additional students who could pay their own way...
The company concluded that 90 percent of Chinese applicants submit false recommendations, 70 percent have other people write their personal essays, 50 percent have forged high-school transcripts...
"If a student isn't placed, we've got screaming, yelling parents in the lobby," says Kathryn Ohehir, who works in [Aoji Education Group], in Beijing. "They don't want their money back. They want their kid in an Ivy League school."
This is not a screening for English proficiency. Of course a successful applicant could have a low TOEFL score; that will mean taking pre-major ESL courses, which is a delay but not a punishment. A fraudulent applicant, on the other hand, should be rejected. To keep this fair, a Chinese speaker must also be part of these interviews.
This is an argument in favor of acknowledging the agent system, and requiring China's agents to reveal themselves. Perhaps even a "registration" system (similar to the one already followed for student-athletes who have declared eligibility for professional sports drafts). By doing this, America's universities could push the agents to increase honestly, with the threat of banning them from future representation of students. I understand such a system would be drastically different, but it might be a good idea. And there are wealthy students in the U.S. who similarly hire "agents" to help them prepare applications, whether private tutors or after-school study centers. These should also be monitored, this is one of the unpublicized ways rich kids build advantages in the admissions process.
Back to the topic, if the student is from a region that speaks one of China's many other languages, it is unethical to accept those students unless the admissions office first hires someone who speaks that language. Dependence on so-called "official" translations, essays that may be written by a professional, and transcripts that are often forged? That is a highly questionable business practice, advocated by universities that value money more than education. I do not actually support the use of translated transcripts at all. I don't expect non-English institutions to produce them, that is not their job. I do not trust private, third-party translation services to hire only honest brokers. They are interested in serving their customers, the foreign applicants. The university that is interested must do the work itself, to assure an accurate understanding of what the student can do. If that means extra cost, it is reasonable to charge a small fee to applicants who need translation. At the same time, this must not become a profit source to exploit foreign applicants (as it already is in Great Britain).
We cannot look the other way just because the university is having budget problems (problems that in the case of public universities invariably originate with the state itself). Investment in Chinese recruiters alone is not acceptable. More time and resources must be devoted to verification and academic honesty, on applications and coursework. This will require advanced technology (turnitin, SafeAssign) along with human resources -- humans with cultural and linguistic knowledge of whichever countries our students come from.
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http://chronicle.com/article/Chinese-Students-Prove-a/129628/
November 3, 2011
The China Conundrum
American colleges find the Chinese-student boom a tricky fit
Dozens of new students crowded into a lobby of the University of Delaware's student center at the start of the academic year. Many were stylishly attired in distressed jeans and bright-colored sneakers; half tapped away
silently on smartphones while the rest engaged in boisterous conversations. Eavesdropping on those conversations, however, would have been difficult for an observer not fluent in Mandarin. That's because, with the exception of one lost-looking soul from Colombia, all the students were from China.
Among them was Yisu Fan, whose flight from Shanghai had arrived six hours earlier. Too excited to sleep, he had stayed up all night waiting for orientation at the English Language Institute to begin. Like nearly all the Chinese students at Delaware, Mr. Fan was conditionally admitted—that is, he can begin taking university classes once he completes an English program. He plans to major in finance and, after graduation, to return home and work for his father's construction company. He was wearing hip, dark-framed glasses and a dog tag around his neck with a Chinese dragon on it. Mr. Fan chose to attend college more than 7,000 miles from home, he said, because "the Americans, their education is very good."
That opinion is widely shared in China, which is part of the reason the number of Chinese undergraduates in the United States has tripled in just three years, to 40,000, making them the largest group of foreign students at American colleges. While other countries, like South Korea and India, have for many years sent many undergraduates to the United States, it's the sudden and startling uptick in applicants from China that has caused a stir at universities—many of them big, public institutions with special English-language programs—that are particularly welcoming toward international students. Universities like Delaware, where the number of Chinese students has leapt to 517 this year, from eight in 2007.
The students, mostly from China's rapidly expanding middle class, can afford to pay full tuition, a godsend for colleges that have faced sharp budget cuts in recent years. But what seems at first glance a boon for colleges
and students alike is, on closer inspection, a tricky fit for both.
Colleges, eager to bolster their diversity and expand their international appeal, have rushed to recruit in China, where fierce competition for seats at Chinese universities and an aggressive admissions-agent industry feed a frenzy to land spots on American campuses. College officials and consultants say they are seeing widespread fabrication on applications, whether that means a personal essay written by an agent or an English-proficiency score that doesn't jibe with a student's speaking ability. American colleges, new to the Chinese market, struggle to distinguish between good applicants and those who are too good to be true.
Once in the classroom, students with limited English labor to keep up with discussions. And though those students are excelling, struggling, and failing at the same rate as their American counterparts, some pro
fessors say they have had to alter how they teach.
Colleges have been slow to adjust to the challenges they've encountered but are trying new strategies, both to better acclimate students and to deal with the application problems. The onus is on them, says Jiang Xueqin, deputy principal of Peking University High School, one of Beijing's top schools, and director of its international division. "Are American universities unhappy? Because Chinese students and parents aren't."
"Nothing will change," Mr. Jiang says, "unless American colleges make it clear to students and parents that it has to."
The Role of Agents
Wantin
g Tang is quick to laugh, listens to high-energy bands like Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and OK Go, and describes herself on her Facebook page as "really fun" and "really serious." Ms. Tang, a junior majoring in management and international business, speaks confident, if not flawless, English. That wasn't always the case. When she applied to the University of Delaware, her English was, in her estimation, very poor.
Ms. Tang, who went to high school in Shanghai, didn't exactly choose to attend Delaware, a public institution of about 21,000 students that admits about half its applicants—and counts Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. among its prominent graduates. Ms. Tang's mother wanted her to attend college in the United States, and so they visited the offices of a dozen or more agents, patiently listening to their promises and stories of success.
Her mother chose an agency that suggested Delaware and helped Ms. Tang fill out her application, guiding h
er through a process that otherwise would have been bewildering. Because her English wasn't good enough to write the admissions essay, staff members at the agency, which charged her $4,000, asked her questions about herself in Chinese and produced an essay. (Test preparation was another $3,300.)
Now that she can write in English herself, she doesn't think much of what the employees wrote. But it served its purpose: She was admitted, and spent six months in the English-language program before beginning freshman classes. And despite bumps along the way, she's getting good grades and enjoying college life. As for allowing an agent to write her essay, she sees that decision in pragmatic terms: "At that time, my English not better as now."
Education agents have long played a role in sending Chinese students abroad, dating back decades to a time when American dollars were forbidden in China and only agents could secure the currency to pay tuition. Admission experts say they can provide an important service, acting as guides to an application process that can seem totally, well, foreign. Application materials are frequently printed only in English. Chinese students are often baffled by the emphasis on extracurriculars and may have never written a personal essay. Requiring recommendations from guidance counselors makes little sense in a country where few high schools have one on staff. Many assume that the U.S. News & World Report issue on rankings is an official government publication.
But while there are certainly aboveboard agents and applications, other recruiters engage in fraudulent behavior. An administrator at one high school in Beijing says agents falsified her school's letterhead to produce doctored transcripts and counterfeit letters of recommendation, which she discovered when a parent called to complain about an agent's charging a fee for documents from the school. James E. Lewis, director of international admissions and recruiting at Kansas State University, says he once got a clutch of applications clearly submitted by a single agent, with all fees charged to the same bank branch, although the students came from several far-flung cities. The grades on three of the five transcripts, he says, were identical.
Zinch China, a consulting company that advises American colleges and universities about China, last year published a report based on interviews with 250 Beijing high-school students bound for the United States, their parents, and a dozen agents and admissions consultants. The company concluded that 90 percent of Chinese applicants submit false recommendations, 70 percent have other people write their personal essays, 50 percent have forged high-school transcripts, and 10 percent list academic awards and other achievements they did not receive. The "tide of application fraud," the report predicted, will most likely only worsen as more students go to America.
'Studying for the Test'
Tom Melcher, Zinch China's chairman and the report's author, says it's simplistic to vilify agents who provide these services. They're responding, he says, to the demands of students and parents...
Most Chinese students who are enrolled at American colleges turn to intermediaries to shepherd them through the admissions process, according to a study by researchers at Iowa State University, published in the Journal of College Admission...
http://chronicle.com/article/Chinese-Students-Prove-a/129628/
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