EDUCATION: Foreign Universities Eye Chinese Students’ Full-Fees

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Antoaneta Bezlova*

BEIJING, Sep 7 2004 (IPS) - Cutthroat competition at Chinese universities and a bleak labour market are driving thousands of Chinese students to buy higher education abroad, making the country the biggest source of foreign students in the world.

But as cash-rich Chinese students are pouring into foreign universities, questions are being raised whether obtained degrees reflect real academic achievements or an easy way for universities to boost their coffers.

In less than five years China has become the biggest market for students that pay the highest fees. UNESCO figures for 2002 show the total of 460,000 Chinese students in 103 countries and regions, with the United States and Britain ranking first and second.

Students going abroad are spending an estimated one billion U.S. dollars a year.

In Britain alone, the number of Chinese students in 2002 saw a 70 percent year-on-year increase, while those in Australia and Canada were up 50 percent.

Meanwhile, the number of Chinese students who pay their own fees has risen sharply. In 1981, self-sponsored students accounted for only 7 percent, according to the Chinese Ministry of Education. In 2003, 93 percent of those going to study abroad, paid out of their own pocket.

While signs of increasing wealth among Chinese people are everywhere to be seen, the per-capita annual income averaged 1,000 dollars last year.

With price tags of 20,000-30,000 dollars per year, university education in the U.S. and Britain is a pricey dream beyond reach for many. Increasingly though, Chinese families find the means to send their only child abroad in hope that a foreign degree would bring better career prospects.

Grace Zhang, who is improving her English in a language school in northern London, says her studies abroad were funded by her father – a private entrepreneur in the southern Chinese province of Guangxi.

”All his earnings from the last five years went into paying my studies in England. We lived on a shoestring, spending only on food and the most necessary things. I’m here thanks to my parents thriftiness and sacrifice,” she tells IPS in an interview in London.

A Beijing father, Wang Xianru, is selling his family flat and moving to live with his mother-in-law, to help finance his daughter’s studies – also in Britain.

”I worked hard to buy my own apartment and I bought it while many others were still living in tiny flats paid by the state,” Wang says. ”It is hard to see our home go but my daughter’s education is more important. She doesn’t stand a chance to get a decent job if she doesn’t speak fluent English and doesn’t have a foreign degree.”

The growing number of Chinese aspiring to study abroad has brought a bonanza for foreign schools and colleges that see a golden opportunity to subsidise their teaching and research. But the rush by the world’s most populous nation to get access to the world’s top universities has also raised eyebrows.

In the middle of university entrance examinations this summer, the British media claimed that fee-paying foreign students were eroding academic standards at some of Britain’s most popular universities, like Oxford and the London School of Economics.

”Degrees for sale at UK universities,” read the front-page headline of the left-wing newspaper ‘The Observer’. ”University places go to cash-rich foreigners,” claimed the ‘Sunday Times’.

Independent investigations conducted by both papers showed British universities have become too dependent on fees paid by greater than ever numbers of Chinese and other foreign students. Many universities were favouring fee-paying foreign students by setting lower entrance grades, compared to that for British applicants.

At the top end of the range, foreign students can pay 30,000 sterling pounds (52,500 dollars) a year to study for a business degree – six times the income received from a British undergraduate. Even masters’ degrees in traditional academic subjects can cost as much as 7,000 sterling pounds (12,250 dollars) for foreign students.

While the investigations were aimed at unveiling the inadequate state of university funding in Britain, the press didn’t fail to point out that rising numbers of Chinese and Indian students had implications not only for financial stability, but also for classroom dynamics and for the curriculum.

”There is the real risk that our universities are choosing students not because of their ability to benefit from higher education, but because they can pay. That puts at risk academic standards in our universities,” the ‘Sunday Times’ quoted Tim Collins, the shadow education secretary as saying.

The debate has surprised many Chinese students who have arrived with high expectations for top-notch education.

”I came to Britain to do a master degree in environmental studies,” says Ivy Wang who is enrolled in the University of York.

”It is a new subject for us in China and I can’t possibly do better than here. I also hope that with Chinese Olympics in 2008 and all the clean up of the environment done by the government, I can easily get a well-paid job,” she adds.

China represents the single largest source of foreign students for Britain from a country outside Europe. According to the British Council, numbers of Chinese students have increased from fewer than 4,000 in 1998 to 32,000 last year.

The changes reflect also the fact that the biggest education operator – the United States – has become less welcoming since post-Sep 11, 2001.

A July survey by the Royal Institute of International Affairs found that mainland Chinese students contributed the equivalent of 4.7 percent of the amount that was granted to the universities by the British government in the 2003-2004 fiscal year.

(*with additional reporting from London)