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Cost, `seaweed' fears help foreign colleges in China

"Any university worth its salt, just like any multinational, should have relations with China," says Ian Gow, the provost of Nottingham Ningbo university.

Just like the multinational companies, internationally minded universities from the US, Britain and other English-speaking nations see China as their biggest potential market.

Thousands of new students continue to flock abroad each year, with about 60,000 Chinese currently studying in the US and some 50,000 in Britain.

But as China liberalizes its education sector to comply with WTO requirements, foreign universities have a new opportunity to bring Western education to more Chinese students.

The number of higher education students in China has mushroomed to 4.75 million last year, up 19 percent from 2004, according to government statistics.

Dozens of universities and colleges from the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore and other countries have already set up joint ventures in China.

Britain's Nottingham promotes itself as the "first top 200 foreign university to establish an independent campus on the Chinese mainland", choosing the city of Ningbo in Zhejiang Province.

Nottingham Ningbo has initially focused on recruiting students in Zhejiang, where a population of 56 million makes it "like a country," Gow said.

RECRUITMENT

The university has enrolled 930 students in its first year and aims to have about 4,000 students within five years. It will send recruitment teams to nine other areas of China this year, Gow said.

"The Ningbo campus is a vehicle for us to introduce best practices of a leading international university," Yang Fujia (楊福家), the British-based Chinese chancellor of Nottingham University, said at the opening of the Ningbo campus in February.

Small classes of about 16 students will focus on subjects like energy, environment and finance.

Nottinhgam Ningbo also aims to recruit more international students, including expatriate children from around Asia who don't want to leave the region for their higher education.

"To study abroad you have to spend more than 100,000 yuan [US$12,000] per year, but to study here you only need 30,000 to 50,000 yuan," said Hong Chengwen (洪成文), an education expert at Beijing Normal University.

The gap is even bigger between British fees averaging about ?9,000 (US$15,700) a year for overseas students and Nottingham's basic fees in Ningbo of ?3,500.

"I think we have made a British degree affordable," Gow said.

But there are other reasons, apart from cost, that make studying a foreign university in China attractive.

With tens of thousands of graduates of foreign universities already beginning to flood labor markets in China, an education abroad is no longer a guarantee of success at home.

The term hai gui (sea turtle, a pun on the Chinese for returned from overseas) was coined in the 1990s. In recent years, hai dai (seaweed) has joined it. Seaweed is a pun on "returned from overseas and waiting for a job."

Some of the returnees lose touch with economic and social trends in their rapidly developing home country. The need to work hard to master a foreign language in and out of the classroom also means that some people return to China with a weakened ability to write Chinese, giving them a higher risk of becoming "seaweed."

There is also "perhaps a safety element" in studying abroad, Gow said, with some Chinese students and parents worrying about personal safety and harmful influences from a more liberal Western youth culture.

CONNECTIONS

The fact that Yang is a Ningbo native and a well-connected academic helped Nottingham to take a lead in bringing Western higher education to China.

"Having somebody as credible as him ... probably meant that we established that we could be trusted quicker," Gow said.

Another British university, Liverpool, plans to open a campus in September in Suzhou, close to Shanghai.

Although the two British universities claim to be independent in China, Hong says they have formed a "special kind of joint venture" similar to one that his own university plans to launch in September with the Hong Kong Baptist University in Zhuhai.

The new universities are likely to attract second-tier students with reasonably wealthy parents, Hong said.

In the short term, the scale of the new campuses is so small that they will have negligible effect on Chinese education. But the foreign systems may provide longer term models from local education departments to follow, Hong said.

"From this perspective, to allow the joint-venture education is to absorb other countries' experiences to enrich and develop our country's higher education," he said.

Gow also believes that foreign universities can provide new models for Chinese education authorities. He predicts that each of China's 31 provinces will try to bring in at least one top foreign university.

"I don't think there's strong competition at the moment, but it's certainly coming," Gow said.
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