Competition between Peking and Tsinghua Universities

From the WSJ blog: Top Chinese Universities’ Recruitment Battle Turns Ugly

"China’s version of the Ivy League found itself splattered in mud this week, as top schools Peking University and Tsinghua University accused each other of turning to unsavory recruiting strategies.

The schools are among China’s best, guaranteed to attract the students who score highest on the gaokao, the country’s national college entrance exam. So it was jarring to see the two unleash a public series of mutual recriminations: on social media, an account affiliated with Peking University’s recruiting team in southwestern Sichuan province suggested that Tsinghua’s recruiters in the same region had offered students money as an incentive to enroll in Tsinghua, among other accusations.

In turn, Tsinghua’s Sichuan recruiter struck back, also on social media, saying that Peking University was the one guilty of such behavior. The back-and-forth earned both universities a chiding from China’s education ministry, which on Weibo urged “relevant universities” to respect an orderly enrollment process and refrain from dangling promises, such as large scholarships offers, to “maliciously carry off students.”

Competition for top-scoring students—and assiduous courting of the same—is nothing new among universities in China. But a visible airing of dirty laundry is more unusual, says Percy Jiang, counselor at the local Beijing National Day School.

Peking University and Tsinghua University did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Universities in China have felt increasing pressure to hold onto the best students, Mr. Jiang notes, as fewer students take the gaokao and more of China’s best students choose to study overseas. This year, 9.4 million students sat the test, down from 10.5 million in 2008.

Cheating in China on (American) college admissions

Inside Higher Ed has the story: In China, No Choice But to Cheat?

July 9, 2015 By

Elizabeth Redden

"EUGENE, Ore. -- Is the admission process broken for Chinese applicants to American colleges?

Variations of that question came up again and again during sessions on Wednesday at the Overseas Association for College Admission Counseling [OACAC] conference. Persistent concerns about standardized test fraud, doctored transcripts and fake admission letters -- and the role of agents in helping to "pollute" the application process (as one session description put it) -- are causing some to worry that Chinese students might think cheating is their only choice.

"We need to make it [the application process] safe for honest applicants," said Terry Crawford, the chief executive officer and co-founder of InitialView, a video interviewing company based in Beijing.

"There's a perception in China that the system is rigged, that if you pay enough money you're going to get the results that you want," Crawford said. He cited a recent China Newsweek article laying out the process and prices for cheating on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) as just one example of the type of story that feeds into this perception (the reporter received test answers during the exam via a small, wireless-enabled watch)."

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Interestingly, Initial View, the company that Terry Crawford and Gloria Chyou founded in China, was initially founded to address the problem of fraud in English language tests, by offering applicants the opportunity to make a video of an unscripted interview that they conduct, to be sent to colleges, who can then confirm the fluency of the speaker, and later verify that the student who enrolls is the one who took the interview.

College admissions, as seen by the Chronicle of Higher Ed

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long roundup of thoughts on college admissions: College Admissions, Frozen in Time

They describe the admissions process this way:

"Like a machine Rube Goldberg might’ve built if he’d been really, really mean. For colleges aspiring to greater selectivity, the system’s undeniable inefficiency is by design. Each year, four-year institutions everywhere spend a fortune buying tens or hundreds of thousands of high-school students’ names from testing and other companies, and bombard those "suspects" with letters and emails. The hope is that, as they move through the recruitment funnel, enough of them become interested "prospects," then, ideally, applicants, at which point the bulk of colleges, tuition-dependent and not world-famous, scramble to admit and enroll a certain number (to meet their enrollment and revenue goals), while the wealthiest, choosiest institutions use elaborate criteria to whittle down vast numbers in an intensive exercise known as crafting a class. That’s an artful term for how colleges satisfy their many interests, for this much tuition revenue and that much diversity, this many legacies and that many goalies, and enough engineering majors to keep the program strong.

These days, students file more and more applications to hedge their bets on where they’ll get in and, unknown until very late in the process, how much it’ll cost them. Meanwhile, colleges only increase the suspense for all involved by chasing more applicants and placing great numbers of them on wait lists, drawing out a months-long process even more."

...

"In the fall-2013 cycle, the average institutional yield rate was 36 percent, down from 49 percent in 2002, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling. "

...

"Some futurists want to automate college matches. Yet the recruitment process, tedious though it is, allows for personal interactions that help applicants form crucial opinions of colleges. When institutions make it easier and faster to apply, it can be hard for one party to know how seriously to take the other. "

...

"In 2011, for instance, Washington Monthly published an article proclaiming "the end of college admissions as we know it," about ConnectEdu, a website designed to match students and colleges. The platform, with its powerful algorithm, would transform the admissions process much like Match.com has changed dating. Such a shift would benefit less-savvy applicants in particular, the article said: "Everything you’ve heard about getting in is about to go out the window."

ConnectEdu filed for bankruptcy three years later. Though the reasons were complicated, one lesson was clear: Just because an entrepreneur has a big idea and a high-tech plan doesn’t mean the status quo is crumbling. Although other companies still provide similar matching services, the traditional process endures."

...

"To deal with the uncertainty of vast applicant pools, colleges might embrace anything that helped them identify candidates with genuine interest. A company called InitialView, which conducts brief interviews of foreign students and transmits the video to U.S. colleges, now allows those applicants to assign a virtual "star" to the two institutions they most want to attend. The company is considering a similar service for the domestic market."

...

"Right now, parents complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid in the spring of their child’s senior year of high school, after typical application deadlines have passed, often estimating their tax information for the previous year.

But a proposed policy change would allow future applicants to use two-year-old tax data to complete the form, giving families an earlier, clearer picture of their college bills. That way cost could fold into students’ college search like never before, perhaps prompting them to apply to fewer places. Mr. Boeckenstedt says. And the change could shake up the traditional admissions calendar, in which applicants find out how much they’ll have to pay at each college shortly before the May 1 deadline for choosing where to go."

The State of College Admissions--NACAC report

The Chronicle of Higher Ed summarizes the NACAC report on college admissions: 3 Key Findings About College Admissions
"Here are three sets of findings from NACAC’s annual "State of College Admission" report:

Yield Rates Are Sliding

Nationally, application surges continue for most colleges, with more than 70 percent reporting year-to-year increases in 10 of the last 15 years. For the fall 2013 admission cycle, 32 percent of freshmen submitted seven or more applications.

As applicant pools expand, uncertainty usually grows. Many colleges have seen their yield rate — the percentage of accepted students who enroll — decline sharply. In the fall 2013 admission cycle, the average institutional yield rate was 35.9 percent, down from an average of 39.5 percent in 2010, and 48.7 percent in 2002.

It’s long been said that enrollment goals are subject to the whims of teenagers. Yet Mr. Fuller, the association’s president, says many decisions about where to enroll now hinge on last-minute conversations students have with their parents about affordability. Sometimes that means students who had planned to attend four-year colleges end up enrolling at community colleges. "Those kinds of conversations," he says, "are definitely playing into yield numbers."

Transfer Students Are Crucial

Many colleges are located in regions where the number of high-school graduates has plateaued. That’s one reason some enrollment officials are deciding to make transfer students a bigger piece of their recruitment puzzle.

Forty-four percent of four-year institutions reported an increase in transfer applicants over the previous five years, and 37.6 percent reported an increase in transfer enrollments. At public institutions, two-thirds of transfer students were previously enrolled at community colleges.

"A lot of us are really seeing the value of these students and what they add to the campus," Mr. Fuller says. "They’ve got a proven history."

As for the future, 58 percent of four-year colleges anticipate that recruiting transfer students will become more important over the next three years. (Public institutions were more likely than private ones to rate the importance of such students highly.) And 80 percent of respondents said their college had admissions counselors who work exclusively with prospective transfer students.

Recruitment Has No Borders

College-bound students everywhere are on the move. Over the last 40 years, the report notes, the number of students enrolled in colleges outside their home countries increased to 4.5 million from 800,000. That number is projected to exceed seven million by 2025.

Meanwhile, more and more foreign-born students are earning diplomas at American high schools. "Recruiting international students," the report says, "is no longer reserved only for those professionals who travel internationally."