In China, Private Schools Give It the Old College Try

XIAN, China —  They should be back home farming, or working in a factory.

But instead they’re chilling out on a college campus, chatting about computers and international business.

Chai Chao and He Yanping belong to a new generation of Chinese university students: They had failed the country’s rigorous college entrance exam, but they’re still getting a college education.

Disappointment is a way of life in a country where only about 10% of college-age students get a higher education. There simply aren’t enough public universities in the world’s most populous country.

An education revolution, however, has been sweeping the land.

Private universities, decimated along with every other form of private enterprise after the Communists took over in 1949, are back in business. Millions of high school students like Chai and He now have a second chance to change their destiny.

“My father is a factory worker. He said if I could go to college, it doesn’t matter what kind it is. I must learn something to make myself more marketable,” said Chai, 22, a computer major at Xian International University here in central China’s Shaanxi province.

Yet so far, China’s fledgling private universities fall far short of the status symbols they are in the West. Instead, they are dogged by image problems, accused of being money-grubbing and substandard.

In a society where public schools still rule, lukewarm government support has helped make private higher education a promising but risky investment, both for the educators and their students.

“Of course I feel the stigma,” He said. “Lots of employers won’t even consider graduates from private colleges. That’s why a lot of people would rather go to a mediocre state school than a good private school.”

For most of the last five decades, education has been a Communist monopoly. Breakneck economic growth in the last 20 years, however, forced Beijing to relax its grip so more youngsters could be better prepared for the competitive global economy.

In principle, the party still considers academia a training ground for the elite. Indoctrinating young minds is a lofty job suitable only for the state. In reality, private schools fill a critical gap in the public education system.

In less than 20 years, China’s private schools have grown from zero to about 1,300, surpassing the 1,000 state universities and accounting for about 36% of total enrollment.

But Beijing keeps the schools on a tight leash: Private colleges are permitted to recruit only students rejected by public universities, and the majority of the private institutions are barred from conferring degrees and not allowed to operate for profit.

“Running a private university is an enormous challenge,” said Gao Ling, head of the Xian Village and Township Enterprises University, also based here. “Every one of us has had to fight just to stay alive.”

Although the education market is shrinking in many developed countries, it is exploding in China, with about 230 million school-age children--practically the entire population in the United States.

China’s public universities are notoriously out of reach, especially for youngsters from the poorer inland provinces. That should leave plenty of wiggle room for China’s burgeoning private schools. Yet less than 7% of them are allowed to offer bachelor’s degrees. For now, most Chinese private universities function like adult schools or community colleges in the West.

Since their peak in the mid-1990s, droves of private schools have shut down, victims of management and funding troubles. But others are flourishing, especially those who manage to gobble up smaller competitors, secure solid investors and elevate academic reputation.

Xian International University is one of the success stories. Founded 10 years ago by a former farmer, the school initially had only 200 students and some rented high school classrooms. The school drifted from temporary shelter to shelter--a barracks on a shooting range, rooms in a veterans retirement home. Finally, it got lucky.

An amusement park built by a rural entrepreneur was skirting bankruptcy and searching for a partner. A deal was cut, and today the college’s sprawling campus is home to more than 16,000 students, one of the largest private universities in the country and one of only five in the province allowed to offer a bachelor’s degree.

“I’m the first one in my family to go to college,” said a proud He, a cotton farmer’s son studying international business. “Sometimes I feel embarrassed and defensive because I didn’t get into a public school. But society is changing so much, it’s up to us to change our lives.”

That underdog feeling motivates good private schools to try to outperform their public rivals. They strive to be less bureaucratic and more democratic. If students don’t like a professor, they can get him removed. If job placement is poor in a certain department, it may be eliminated.

“To survive in this business, we can’t afford to think of ourselves only as educators. We also need to be businessmen and politicians,” said Li Ruochi, an administrator at the Xian International University. “This is why many schools fold. They don’t have the combination of skills.”

That’s what’s killing Gao, the head of the struggling Village and Township Enterprises University just across town.

Because China’s private schools lack the wealth of endowment that enables private institutions to thrive in the West, they rely heavily on business partnerships to raise funds.

The 33-year-old wine exporter with no education experience outbid a dozen other entrepreneurs last year to invest in the 14-year-old technical college.

Then everything that could go wrong did. A power struggle with the school’s aging but well-connected founders left Gao in a legal quagmire. She’s been tossed into jail and hit with debts. She sank millions into a new building that never got off the ground. Worst of all, the students fled. The onetime 3,000-strong campus now can barely hold on to 100 stragglers.

“If I knew what I was getting myself into, I would have never done it,” Gao said from her office on the nearly deserted campus.

Private universities also lack resources to cultivate their teaching staff. They settle instead for retired public school professors or inexperienced young graduates. No matter how good life is on campus, students complain of second-class treatment on the outside. The most obvious disadvantage is that they can’t qualify for student loans or buy half-price train tickets, privileges enjoyed by their peers in public universities.

“I definitely feel a head shorter than students from public schools,” Liu Chunlan, 23, an English major, said from her dorm at Xian International University.

The state is working on a law to give private schools and their investors better legal protection. For many struggling schools, it might be too little too late. Desperate for survival, they are pulling all the stops--TV ads, billboards, train and bus station recruitment stalls--to win students.

But that strategy has sometimes backfired, reinforcing the negative stereotype that private colleges are in it only for the money

“This school is easy to get in but hard to get out of,” said Liu Lu, a student at the Shaanxi Sanzi Enterprises Institute, a medium-sized technical college in Xian. She complained that the school is nothing like it was advertised and she wants out.

But despite her pleas, officials have yet to return her tuition money. “They sees us as income, not students.”

“I feel totally cheated,” said Jin Zhe, another recent dropout from the school. “What we got here is college-level courses, high school-level facilities and elementary school-level management.”

Mu Jinguo, the former farmer who founded the school, admits that it has a long way to go to meet public school standards. But he begs his students to be patient.

“We don’t have the same resources,” he said. “We may not produce rocket scientists. But we offer young people a way to escape the life of a manual laborer. To become a stronger nation, China needs more schools like us.”