By Dr. Jinzhao Li

Editor's note: Dr. Jinzhao Li is from Beijing Foreign Studies University, and now is also a columnist for TMTPost.

On May 25th, a news post on the portal of China Business Journal triggered heated discussions instantly among netizens. It had a catchy title: “Students Who Returned from their Study Abroad because of COVID-19 Can Choose Vocational and Technical Colleges.”

The idea, or the misinformed idea, came from Ni Minjing（倪闽景）, Deputy Director of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, in his written suggestion submitted to this year’s CPPCC session. Many netizens dismissed the idea as a joke or an insult of redirecting a student from Harvard to a culinary school. Some attacked it as an extreme mishandling of COVID-19 quarantine practice and a blatant discrimination against students coming back from abroad. More accepted it as a reasonable temporary placement for those students who have no college to go back to because of the pandemic. Ni criticized the news report as misleading and claimed his original suggestion a plan of fairness.

A closer look will reveal that Ni’s original suggestion is neither temporary nor discriminative. It is not temporary, but is a long-term plan that intends to help a steadily increasing body of students. It is not discriminative, but is a favoritism towards the returning students with affluent family background. It may be fair in planning for diverse returning students, but bears the potential in weakening the entire system of national college entrance exam. Although it is not a formal policy proposal submitted to the CPPCC, we still need to examine it and safe guard against its spread in the near future.

So what is Ni’s original plan? It is mainly three major suggestions to help out a growing number of students who are failing in their colleges abroad and are returning to China without a reputable public college to attend. Among the three suggestions, only the first one seems a fair enough practice within the current educational system in China:

1. To allow the returning students enter 2- to 3-year vocational colleges or technical colleges with no entrance tests. To further guarantee their readjustment, they can be placed one class lower than their study abroad, such as a junior student being placed into a sophomore class or a freshman repeating the first year all over again.

2. To allow the returning students into regular 4-year public colleges if they can pass placement tests. They can take the tests at the beginning of each semester and join a class on a 1-year probation after they pass the tests. They can become a regular student after demonstrating a satisfactory academic performance during the probation.

3. To establish a credit transfer system to allow the returning students transfer some credits already earned or courses already finished abroad into their study at regular Chinese universities.

Ni stressed in an interview by a journalist days later that his suggestion is not meant for those students who are temporarily moving back to China due to the outbreak of COVID-19 in their country of study. It is meant for those students who need to come back to finish their college either due to academic obstacles abroad or sudden family financial difficulties.

His first suggestion seems a fair enough practice even though many netizens with experiences of studying abroad take it as a joke or an insult. They think that after spending tens of thousands of dollars at a foreign college per year, a returning student should still be transferred to a four-year college.

Yet the fact is that a growing number of Chinese students are attending junior college or community college abroad, which is equivalent to the 2- to 3-year vocational colleges and technical colleges in China. Besides, if a returning student fails placement tests for entering a regular 4-year college, or finds a vocation or specialty more to his occupational interest, being able to attend a vocational college without any tests is indeed a reasonable and workable result. Furthermore, the central government just launched a new reform of vocational education in February 2019, which aims to establish 50 high-quality vocational colleges and 150 key disciplines by 2022. This reform will greatly improve the quality and prestige of vocational education in China.

The other two suggestions, however, may easily create loopholes for some students with affluent financial background to enter reputable public universities.

Most students attended college abroad not because they were the best among the best in high school but because they were not able to enter a prestigious Chinese university through the national college entrance exam. They might be good enough to enter a decent university in big cities but not competitive enough among their peers to go to key public universities of the country. While their family could afford, they chose to go abroad for a university prestigious enough internationally. If they come back after a couple of years and, after passing some tests, get accepted into those key universities, it will not be fair to the students who have entered those schools through formal and strict recruitment.

Let us imagine a Lisa, who wanted to go to Peking University, but she knew she could not beat Amy, Hellen, and Pepper who also aimed for PKU, and PKU would only take two students from her entire province. So Lisa's parents sent her to Brown University while Amy and Hellen got into PKU and Pepper ended up in Beijing Foreign Studies University. After one year at Brown, Amy now returns back to China because her family has a sudden financial difficulty. After passing PKU’s placement tests, she successfully gets accepted into the sophomore class and becomes a regular junior student at PKU after her one-year probation. In this scenario, Lisa’s mid-way acceptance into PKU is not fair immediately to neither Amy and Hellen nor to Pepper. In a broader sense, unless out of some international or domestic political reasons, Lisa’s acceptance into PKU would not be fair to any other students who went through the formal and competitive screening process of PKU.

According to Ni, his suggestion was merely trying to restore a policy of the Ministry of Education in 1990. The ministry then issued “An Announcement with Regard to Continuing Study of Students Returning from Abroad.” It decided that if a self-sponsored Chinese student had to cut short their schooling abroad and move back to China before graduation, he or she could be accepted back into a four-year college as long as s/he can pass placement tests and cover her/his own tuition and expenses for the remaining semesters.

But this practice was ended in 2004. As a result, a student as such now has only three options: 1. To take part in the national college entrance exam; 2. To enroll into an open university’s adult education program with no placement tests; 3. To earn a college degree directly after passing the Self-taught Higher Education Examinations. All these options are significantly cancelling out the student’s previous study abroad. Hence Ni made three new suggestions .To compare the three old options and Ni’s three suggestions, please see the table:

to compare the three old options and Ni’s three suggestions (from TMTPOST Column)

Although the three old options have problems, a simple restoration of an earlier policy does not meet the current social, economic, and educational context.

First of all, the size and demographics of current study-abroad student body is drastically different from of the period of 1990 to 2004. Second, the main reasons for earlier withdrawal are also different now. For example, according to a report on the online Wall Street Journal of May 29, 2015, 80 percent of the Chinese student who got expelled from U.S. universities were because of poor grades or academic dishonesty. Even when we take this finding with a grain of salt because it was only one survey of 1,657 expelled students of one year, we still need to take these possibilities into consideration when we try to find a more reasonable and supportive replacement for the returning students.

To be sure, Ni’s concerns and suggestions deserve our full and long attention because the number of college withdrawal cases are tripling if not quadrupling in 2020 due to a global spread of COVID-19, growing economic and political tensions between China and the U.S., and the domestic economic setback. Yet we also have to make sure that fairness of a policy should not just meet the academic and financial diversity of the returning students but the entire college entrance exam system. To help those returning students, a better way may be thinking outside the public college education system and allowing the international universities and private universities in China play a major role.

(This article do not represent the editorial policy of TMTPost but rather views of the columnist. Anyone willing to contribtute and have specific expertise, please contact us at: english@tmtpost.com)