Last year, through July 2008, I taught at Jimei University as part of a joint degree program with a very small US college that managed to have four times the students in China (with no employees; only contractors through an intermediary company) than it has in the US where it is located. The workload was ridiculous, with more than 22 contact hours each week and more than seven hundred kids and that with no teaching assistants or other support.
Some of us at an outing from the Guanghua College CIE Centre, Shanghai, China
While the last deal was onerous, it paid better than average for China by a wide margin, albeit well below average for the US, and provided a mechanism for an extended stay that included a long-term residence permit, a foreign expert’s certificate and lodging — all at no expense to me.
Finding this new gig in Shanghai which I learned of through a recruiter, uncovered a whole new aspect of the education industry I’d never heard of before, in China or anywhere else. The workload is substantially less by a long shot.
There are many very wealthy people in China these days – someone told me the other day there were more than 300,000 millionaires — and the rich ones follow the Chinese tradition of sacrificing for their kids just like the poorer parents do. The difference is that the level of sacrifice is proportionately smaller, but the absolute numbers are quite substantial. Most rich parents aim to get their kids into the best colleges and universities in the west and have the money to do it.
Tapping into that need is an industry of preparatory schools getting kids ready to pass the SATs if it’s a US school they’re aiming for or for “A-levels” if they are headed for the UK or Europe. So rather than complete the last year or two of Chinese high school, the kids of rich parents are often sent off to a finishing school that concentrates on preparation for foreign college entrance exams. They forgo the Chinese National Exam which is the placement mechanism for Chinese colleges and universities and bet big on a foreign education.
The program I’m with now is called a college, but it’s a prep school chartered by Cambridge University (the one in the UK), which has a subsidiary business chartering and providing materials for the British “AS” and “A” level entrance examinations. I never heard of them before I started poking around for another gig in China.
Chinese kids looking to go to Cambridge, Oxford or a host of other UK (or European and some others) colleges and universities study what seems like advanced placement level courses in physics, chemistry, economics and math, plus a big dose of English for two or three years to get ready for the entrance exams and English tests (IELTS – International English Language Testing System). It’s all college level classes and the exams are tough.
Get this: these preparatory schools, which are all private businesses, charge tuition in excess of 70,000 RMB a year (more than US$10,000), which is almost what four years of college will cost at a typical Chinese university. It’s an enormous sum of money in China where a decent wage for most workers is well less than 5,000 RMB a month. One school here in Shanghai, affiliated with Shanghai Normal University (they all try to affiliate with some regular school), accepted less than three twenty five kids from two thousand applicants. The demand here is huge.
The school I’m working for now (teaching economics), is new with no track record, but even they will have more than 100 kids in their first year. Cambridge International Examination Centre (CIE) prep schools are popping up all over. The better ones also provide SAT preparation and preparation for other new and evolving entrance exams for western colleges and universities.
A complementary industry here that works in concert with the prep schools coaches kids and their parents through the college application and Visa process so the kids actually go someplace after the pass the entrance exams. Those are private enterprises too, so popular that the Chinese government has suspended licensing any more of them. They can charge the equivalent of US$5,000 to help some kid apply to Harvard or MIT. One smart CIE Centre here in Shanghai bought one of these advisory companies and got around the licensing problem that way and integrated the advisory/application support business into their prep school — raising tuition to cover the added value.
Education for the offspring of the very wealthy here is big business and there are plenty of them. 
If you want to come to see China for an extended period, one of the easiest ways is as an English teacher. China needs thousands of them all over the country. The pay is lousy by US standards, maybe $800 a month, but still more than a Chinese teacher and more than most workers. And you get housing and part of your ticket paid. Dave’s ESL Cafe is a good place to find a gig (http://www.eslcafe.com/jobs/china/).
Academic subjects pay more, but the one’s that teach the material in English are a little more scarce. The CIE centers and a joint degree program with a US college or university will pay the best and better yet are the few accelerated graduate degree programs suited for professors from western colleges who fly in for a couple of weeks to do an intensive course or two. They get western pay scales, but those slots are few and usually taken by people already associated with the foreign college or university.
Seeing China over an extended period is an experience not to be missed. This is the fastest changing place on the planet — beyond the industrial revolution — and you will never get a real sense of it from National Geographic or CNN.
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