If I could send one document to every college and university admission office in the US that enrolls a significant number of students from China, then this would be it. In part I of his interview, Jordan described beautifully many of the ways education works (and doesn’t, as well) on both sides of the world. Here, however, he says what needs to be said without worrying whether it upsets some people. Great writing should get us to question the way we view the world; it may even change those views too. I hope that happens for some reading what follows.
*********************************************************************************
What do you like about helping and teaching students
from China?
What don’t you like?
If you'd told me a decade ago that my life's work would be
teaching Chinese teenagers how to write and think, and helping them earn
admission to elite colleges, I would have laughed at you. But it's entirely
true, and I love it because of the kids. Even though I now work with students
from around the world, Mainland Chinese students are still my favorite. They're
incredible.
 |
| Jordan-University Lecture |
Our students this year were born in 1996-98. They've watched
the world around them change at light speed. Because of this, they believe in
great possibilities, in innovation. They believe in magic. All they know is a
world that keeps improving, and they possess an urgency to get involved in that
process, whether it be through business, science, fine arts or anything else.
Their minds and hearts are like wild fire, consuming everything in front of
them, and nearly impossible to stop. They're open-minded and optimistic too, in
ways that many young Americans I meet aren't. Every year I watch these kids
change drastically, and the relationships I get to develop with them personally
as they do that...that's the best part of my work. Taking young people who have
enormous dreams, giving them the tools to chase those dreams, and seeing them
fight like overjoyed gladiators to achieve them. It makes you feel very
positive about the prospects for this country in the future.
The worst part? SAT-obsession. Easily. If we let them,
they'd all waste six hours a day for two years studying inefficiently for this
stupid exam.
You and I have talked about how the current model of
agents doing too much and schools in the US turning a blind eye to some of the
problems. Do you think that too many US schools are more interested in finding
full paying students than they are in finding ethical and prepared students?
I think I probably said too much about this already, but I'm
happy to rant again. There are currently, what, 280,000 Chinese students in
America? If these were the best 280,000 students in China, we wouldn't have a
problem (though China certainly would). But they aren't. Many are amazing,
surely. At (most) Top-50 research universities and liberal arts colleges, you
only see hard-working students that deserve to be there.
At less selective schools, however...well I call it the
"Great Chinese Money Grab." Faked transcripts, comparatively low
TOEFL-requirements, and no or weak application-essay requirements essentially
guarantee that you're admitting kids who have no business studying anything
other than the English language. You're charging kids full tuition, or
sometimes even more when you add in the ESL program, but these kids are two
years away from contributing to a college classroom in the most basic ways. We
know that they group together into cliques, preventing any kind of cultural
adaptation. We know they become social ghosts on campus, and that this has
devastating effects on their classroom behavior. The PhD students teaching
their freshman classes have no time, patience, or even ability to provide a
learning experience aligned with their language abilities. Their professors see
only voiceless names on the class roster who can't answer essay questions with
correct grammar. Beyond the few best Chinese students in the class, they
essentially get ignored, left to their own devices. And this is the education
we're selling them? This is what we're offering to 200,000 international
students? Is anyone wondering if, perhaps, we shouldn't be accepting these
students at all, and that doing so might have terrible backlash effects
in the future?
I myself had a great deal of trouble adapting to life and
work in college. I only came from an insular culture in rural Virginia. To be
coming from a culture and language wholly extraneous, however...it's so
ludicrous to believe that this spectrum of international students is receiving
the same education as our own domestic students, it can only be understood in
terms of financial benefit.
Americans would do well to remember that unsavory
application practices in China wouldn't exist if there weren't colleges willing
to overlook them and accept full tuition anywhere they can get it.
Do you think that the flood of Chinese students to the
US will slow any time soon? I see that almost all the students coming to the
US now will have no chance to stay in the US for a job and many will not have a
great chance to get a job back home. Am I wrong?
You're entirely right, and the trend is already beginning.
You already hear upper-class Chinese griping about the waste of money in
sending their kids to American schools. They complain that their kids, whose
"education" they spent a half million USD on once you factor in
lifestyle, are only returning to China with English skills that actually got
worse! It's become a joke that, if you're not a serious student, America is a
great place to improve your Chinese because you'll only ever interact with
people from Beijing.
Now, as admissions at top universities are becoming
infinitely more competitive, it's going to become a hard sell for all of these
middle-of-the-road students. Previously, these kids all thought they had a
chance at Stanford and MIT. All of them. Why? Because someone was selling it to
them, and they didn't have the frame of reference, the context, to understand
how unrealistic that dream is for a kid with an 85 TOEFL score. When they
didn't get in, and ended up at Cornbread Midwest State Polytech in ESL classes,
the parents would backward rationalize the time and money invested in college
prep (while the kids were just happy to be driving a Lexus around and partying
in America). And still, an American degree was a positive factor career-wise.
Now though...it's simply not. Too many Chinese people have American degrees!
Today, virtually everyone knows that those dream universities are off the table
(or, are at least impractically competitive). So how do you sell those students
on America? Especially when Canadian and European universities are vastly
cheaper, and with brilliantly innovative schools like NYU and Yale opening
campuses here in Asia.
It's also true that many wealthy Chinese people want to
expatriate or move assets overseas, and sending their children to study is a
useful first step. Yet is that a first step when it's impossible for your kids
to ever get a job in America? That's an equally ridiculous problem if you ask
me - how antagonistic the US government is toward immigrating international
talent.
We're not only talking about wealthy families either. Just
because a student can pay full tuition doesn't mean her family is wealthy. In
the past, we took many scholarship students whose extended families would pool
together their meager resources (I mean ENTIRE extended families) to cover US
tuition. It was a social-mobility opportunity for the entire family! Nowadays
though, with so few schools offering aid packages, "name" schools off
the table, and the perceived value of American education on the decline, these
students just aren't applying anymore. At least not at the undergrad level.
They're often waiting for grad school, where they can get financial aid to
one-year, money-mill LLM and MS Finance programs (that are filled with Chinese
students, and seem designed only for them if you ask me). UK and Canadian
universities, however, have been setting up graduate partnerships and
scholarships with Chinese universities at a much faster rate than US schools
have, so you can guess where the less than super affluent students are turning
their gaze.
When you juxtapose all of this with the state of tuitions
and national student loan debt, well, it's so much like America before the real
estate credit bubble burst, it's scary. All these US schools belly-flopping
into easy money without contemplating the potential fallout. I, for one, expect
that within 3-4 years, we'll see the total number of Chinese applicants
decrease for the first time, and then watch as bloated, over-expanded
middle-tier colleges run around tearing their hair out.
Can you explain Guanxi for those who don’t understand
this and can you tell how this cultural practice affects you?
How many hours do you have? (insert a chuckle here)
Guanxi is an unwritten code of social networking and
influence in China. Hundreds of books have been written by Westerners about the
topic. They're all by and large completely idiotic. The best way for an
American to conceptualize it is to think of blue-blood "good old
boys" clubs. Think of a sub-par college senior getting an interview
opportunity at an elite Wall Street firm only because he and the hiring manager
were in the same college fraternity. Now add ten degrees of complexity (which
Chinese people find all too easy to understand), and include all social strata.
One of my students explained to me how important it was for
him to superficially maintain relationships with friends from primary and
middle school. Though they aren't "really" friends anymore, these
will one day be important contacts for his career. You hear Chinese people
constantly talking about their "classmates" with the same kind of
conscientiousness. They don't say "friend," they say
"classmate," which can sound silly and presumptuous to foreigners,
but absolutely isn't to them.
Now this is all obviously a gross oversimplification, but
it's worth noting that as foreigners, guanxi isn't something available
to us. At least not in the way it exists for Chinese people. What we have, and
what's been greatly beneficial for me and my team personally over the years, is
simple trust. Our tutoring program isn't large, but we do no sales, no
advertising, no marketing whatsoever. All of our students come from direct
referrals. And when they come, it's almost a foregone conclusion that they'll
sign up, because they trust their friends, and their friends trust us. This is
a distilled example of guanxi, but I'd rather describe it as the result of
working very hard to treat people well and make good on your promises. Perhaps
this is why recommendation letters are so ridiculous for Chinese people,
because they're so impersonal. When they want to recommend someone, they do it
in person, and most likely over a meal! There's a very intimate, face-to-face
aspect to it all, and that's probably the single most important element.
What it isn't, however, is a magical Jedi force that opens
the doors to Shangri-La. It's not a Contra cheat code for economic game theory.
In fact, it's not so complicated at all. It's a little bit of nepotism, a
little bit of your mom reminding you to send thank you notes, and a little bit
of a business deal sealed with a handshake on the 18th green. In China, they
have a word for it. In America, we don't (not outside of The Godfather,
at least).
Actually, we do have terms for that. "Legacy
admission" and "development committee" are good ones to start
with.
Do or Do Not, There is No Try
How have you changed given your time in China?
I'm probably a strange case, because I came here at 21 years
old. Now 30, I've lived my entire adult life in China, and it's as defining a
part of my identity as any other place I've lived. If pressed to describe one
major change, however, it would be that I'm vastly more open-minded about
America and it's role in the world. Now, when someone says "America is
terrible!" or "America is world #1 country!"...I want to know
why, to gain that insight, instead of simply ripping off my shirt and chanting
the Rocky theme. Living outside the US teaches you that, really, everyone in
the world is basically just trying to live a good life, to be happy, to take
care of their families. The politics and social squabbles that once seemed so
important, now only seem like a form of self-aggrandizement. You stop seeing
the world in terms of "us versus them," and realize that, really,
most people need to just shut up and get back to work on making their little
corner of the world better.
 |
| Jordan in Qingai province, Girl's school |
Honestly though, I often feel uncomfortable back home now.
There's an element of isolation to American life that I can't parse anymore
(but which isn't necessarily a bad thing). In a place like China, Asia,
Europe...anywhere that life offers new people, languages and philosophies
around every corner, there's a forced "realness" to living (or persisting).
Partly this arises from the work I've done over the last five years with a very
special school in China's Qinghai province. It's a school for ethnic Tibetan
girls from very unfortunate life circumstances. When such experiences are a
part of your reality, such wonderful people, who smile constantly amid a world
of geographic, spiritual, and ten other kinds of chaos...it redefines your
perspective. You develop comfort in uncomfortable situations, or perhaps, as
the poet Ted Hughes said, and as I once paraphrased in
describing the girls at that school, you develop the ability to carry and
tolerate a higher voltage of life. Perhaps it's similar to that which once
called men like Melville and Conrad to life as a sailor. After experiencing
that adjustment...you have a hard time accepting a lesser voltage.
If anything, living abroad has taught me that the things
which make my home country great, are the same things which make people everywhere
great.
What do you see in your future?
Two months ago I had the opportunity to visit Australia for
the first time. I'm now convinced that Sydney is the greatest city on Earth,
and will hate myself if I don't live there for an extended period of time. I'm
about to begin an MFA in Fiction Writing at City University of Hong Kong, and
am hoping that it will be writing that defines this fourth decade of my life,
in the way that teaching it to Chinese students defined the third. Beyond
that...ahh, the world is so full of stories, I just hope to make a few.
Are you optimistic about the direction China is going?
Are you optimistic about the way the US is going?
Very tricky questions, these are. My two-second response
would be "yes" for China (because of my students) and "no"
for the US (because of student loan debt and middle-class complacency), though
both answers would be fraught with biases, lack of education and inner turmoil.
I'm certainly not well-read enough in politics or economics to form worthwhile
opinions anyway.
.jpeg) |
| 3D printed house, Shanghai |
However, if pushed to give a more complete response, I could
only say that I have a hard time differentiating these two directions. It's
2014, and we're all in this together, whether we want to admit it or not. To
that end, it's hard to not be inspired by society's ability to cultivate
proactive geniuses, those who ignore petty communal squabbling and effect great
change on a global scale. Look at what Bill Gates is doing for basic health in
the developing world, what Elon Musk is doing to reverse the shortsightedness
of industrial development. Look at how Shanghai Winsun is realizing the promise
of cheap, 3D-printed housing, or how a few motivated Chinese students were
translating and disseminating free online university courses long before
Coursera came on the scene. Our societies are merging, and that's inspiring. It
only makes me optimistic. One of my brilliant students once said that our only
reason not to be optimistic is that the word "country" will always
have a plural form, and that's quite insightful. However, it seems that people
with the capacity to care about humanity as a whole have much more energy than
those whose passions only burn bright within the glass walls of Internet
comment sections.
To that end, Reddit might be the end of us all. (insert a
hearty chuckle here)
Anything else you want to add?
I think I'd better get off this soapbox before it collapses.
Thanks so much for the opportunity to talk about these issues. They're very
important to a lot of people, and a lot more who don't even know how or why.
And also thanks for doing what you do, Parke. Our students and a great many
others in China are huge fans of your blog, and justifiably so.
Jordan’s words here demonstrate why he has a great future
ahead as a writer. He has a voice and in this case his voice makes a persuasive
case for colleges and universities to take a good look at their policies about
enrolling students from China. He is not the only one who has outlined these issues. But the magazine articles I've linked to come from reporters who have not spent years on the ground. Jordan provides much more detail; more importantly, he suggests some pragmatic solutions while also calling out some of the players who turn a blind eye to problems.
While Jordan has brought up issues that will cast a less than wonderful light on what some schools, prep companies and agents are doing, I
think it’s more important to end on what Jordan underscores about what is
right and wonderful too.
The students that Jordan has worked with have changed his
view of the world. They undermine the stereotype of study machines. He has
experienced again and again what I have too: many of these students have a love
of learning and a wide range of interests and passions. Many of them are more
interested in learning than student in the US. Not learning just to get a job
(although that is certainly an issue) but learning how to be a global citizen,
how to adjust to another language and culture, and how to contribute to the
life of a campus or a company. There are
certainly thousands of students like this I the US but there are thousands in
China too. They have a hunger that comes from living through the greatest
social and economic changes that have taken place in one generation in the
history of the world. Anyone who has spent time with these students knows that
Jordan’s experience of being able to say these are some of the best kids in the world is not in any way an exaggeration.
What is unique, however, is that the students have had the
opportunity to work with a man who has a passion to help the students and a
passion for language. They have been incredibly lucky to get a combination that
is all too rare in China or anywhere else in the world.
I am grateful to Jordan in ways that clichéd abstractions of
thanks simply can’t cover. His words here, however, do convince me that we are
going to be hearing a lot more from him in the near future as he turns his
attention to creating works of art with his words. I will be in the front of
the line to read them. Like Melville and Conrad, he has the 'voltage' and vision to write what may be the Great Global Novel.
For those who want to read a great short piece by Jordan,published in one of the top literary journals in the world go here.
 |
| Jordan performing |
No comments:
Post a Comment