The Ministry of Education will take steps to improve the efficiency
of intermediary agencies that help self-supporting students go
abroad to study.
It
will set up an official center to evaluate the quality of overseas
educational institutions -- whether those institutions are legally
established and what kind of academic degrees they can issue. The
evaluation results will be published, an official with the
ministry's Department for International Cooperation and Exchanges
told China Daily.
Department official Cen Jianjun said the website www.jsj.edu.cn
will regularly publish information on qualified overseas schools,
Chinese intermediary agencies and their good or substandard
services, as well as letters and the views of the public.
Service standards will be established to further discipline
intermediary agencies and get them to improve their work.
Managers of intermediary agencies will be given special training.
This will include law experts discussing cases of illegal
activities by some poor-quality intermediary agencies.
Cen said: "This move aims to enhance managers' awareness of law
enforcement and offer better services to the public."
The ministry's measures are designed to help self-supporting
students rationally choose overseas schools. An increasing number
of self-funding Chinese students go abroad, with nearly 70 percent
of them using intermediary agencies.
China now has 270 authorized intermediary agencies, which employ
nearly 10,000 staff. Most of these agencies provide a good service
but some, driven by profits, have violated the rules, such as by
issuing misleading advertisements and forging documents.
Some authorized agencies even entrust their services to illegal
institutions and then collect commission, according to Cen.
The Tiancheng Culture and Education Development Co in northeast
China's Liaoning Province, for example, issued an exaggerated
advertisement and cheated 41 students who went to a school in
Greece in July last year.
The students found out later that the school was located on the top
of a remote mountain, with only a poor blackboard, and a few desks
and chairs. The howls of wolves scared them every night.
The education administration in Liaoning has suspended the
company's operations.
China has sent 580,000 self-supporting and government-funded
students to study abroad since the country started to implement its
reform and opening-up policies in 1979. More than 160,000 of them
have returned and the remaining 420,000 are still studying or
working abroad.
The number of self-supporting students has increased in the last
few years. In 2001, 91 percent of students going abroad were
self-supporting and this rose to 93 percent in 2002.
Cen said it is hard to predict how many students would go abroad
this year because this spring's SARS outbreak discouraged foreign
countries from receiving Chinese students.
However, the number of self-supporting students is expected to rise
over the next few years as Chinese people's incomes rise, said
Cen.
Some rich families now send their children to study abroad before
they are even 18.
No
total figure for these young students is available because they all
go abroad through regional intermediary agencies, Cen said.
Some pupils do not study hard after going abroad. Instead, they
concentrate on entertainment, travel and fashion.
Cen said his ministry does not meddle in the affairs of parents
sending their children abroad. But he suggested that parents be
careful about sending their children abroad at an early age because
living and studying abroad might be tough for pupils who are so
young.
Xia Guoshun, an official with the Chinese Embassy in New Zealand,
said it is not very wise to send younger students to study abroad.
The local teaching resources can scarcely meet the demands of the
students arriving, so the teaching was be less efficient as a
result, the official said.
(China Daily July 4, 2003)