Elite universities fail test in how to attract students, breaking promise of education
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No sooner were the national college entrance exam results released late June than some leading universities began to fight to enroll top scorers.
As a matter of fact, the battle began even before results were formally known, when successful candidates began to receive phone calls from university admissions officers.
In one case, Peking University (Beida) offered an outstanding candidate a chauffeur-driven 270-kilometer ride home to Chongqing from Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, where the student was touring.
This was designed to frustrate any enrollment attempt en-route by Beida’s arch-foe, Tsinghua University.
Soon diatribes and accusations were traded between the two rivals via the Weibo (microblog), with each party accusing the other of using underhand means, including money, to beat the competition.
And the chauffeuring service from Chengdu was not an isolated incident.
One candidate from Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province, was already in a car provided by Beida when it was stopped by people from Tsinghua. A standoff ensued, leading to traffic jam and almost ending in a scuffle.
In such a situation it is profitable for an in-demand student to hesitate before making a decision, as the schools vying for their signature may offer more money — in the shape of scholarships — and other incentives. These elite schools have really mastered the art of how to gather top scorers.
Essence of education
And they can afford to spend big money. Recognized as the “top two”, Beida and Tsinghua are recipients of generous state subsidies. But their biggest asset lies in their names — long associated with the best that education has to offer.
This cut-throat courting of high scorers is a huge waste of state resources and a mockery of the understanding that education should be a transforming power, offering all the chance to attain a higher level in spiritual terms.
Chih-Yung Chien is professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland in the United States, and a proponent of liberal education.
He wrote in Weihui Daily a couple of years ago that “good students are brought up thanks to good instruction, rather than to preselection of good students.” Chien observed that there is nothing extraordinary about some universities on China’s mainland turning out outstanding graduates, because they have the privilege of admitting none but the best students.
“If Beida were to take students left over after the rest of the country’s 50 key universities have made their choices and still manage to turn out brilliant graduates, then it could truly rank as a great institution of learning,” Chien observed. Sadly, what these “top” universities have been doing indicates their total lack of confidence in how the education they offer can benefit students.
An even more important insight eluding these universities is that a good education has little to do with scores.
Successful college education is about the cultivation of a well-rounded individual, rather than increasingly narrowly defined academic excellence (crudely suggested by a score).
It is tragic that from an early age students are confined to a specialized field, where they acquire some skills and techniques but lack the broad, overall knowledge required to live properly.
Super-egotists
How can we expect these graduates to make the world a better place to live?
“Ask yourself, as a modern person, what’s your biggest puzzle? Simply put, who we are, where do we come from and where are we going? Our social unsettlement chiefly arises out of our failure to achieve consensus on these important issues,” Chien wrote.
In China, the purpose of education used to be defined in the first lines of the first book of the Confucian classic “The Great Learning.” “What the great learning teaches is to illustrate illustrious virtue, to renovate the people and to rest in the highest excellence.” (“The Great Learning”, James Legge’s translation.)
Thus the investigation of things and knowledge is intended to achieve “sincerity” and “rectified hearts,” bringing about regulated families, correctly governed states and ultimately peace and happiness throughout the land.
For a long time, this preoccupation with these metaphysical principles has been ridiculed as useless and education has degenerated into specialized study.
When the so-called “top” universities use money to get one over on rivals in their eagerness to enroll “top” students, it would be ridiculous to expect graduates emerging from such institutions to be conscious of the duties they owe to society. As a matter of fact, the only thing we can predict about beneficiaries of such education is that a successful student will earn a degree, get a well-paid job and become an expert in a field.
More successful candidates will be schooled in the art of accumulation and become millionaires before they turn 30. A few might also end up in jail in the process. Obviously their success or failure is strictly personal.
Why should taxpayers give their hard-earned money to institutions adept at turning out these super-egotists whose only merit is self-enrichment, almost certainly at society’s expense?
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