New York:
In her ballroom dance class, Li Wanrong has learned to tango and cha-cha. At lunch one day, she tried a strange mix of flavors -- pepperoni pizza, the spicy sausage and oozing cheese nearly burning her tongue. Then there was that Friday night before going clubbing for the first time when new friends gave her a makeover, and she looked in the mirror to see an American girl smiling back wearing a little black dress, red lipstick and fierce eyeliner.
"I say 'wow' a lot," says Ms Li, a freshman at Drew University, a small liberal arts school in Madison, New Jersey.
Against her parents' wishes, she studied for and took the SAT in Hong Kong, a three-hour bus ride from her home in southern China. She told them she was going there to do some shopping. Her parents eventually came around, persuaded by her determination and a $12,000 scholarship that would take some of the sting out of the $40,000 tuition at Drew, which her high school teacher had recommended.
Describing her whirlwind transformation to college kid sometimes leaves Ms Li at a loss for words. And sometimes the cultural distance seems too much, especially when facing dining options in the cafeteria. "Sometimes I feel when I go back to China I'll never eat a hamburger ever again," she says, laughing.
Ms Li is part of a record wave of Chinese high school graduates enrolling in American colleges, joining the fabric of campus life as roommates and study partners and contributing to the global perspectives to which colleges are so eager to expose their students.
"China is going to matter greatly to all students in the 21st century," says Robert Weisbuch, president of Drew, which has increased its international enrollment by 60 percent in the last five years. "We feel it is important to provide the opportunity for American and Chinese students to learn from one another."
While China's students have long filled American graduate schools, its undergraduates now represent the fastest-growing group of international students. In 2008-9, more than 26,000 were studying in the United States, up from about 8,000 eight years earlier, according to the Institute of International Education.
Students are ending up not just at nationally known universities, but also at regional colleges, state schools and even community colleges that recruit overseas. Most of these students pay full freight (international students are not eligible for government financial aid) -- a benefit for campuses where the economic downturn has gutted endowments or state financing.
The boom parallels China's emergence as the world's largest economy after the United States. China is home to a growing number of middle-class parents who have saved for years to get their only child into a top school, hoping for an advantage in a competitive job market made more so by a surge in college graduates. Since the 1990s, China has doubled its number of higher education institutions. More than 60 percent of high school graduates now attend a university, up from 20 percent in the 1980s. But this surge has left millions of diploma-wielding young people unable to find white-collar work in a country still heavily reliant on low-paying manufacturing.
"The Chinese are going to invest in anything that gives them an edge, and having a US degree certainly gives them that edge back home," says Peggy Blumenthal, a vice president at the Institute of International Education. American colleges offer the chance to gain fluency in English, develop real-world skills, and land a coveted position with a multinational corporation or government agency.
Ding Yinghan grew up in a modest apartment with his mother, a marketing executive, and his father, a civil servant in Beijing's work safety administration whose own mother is illiterate. A child of the "new China," he is fully aware that his generation has opportunities unavailable to any before.
His parents pushed him to study hard -- and study abroad -- because they have little faith in the Chinese education system. Sipping tea in their living room one sweltering August afternoon, Mr Ding's mother, Meng Suyan, reflects on the Chinese classroom. "In the US they focus on creative-thinking skills, while in China they only focus on theory," she says. "So what university students learn here doesn't prepare them for the real world."
Says Mr Ding: "Chinese values require me to be a good listener, and Western values require me to be a good speaker."
A bespectacled whiz kid, Mr Ding was accepted early admission to Hamilton College in upstate New York following a yearlong exchange program at a North Carolina public high school. Now a junior, he is on a full scholarship, No. 1 in his class and spending this year at Dartmouth on a dual-degree engineering program. He also founded the bridge club at Hamilton, ran the Ping-Pong team, wrote for the student newspaper and tutored in chemistry, physics and economics for $8.50 an hour.
His first tutoring job was freshman year, when his advanced calculus professor asked him to help classmates struggling with the material. Over textbooks and calculators, Mr. Ding used the opportunity to practice his English and find commonalities with people who had never met someone from China.
At Hamilton, he is surrounded by wealth -- some students, he says, fly to Manhattan on weekends in helicopters, party with Champagne instead of beer, and smoke $100 cigars. It's a new experience for a man who gets his hair cut a few times a year because the $15 is a lot of money for his parents, who fret that they cannot afford to provide him with health insurance in the United States. But sending their child to live across the world is a worthy sacrifice, says his father, Ding Dapeng. "In China 25 years ago it was rare to even go to university, so for Yinghan to study in the US is a real miracle."
"Today the world is so small," he says. "Only by broadening his knowledge with an international background can Yinghan really become a global citizen."
The cultural exchange perhaps manifests itself most in the intimacy of the shared dorm room.
When Mariapaola La Barbera learned last summer that her roommate at Drew would come from China, her mother was thrilled. "She said, 'They're smart people, so you'll learn from her and be focused.' "
She shares a room with Li Wanrong. The two have tacked funky tie-dye tapestries and a poster of the Eiffel Tower to the walls; Ms. Li is planning to study Spanish while perfecting her English, and has taped the words "hola" and "muy bien" next to her laptop.
"Wanrong is very brave," Ms La Barbera says. "I give her a lot of credit for moving across the world and being so focused." Still, Ms. La Barbera, who knew no one from China, says: "It's different. I'm not going to lie."
They have different groups of friends but are friendly. The roommates have taught each other words in Mandarin and Italian, discussed the political differences between the United States and China, and had impromptu lessons on American slang.
Ms Li's teachers in China had told her that American parents kick their children out of the house when they turn 18. Ms La Barbera, who goes home to Staten Island every weekend, has corrected this misconception.
"She's like a window," Ms Li says. "I can watch her and see what Americans are like."
As a freshman at Central Michigan University, Qi Fan realized that even Americans come from different cultures. His roommates -- one black, one white -- spoke to him in different accents and had social circles that largely matched their own skin color. Sometimes they would grab him out of bed and drag him to parties where beer pong was played all night.
Mr Qi had learned of Central Michigan from a Chinese friend who went there, and it was talked up by a company in China that recruits students. Originally he had considered Britain or Germany, but his parents decided there was little point in paying for college in "second-tier" countries, and they would send him to the United States "no matter what, because it's the super power."
But the American myth faded once he settled in. He disliked a campus culture that "was all about drinking," and wanted a high-profile school closer to New York's finance world. In his sophomore year, Mr Qi transferred to the University at Albany, of the State University of New York. He says he is happy there, makes trips to New York City in the car he just bought, and avoids any drinking culture by living with other Chinese off campus.
Partying is an American college rite of passage, but socializing in China is usually conducted around the table, where close friends cook, eat and play games together. The fun in standing around a dark room filled with strangers, speakers blaring, is often lost in translation.
Frances Liu, a Yale sophomore from the bustling city of Tianjin, remembers one night freshman year when friends started smoking marijuana. And then offered her the joint. "They were like, 'Frances, come on,' " she says, rolling her eyes. She declined, but the pressure to fit in meant plenty of late nights. "I don't want to be in a bar drunk and grinding with someone I've never met and will never see again," Ms Liu says. "I've tried that. I went to parties every single weekend freshman year and realized it's not for me."
Ms Liu found refuge in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the towering cube of translucent marble at Yale that holds thousands of the world's most precious written originals. Last summer she worked there as a page, bringing requested items to researchers. But more satisfying than the $12 an hour was discovering treasures like the original manuscript of Edith Wharton's "Age of Innocence" in the stacks and leafing through illuminated parchment from the ninth century. The experience has given her a deep appreciation for the West's values of transparency and access to information. "In China, I'm used to secrecy, so being 18 and able to touch history with my bare fingers really impressed me," she says.
After a year, Ms Liu believes she is less of the quiet-Asian-nerd stereotype that she had felt followed her through Yale's Gothic hallways. Now she wears makeup, raises her hand in class, and has a different perspective than her friends in China, according to whom "I'm contaminated by American culture and not Chinese anymore."
That harsh assessment is heard by many Chinese undergraduates, which they say is hard to ignore. It was in a freshman literature seminar class at Yale called "Experiences of Being Foreign" that Xu Luyi began to tackle the "pulling force westernizing me rapidly and driving me away from my own background."
"Somehow I was stuck in this middle zone and unable to identify with either side," says Ms Xu, a sophomore from Shanghai. She was the only international student in the class. Rather than ignore her "otherness," she dived into the course's exploration of identity construction and confusion, and embraced the assigned readings, by immigrants and exiles. For an assignment that required that students go somewhere that would make them feel foreign, she went to Bible study.
Where she ended up feeling most at home was in her dorm. The women in her hall would meet for tea and cookies every few weeks to discuss college life and address girl "drama." This "women's table," Ms Liu says, "was a great bonding experience and also a good chance to meditate on our experiences."
Perhaps most unsettling to Chinese students is the robust activist culture on campus, where young Americans find their voices on issues like war, civil rights and immigration. In China, protests are illegal and vocal dissent forbidden, and on sensitive topics like Tibet and Taiwan a majority are in lockstep with their government. It can be especially painful hearing Westerners condemn China after growing up steeped in propaganda blaming the West for the suffering before Communism.
Shen Xinchao, a Rutgers junior from Shanghai, chose to attend college in the United States because "here you can argue with professors, which is not encouraged in China," and choose a major rather than test into one. "In China, your path is almost set when you get into college on the first day," he says.
But American college life presented obstacles. As a freshman, he found his campus lonely and alienating. First, he spent a semester living in a dorm lounge because Rutgers had run out of rooms for freshmen. Then he was paired with a roommate who challenged him over his homeland's human rights record. "He thought China was just a very tyrannical Communist country that has no freedom, and that is not what life is really like there," says Mr. Shen, who has moved off campus to live with Chinese friends. "Americans are friendly, but I just can't establish a deep relationship because our cultural differences are too deep."
Some Chinese students have turned activist themselves to rebut criticism of homeland policies. Following China's crackdown on Tibet before the Beijing Olympics in summer 2008, furious groups of Chinese students confronted protesters who were trying to disrupt the torch relay in the United States. And on rare occasions, Chinese students have harassed pro-Tibet activists on campus, and sought to dissuade universities from inviting the Dalai Lama to speak on their campus.
But for the most part, raised on only whispers about the student troublemakers at Tiananmen Square, Chinese students steer clear of sit-ins, demonstrations and petitions.
"In China, we definitely don't see people marching in the streets, so it's a bit disturbing to see the masses rallying," says Li Yidan, a freshman at Yale, wearing a preppy white sweater at an off-campus cafe. "People did that in 1989, and it ended in bloodshed."
To help students make the cultural leap -- as well as to internationalize their institutions -- colleges and universities are building programs that begin in China and end, hopefully, on an American campus.
Teachers College of Columbia University has started a program for high school seniors (in China, much of the last year is spent reviewing for a college entrance exam, though curriculum varies). This year, the program's first, 28 students spent six months at the University of International Relations in Beijing; 19 were found qualified to finish off the year at Columbia. The program preps students to apply as freshmen, with a focus on English instruction, cultural immersion and counseling, including study for the Test of English as a Foreign Language and SAT, and a tour of campuses in the Northeast. (Total cost: about $45,000, including room and board.)
Another new program, US-Sino Pathway, aims to transition high school students into one of six participating colleges. Northeastern University devised the curriculum, a year of for-credit courses taken at Kaplan Inc. branches in China and at a summer bridge session at Northeastern's Boston campus or the University of Vermont. Kaplan handles administration, English-language instruction in China and recruitment of students. (Total cost: about $26,000 to $28,000, including room and board in the United States.)
Collaborations with for-profit education companies are beginning to gain traction as American institutions seek to tap their in-country resources. Kaplan has branches in eight Chinese cities; INTO University Partnerships, a British company with roots in China, similarly works with the University of South Florida and Oregon State. Kaplan, which has been criticized for overly aggressive recruiting in the United States, says it does not use a commission model or work with "agents" in China. Many Chinese hire agents to navigate the American admissions and visa maze. The industry has mushroomed, as has its reputation for unscrupulousness, like falsifying transcripts and making bloated promises.
The goal of US-Sino Pathway, says Philomena Mantella, senior vice president for enrollment management at Northeastern, is to help Chinese families make informed choices and to increase readiness for the American experience. "Finally," she says, "we saw this through a global competitive lens. British and Australian institutions were ahead of us, and we saw an opportunity to offer a strong pathway to American universities."
Students who complete the program's China portion apply as sophomore transfers to a consortium college -- the others are Baylor University, Marist College, Stevens Institute of Technology and the University of Utah. Of the 171 students who started in China, 138 were ultimately accepted into a degree program. Nine of those who didn't meet standards chose to work on their English in another Northeastern program, American Classroom, at its adult-education college on campus (a dozen of the successful matriculants ended up in its degree programs as well).
The University of Vermont joined the consortium to increase its international population, which was less than 1 percent of its undergraduates.
During Vermont's first bridge session, last summer, 29 new Chinese undergraduates absorbed American culture by hanging out with a crowd of aging hippies at a reggae concert. They went to the Ben & Jerry's factory and met with the co-founder Jerry Greenfield to discuss entrepreneurship and social justice. They also got face time with elected officials, including Vermont's governor and Burlington's mayor, for a lesson on democracy. Among course electives: "History of Rock & Roll," for a hearing of Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and the Doors.
Yuan Xiecheng, who grew up amid the neon-lit skyscrapers and karaoke emporiums of Shanghai, was eager to study abroad. He had planned to go to a Canadian university until he attended a presentation by the chief executive officer of Kaplan China, Zhou Yong. When Mr. Zhou announced that students would not have to take the SAT or TOEFL or attend the final year of high school, Mr. Yuan leaped at the opportunity. He attended an international high school, and says he was 20 course credits short of graduation. Instead, he took the final exam given to secure a Chinese diploma, and enrolled in the pathway program. He is now a sophomore at Vermont.
Zhao Siwei took the same route. "This program is super easy to enter, and it was really easy to come here to the U.S.," says Ms. Zhao, who hopes to major in film and TV at Vermont. "I love it here," she concludes. She expresses amazement, though, at her program peers' English: "They can't talk. They can't communicate with American people."
Language is one of Chinese students' biggest challenges. Mr Yuan wishes he had had more exposure to the vernacular. His for-credit classes at Kaplan included calculus, chemistry and American studies, taught by instructors approved by Northeastern. But only half were Westerners, he says, and none American. His teachers in grammar, reading and listening comprehension were Chinese, he says, and "some of their English was not good enough."
Once in Vermont, Mr Yuan worried when people smiled and asked "What's up?" "It was really awkward," he says, "because I wouldn't know how to respond and while I was thinking of an answer they would just walk away."
Still, his English is strong enough that he joined the debate team, with its fast-clip speech and thinking. At weekly meetings he has argued about indigenous land rights and vote buying. Presenting an opinion in less than seven minutes, as he did at his first competition, at Binghamton University, has helped him write college papers succinctly, he says, and question the world around him. "It's about challenging the status quo and thinking of better solutions in a way I never thought about in China."
Zhou Kehui had an unusual adjustment to Brigham Young University. Growing up in officially atheist China, she knew little about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with which the university is affiliated. Mormonism is not a state-sanctioned religion, and proselytizing by its members is illegal.
Ms Zhou chose Brigham Young on the recommendation of a friend of her father's, who had gone there. Its business school also ranks highly. Her parents thought the university's honor code, with its rules of conduct, would keep her safe and focused. Initially, however, the curfew and code, which includes a ban on short skirts and drinking tea, left her shellshocked.
"It was really hard for me to accept the rules in the beginning," says Ms Zhou, a junior majoring in accounting. "I mean, where I'm from, in Fujian province, drinking tea every day is what we do."
But few American universities offer the comfort zone she found here. Though there are only 77 Chinese undergraduates at Brigham Young, with so many Mormons doing their two years of missionary work in Taiwan and Hong Kong, finding someone fluent in her language was easy. "A lot of times I'd be walking on campus when some white dude would just come up to me and start speaking Chinese," Ms Zhou says. That warmth and common experience -- not to mention several meetings with church missionaries -- went a long way toward convincing her BYU was the right match.
A few months after arriving, Ms Zhou was baptized, which, she says, provided a support network. That Mormonism is considered subversive at home, or that her parents were unhappy with her conversion, gave her little pause. After all, she says, saving her soul was as logical as deciding to go to college in the United States. "It wasn't a hard choice to make," she says. "It's probably the best decision I've ever made in my life."
"I say 'wow' a lot," says Ms Li, a freshman at Drew University, a small liberal arts school in Madison, New Jersey.
Against her parents' wishes, she studied for and took the SAT in Hong Kong, a three-hour bus ride from her home in southern China. She told them she was going there to do some shopping. Her parents eventually came around, persuaded by her determination and a $12,000 scholarship that would take some of the sting out of the $40,000 tuition at Drew, which her high school teacher had recommended.
Describing her whirlwind transformation to college kid sometimes leaves Ms Li at a loss for words. And sometimes the cultural distance seems too much, especially when facing dining options in the cafeteria. "Sometimes I feel when I go back to China I'll never eat a hamburger ever again," she says, laughing.
Ms Li is part of a record wave of Chinese high school graduates enrolling in American colleges, joining the fabric of campus life as roommates and study partners and contributing to the global perspectives to which colleges are so eager to expose their students.
"China is going to matter greatly to all students in the 21st century," says Robert Weisbuch, president of Drew, which has increased its international enrollment by 60 percent in the last five years. "We feel it is important to provide the opportunity for American and Chinese students to learn from one another."
While China's students have long filled American graduate schools, its undergraduates now represent the fastest-growing group of international students. In 2008-9, more than 26,000 were studying in the United States, up from about 8,000 eight years earlier, according to the Institute of International Education.
Students are ending up not just at nationally known universities, but also at regional colleges, state schools and even community colleges that recruit overseas. Most of these students pay full freight (international students are not eligible for government financial aid) -- a benefit for campuses where the economic downturn has gutted endowments or state financing.
The boom parallels China's emergence as the world's largest economy after the United States. China is home to a growing number of middle-class parents who have saved for years to get their only child into a top school, hoping for an advantage in a competitive job market made more so by a surge in college graduates. Since the 1990s, China has doubled its number of higher education institutions. More than 60 percent of high school graduates now attend a university, up from 20 percent in the 1980s. But this surge has left millions of diploma-wielding young people unable to find white-collar work in a country still heavily reliant on low-paying manufacturing.
"The Chinese are going to invest in anything that gives them an edge, and having a US degree certainly gives them that edge back home," says Peggy Blumenthal, a vice president at the Institute of International Education. American colleges offer the chance to gain fluency in English, develop real-world skills, and land a coveted position with a multinational corporation or government agency.
Ding Yinghan grew up in a modest apartment with his mother, a marketing executive, and his father, a civil servant in Beijing's work safety administration whose own mother is illiterate. A child of the "new China," he is fully aware that his generation has opportunities unavailable to any before.
His parents pushed him to study hard -- and study abroad -- because they have little faith in the Chinese education system. Sipping tea in their living room one sweltering August afternoon, Mr Ding's mother, Meng Suyan, reflects on the Chinese classroom. "In the US they focus on creative-thinking skills, while in China they only focus on theory," she says. "So what university students learn here doesn't prepare them for the real world."
Says Mr Ding: "Chinese values require me to be a good listener, and Western values require me to be a good speaker."
A bespectacled whiz kid, Mr Ding was accepted early admission to Hamilton College in upstate New York following a yearlong exchange program at a North Carolina public high school. Now a junior, he is on a full scholarship, No. 1 in his class and spending this year at Dartmouth on a dual-degree engineering program. He also founded the bridge club at Hamilton, ran the Ping-Pong team, wrote for the student newspaper and tutored in chemistry, physics and economics for $8.50 an hour.
His first tutoring job was freshman year, when his advanced calculus professor asked him to help classmates struggling with the material. Over textbooks and calculators, Mr. Ding used the opportunity to practice his English and find commonalities with people who had never met someone from China.
At Hamilton, he is surrounded by wealth -- some students, he says, fly to Manhattan on weekends in helicopters, party with Champagne instead of beer, and smoke $100 cigars. It's a new experience for a man who gets his hair cut a few times a year because the $15 is a lot of money for his parents, who fret that they cannot afford to provide him with health insurance in the United States. But sending their child to live across the world is a worthy sacrifice, says his father, Ding Dapeng. "In China 25 years ago it was rare to even go to university, so for Yinghan to study in the US is a real miracle."
"Today the world is so small," he says. "Only by broadening his knowledge with an international background can Yinghan really become a global citizen."
The cultural exchange perhaps manifests itself most in the intimacy of the shared dorm room.
When Mariapaola La Barbera learned last summer that her roommate at Drew would come from China, her mother was thrilled. "She said, 'They're smart people, so you'll learn from her and be focused.' "
She shares a room with Li Wanrong. The two have tacked funky tie-dye tapestries and a poster of the Eiffel Tower to the walls; Ms. Li is planning to study Spanish while perfecting her English, and has taped the words "hola" and "muy bien" next to her laptop.
"Wanrong is very brave," Ms La Barbera says. "I give her a lot of credit for moving across the world and being so focused." Still, Ms. La Barbera, who knew no one from China, says: "It's different. I'm not going to lie."
They have different groups of friends but are friendly. The roommates have taught each other words in Mandarin and Italian, discussed the political differences between the United States and China, and had impromptu lessons on American slang.
Ms Li's teachers in China had told her that American parents kick their children out of the house when they turn 18. Ms La Barbera, who goes home to Staten Island every weekend, has corrected this misconception.
"She's like a window," Ms Li says. "I can watch her and see what Americans are like."
As a freshman at Central Michigan University, Qi Fan realized that even Americans come from different cultures. His roommates -- one black, one white -- spoke to him in different accents and had social circles that largely matched their own skin color. Sometimes they would grab him out of bed and drag him to parties where beer pong was played all night.
Mr Qi had learned of Central Michigan from a Chinese friend who went there, and it was talked up by a company in China that recruits students. Originally he had considered Britain or Germany, but his parents decided there was little point in paying for college in "second-tier" countries, and they would send him to the United States "no matter what, because it's the super power."
But the American myth faded once he settled in. He disliked a campus culture that "was all about drinking," and wanted a high-profile school closer to New York's finance world. In his sophomore year, Mr Qi transferred to the University at Albany, of the State University of New York. He says he is happy there, makes trips to New York City in the car he just bought, and avoids any drinking culture by living with other Chinese off campus.
Partying is an American college rite of passage, but socializing in China is usually conducted around the table, where close friends cook, eat and play games together. The fun in standing around a dark room filled with strangers, speakers blaring, is often lost in translation.
Frances Liu, a Yale sophomore from the bustling city of Tianjin, remembers one night freshman year when friends started smoking marijuana. And then offered her the joint. "They were like, 'Frances, come on,' " she says, rolling her eyes. She declined, but the pressure to fit in meant plenty of late nights. "I don't want to be in a bar drunk and grinding with someone I've never met and will never see again," Ms Liu says. "I've tried that. I went to parties every single weekend freshman year and realized it's not for me."
Ms Liu found refuge in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the towering cube of translucent marble at Yale that holds thousands of the world's most precious written originals. Last summer she worked there as a page, bringing requested items to researchers. But more satisfying than the $12 an hour was discovering treasures like the original manuscript of Edith Wharton's "Age of Innocence" in the stacks and leafing through illuminated parchment from the ninth century. The experience has given her a deep appreciation for the West's values of transparency and access to information. "In China, I'm used to secrecy, so being 18 and able to touch history with my bare fingers really impressed me," she says.
After a year, Ms Liu believes she is less of the quiet-Asian-nerd stereotype that she had felt followed her through Yale's Gothic hallways. Now she wears makeup, raises her hand in class, and has a different perspective than her friends in China, according to whom "I'm contaminated by American culture and not Chinese anymore."
That harsh assessment is heard by many Chinese undergraduates, which they say is hard to ignore. It was in a freshman literature seminar class at Yale called "Experiences of Being Foreign" that Xu Luyi began to tackle the "pulling force westernizing me rapidly and driving me away from my own background."
"Somehow I was stuck in this middle zone and unable to identify with either side," says Ms Xu, a sophomore from Shanghai. She was the only international student in the class. Rather than ignore her "otherness," she dived into the course's exploration of identity construction and confusion, and embraced the assigned readings, by immigrants and exiles. For an assignment that required that students go somewhere that would make them feel foreign, she went to Bible study.
Where she ended up feeling most at home was in her dorm. The women in her hall would meet for tea and cookies every few weeks to discuss college life and address girl "drama." This "women's table," Ms Liu says, "was a great bonding experience and also a good chance to meditate on our experiences."
Perhaps most unsettling to Chinese students is the robust activist culture on campus, where young Americans find their voices on issues like war, civil rights and immigration. In China, protests are illegal and vocal dissent forbidden, and on sensitive topics like Tibet and Taiwan a majority are in lockstep with their government. It can be especially painful hearing Westerners condemn China after growing up steeped in propaganda blaming the West for the suffering before Communism.
Shen Xinchao, a Rutgers junior from Shanghai, chose to attend college in the United States because "here you can argue with professors, which is not encouraged in China," and choose a major rather than test into one. "In China, your path is almost set when you get into college on the first day," he says.
But American college life presented obstacles. As a freshman, he found his campus lonely and alienating. First, he spent a semester living in a dorm lounge because Rutgers had run out of rooms for freshmen. Then he was paired with a roommate who challenged him over his homeland's human rights record. "He thought China was just a very tyrannical Communist country that has no freedom, and that is not what life is really like there," says Mr. Shen, who has moved off campus to live with Chinese friends. "Americans are friendly, but I just can't establish a deep relationship because our cultural differences are too deep."
Some Chinese students have turned activist themselves to rebut criticism of homeland policies. Following China's crackdown on Tibet before the Beijing Olympics in summer 2008, furious groups of Chinese students confronted protesters who were trying to disrupt the torch relay in the United States. And on rare occasions, Chinese students have harassed pro-Tibet activists on campus, and sought to dissuade universities from inviting the Dalai Lama to speak on their campus.
But for the most part, raised on only whispers about the student troublemakers at Tiananmen Square, Chinese students steer clear of sit-ins, demonstrations and petitions.
"In China, we definitely don't see people marching in the streets, so it's a bit disturbing to see the masses rallying," says Li Yidan, a freshman at Yale, wearing a preppy white sweater at an off-campus cafe. "People did that in 1989, and it ended in bloodshed."
To help students make the cultural leap -- as well as to internationalize their institutions -- colleges and universities are building programs that begin in China and end, hopefully, on an American campus.
Teachers College of Columbia University has started a program for high school seniors (in China, much of the last year is spent reviewing for a college entrance exam, though curriculum varies). This year, the program's first, 28 students spent six months at the University of International Relations in Beijing; 19 were found qualified to finish off the year at Columbia. The program preps students to apply as freshmen, with a focus on English instruction, cultural immersion and counseling, including study for the Test of English as a Foreign Language and SAT, and a tour of campuses in the Northeast. (Total cost: about $45,000, including room and board.)
Another new program, US-Sino Pathway, aims to transition high school students into one of six participating colleges. Northeastern University devised the curriculum, a year of for-credit courses taken at Kaplan Inc. branches in China and at a summer bridge session at Northeastern's Boston campus or the University of Vermont. Kaplan handles administration, English-language instruction in China and recruitment of students. (Total cost: about $26,000 to $28,000, including room and board in the United States.)
Collaborations with for-profit education companies are beginning to gain traction as American institutions seek to tap their in-country resources. Kaplan has branches in eight Chinese cities; INTO University Partnerships, a British company with roots in China, similarly works with the University of South Florida and Oregon State. Kaplan, which has been criticized for overly aggressive recruiting in the United States, says it does not use a commission model or work with "agents" in China. Many Chinese hire agents to navigate the American admissions and visa maze. The industry has mushroomed, as has its reputation for unscrupulousness, like falsifying transcripts and making bloated promises.
The goal of US-Sino Pathway, says Philomena Mantella, senior vice president for enrollment management at Northeastern, is to help Chinese families make informed choices and to increase readiness for the American experience. "Finally," she says, "we saw this through a global competitive lens. British and Australian institutions were ahead of us, and we saw an opportunity to offer a strong pathway to American universities."
Students who complete the program's China portion apply as sophomore transfers to a consortium college -- the others are Baylor University, Marist College, Stevens Institute of Technology and the University of Utah. Of the 171 students who started in China, 138 were ultimately accepted into a degree program. Nine of those who didn't meet standards chose to work on their English in another Northeastern program, American Classroom, at its adult-education college on campus (a dozen of the successful matriculants ended up in its degree programs as well).
The University of Vermont joined the consortium to increase its international population, which was less than 1 percent of its undergraduates.
During Vermont's first bridge session, last summer, 29 new Chinese undergraduates absorbed American culture by hanging out with a crowd of aging hippies at a reggae concert. They went to the Ben & Jerry's factory and met with the co-founder Jerry Greenfield to discuss entrepreneurship and social justice. They also got face time with elected officials, including Vermont's governor and Burlington's mayor, for a lesson on democracy. Among course electives: "History of Rock & Roll," for a hearing of Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and the Doors.
Yuan Xiecheng, who grew up amid the neon-lit skyscrapers and karaoke emporiums of Shanghai, was eager to study abroad. He had planned to go to a Canadian university until he attended a presentation by the chief executive officer of Kaplan China, Zhou Yong. When Mr. Zhou announced that students would not have to take the SAT or TOEFL or attend the final year of high school, Mr. Yuan leaped at the opportunity. He attended an international high school, and says he was 20 course credits short of graduation. Instead, he took the final exam given to secure a Chinese diploma, and enrolled in the pathway program. He is now a sophomore at Vermont.
Zhao Siwei took the same route. "This program is super easy to enter, and it was really easy to come here to the U.S.," says Ms. Zhao, who hopes to major in film and TV at Vermont. "I love it here," she concludes. She expresses amazement, though, at her program peers' English: "They can't talk. They can't communicate with American people."
Language is one of Chinese students' biggest challenges. Mr Yuan wishes he had had more exposure to the vernacular. His for-credit classes at Kaplan included calculus, chemistry and American studies, taught by instructors approved by Northeastern. But only half were Westerners, he says, and none American. His teachers in grammar, reading and listening comprehension were Chinese, he says, and "some of their English was not good enough."
Once in Vermont, Mr Yuan worried when people smiled and asked "What's up?" "It was really awkward," he says, "because I wouldn't know how to respond and while I was thinking of an answer they would just walk away."
Still, his English is strong enough that he joined the debate team, with its fast-clip speech and thinking. At weekly meetings he has argued about indigenous land rights and vote buying. Presenting an opinion in less than seven minutes, as he did at his first competition, at Binghamton University, has helped him write college papers succinctly, he says, and question the world around him. "It's about challenging the status quo and thinking of better solutions in a way I never thought about in China."
Zhou Kehui had an unusual adjustment to Brigham Young University. Growing up in officially atheist China, she knew little about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with which the university is affiliated. Mormonism is not a state-sanctioned religion, and proselytizing by its members is illegal.
Ms Zhou chose Brigham Young on the recommendation of a friend of her father's, who had gone there. Its business school also ranks highly. Her parents thought the university's honor code, with its rules of conduct, would keep her safe and focused. Initially, however, the curfew and code, which includes a ban on short skirts and drinking tea, left her shellshocked.
"It was really hard for me to accept the rules in the beginning," says Ms Zhou, a junior majoring in accounting. "I mean, where I'm from, in Fujian province, drinking tea every day is what we do."
But few American universities offer the comfort zone she found here. Though there are only 77 Chinese undergraduates at Brigham Young, with so many Mormons doing their two years of missionary work in Taiwan and Hong Kong, finding someone fluent in her language was easy. "A lot of times I'd be walking on campus when some white dude would just come up to me and start speaking Chinese," Ms Zhou says. That warmth and common experience -- not to mention several meetings with church missionaries -- went a long way toward convincing her BYU was the right match.
A few months after arriving, Ms Zhou was baptized, which, she says, provided a support network. That Mormonism is considered subversive at home, or that her parents were unhappy with her conversion, gave her little pause. After all, she says, saving her soul was as logical as deciding to go to college in the United States. "It wasn't a hard choice to make," she says. "It's probably the best decision I've ever made in my life."
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