Recruiting in China

Harvard focuses more heavily on China in an effort to increase the diversity of the student body

By BENJAMIN K. GLASER
Contributing Writer

It wasn’t her school, it wasn’t a Web site, and it certainly wasn’t a recruiter that got Yichen Chen ’11 to apply to Harvard in 2006. It was a little help from her friends.

Like many students from mainland China, Chen, a native of Beijing, had to navigate the application process largely on her own. A loose network of friends, including other applicants, served as guides—even encouraging her to apply in the first place.

RED TAPE

“In China...there’s no such thing as a [guidance] counselor,” Chen explains.

In an education system that requires only one entrance exam for enrollment in national universities, Chinese students are often ill-prepared to apply to schools abroad. SAT testing is restricted; Chen traveled to Hong Kong for both the SAT I and SAT II exams.

“You feel like you are just trying to travel in the dark,” says Chen of her application process. “Sometimes there are lights around that are trying to point you in the right direction, but you can’t really trust every one of them.”

But Harvard administrators, like Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67 and President Drew Gilpin Faust, hope to increase Harvard’s presence in mainland China. Fitzsimmons and Faust’s recent high-profile trips to the People’s Republic of China are some of the current programs that have sought to promote connections and exchange between Harvard and mainland China.

“A leading university like Harvard has to be involved in areas where knowledge is being created and disseminated at really a revolutionary pace,” says Professor William C. Kirby, director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and chair of the Harvard China Fund.

HARVARD WANTS YOU

In the past few years, China’s higher education system has undergone an explosion in growth and development. According to Kirby, the university population has increased from five to 20 percent of the college-age population. Their aspiration, Kirby says, is to double that number. Currently, China has upwards of 26 million college and university students, in comparison to the U.S.’s fifteen million.

“If you look ahead 50 years from now,” Kirby says, “the only system of higher education that has the capacity to compete with, and perhaps exceed, America’s in many areas is China’s.”

Dean Fitzsimmons sees recruitment of the best and brightest Chinese students as an essential part of Harvard’s long-term vibrancy as an institution. In his view, an increased presence of Chinese students is necessary both to create a diverse student body and to maintain elite standards. “We are thinking generations ahead,” Fitzsimmons says. “We’re thinking much more competition.”

Kirby adds that some Chinese families are pleasantly surprised to hear that “you don’t need to be rich” to apply to Harvard. The University’s recruitment efforts are aimed at both clearing up current misconceptions and getting “people thinking about Harvard in very broad terms,” he says.

DIGGING TO CHINA

In October, preeminent Harvard mathematician Shing-Tung Yau organized the first annual Shing-Tung Yau High School Mathematics Award, a mathematical sciences competition held in Beijing. Fitzsimmons served as a judge.

While Yau established the program to “fulfill [his] dream to promote mathematics,” he acknowledges the benefits of interactions between Harvard representatives and Chinese students. “Harvard students and faculty should understand this country,” he writes in an e-mail message. “The participation of brilliant Chinese high school students [in future undergraduate life] will be very meaningful.”

While the Shing-Tung Yau High School Mathematics Award was not explicitly established to create stronger ties between Harvard and China, Harvard’s Shanghai Office does have such a mission in mind. Opened in the spring of 2008, the office seeks to promote and assist all sorts of University ventures in China. One of the office’s several goals is to facilitate Harvard admissions interviews, as well as providing “on-the-ground services” for students and faculty working and studying in the PRC, according to its Web site.

However, increased awareness has not yet translated into increased matriculation for mainland China’s students. The applicant pool from mainland China has more than dectupled in the last ten years—from 44 for the class of 2003 to 484 in the class of 2012. But the number of accepted students has remained amazingly consistent, around five each year. Fitzsimmons attributes the phenomenon to remaining obstacles, ranging from standardized tests to language skills. A lack of SAT scores and difficulties with English “will not be positive factors,” he says.

STUDENT MOVEMENT

Many student groups have taken matters into their own hands, often long before the University got in the game. Every summer since 2006, the Harvard College Summit for Young Leaders in China has brought Harvard undergrads to Shanghai to teach 300 Chinese high school students as part an intensive week of seminars, guest speakers and extracurricular activities.

“I really want a lot of Harvard students to step on the Chinese mainland,” says co-founder and Shanghai native Meijie “MJ” Tang ’09. She hopes that each trip will give Harvard students a better understanding of Chinese culture. As for the Chinese students, Tang hopes that they will find in HSYLC a love of the “true liberal arts education” and the “eagerness to learn” that she found at Harvard. Whatever HSYLC is doing, it must be working: 22 percent of their Chinese alumni are currently enrolled at prestigious universities abroad, including several at Harvard.

“There are so many programs I’ve heard about between Yale and China,” Chen says. “And Harvard should definitely be more awesome.”

—Lingbo Li contributed to the reporting of this story