A Harvard-bound Shanghai pupil is the envy of her peers, for whom entry to the Ivy League ranks is a class act

EDUCATION

Barbara Demick

Jun 21, 2010

It was just a week after Chang Shui received her acceptance notice from Harvard that the first book offer came.

A publisher approached her father with a detailed outline for an inside guide to how a Shanghai couple prepared their daughter to compete successfully with the best students from America. Local newspapers weighed in with articles about how Shui's membership in a dance troupe surely helped. "Magical girl 'danced' her way into Harvard," the Shanghai Evening Post headlined its story.

Qibao High School, where Shui is a senior, trumpeted the news on a large electronic billboard at the front gate. The day that she received her acceptance notice - by e-mail at 5am on April 2 - teachers at the high school crowded around to have their picture taken with her.

"She was a celebrity," her homeroom teacher, Xiong Gongping, boasts.

"I'm not exactly a celebrity," Shui says, interjecting a note of modesty.

"But it is true that more students are approaching me wanting to know how to get in to college in the US.

"And for the parents, it's their dream to send a kid to Harvard or Yale."

Charlotte Chang, as she'll call herself in the United States, is a skinny 17-year-old with hair pulled back into a perky pony tail and a broad, confident smile despite the braces that she hopes to get off her teeth before moving abroad in August. Striding through her school campus, she switches easily between Putonghua and English, the word "cool" punctuating her speech, a product of spending her junior year of high school as an exchange student in Seattle.

She wears the Wedgwood-blue tracksuit jacket that is part of her school uniform, along with jeans and canvas sneakers that put a bounce in her step. The only book she carries is a paperback version of the novel The Time Traveler's Wife. She is reading it for fun.

She is at school to have her photograph taken. She has stopped attending classes even as her classmates are preparing for the dreaded gaokao, or high test, that determines placement in mainland universities.

"My friends are so depressed. They study from 7am to midnight," Shui says.

For many, at the very top of the wish list is Harvard, or Hafo, which the Chinese pronounce with reverence. Its namesakes are found all over the mainland - the Harvard Kindergarten, the Harvard Graphic Arts School, the Harvard Beauty School. Chinese books on the university number nearly half a dozen, among them You Too Can Go to Harvard: Secrets of Getting into Famous US Universities and the best-seller published in 2000, Harvard Girl.

"More and more rich Chinese families want to send their children to the US to be educated, and when they do, they want them to go to the best universities," says Zhou Jun, founder and head of the Leadership Academy, one of a dozen consulting firms that dispense advice on how to get into foreign universities.

Based in Shanghai, his company targets a niche market of the wealthiest families, people who will pay as much as US$300,000 for up to five years of supplemental classes aimed at getting their child into an Ivy League school. "The parents all want Harvard, but we can't guarantee that. We're not God. We work with what we have got."

Zhou's company helps students with their English, prepares them for the SATs, which are taken in Hong Kong or through an international school, and helps them single out universities, fill out their applications and edit their essays. It also organises extracurricular programmes, most recently a fourday hiking excursion to Nepal, and volunteer work tutoring the poor - the sort of activities notably absent on the résumés of children schooled in a grade-obsessed system.

The desire to go to top American universities is not just about the prestige conveyed by the name.

Mainland students envy many aspects of US higher education, such as the chance to explore different pursuits before choosing a major, interactions with professors and the more open intellectual debates.

"You really don't learn anything in Chinese universities. It is very difficult to get into college, but more relaxed once you get there," says Zhang Haosheng, an 18-year-old classmate of Shui's at Qibao High School. "Many of us, if we had the money, would prefer to go to school in the US."

There are 36 Chinese undergraduates at Harvard, although the number of graduate students is much larger. Of 2,110 students accepted for the upcoming freshman class, at least nine are from the mainland.

"The Chinese high schools used to worry that if the top-flight students applied internationally, they wouldn't study hard for the gaokao and that [students'] status in China would suffer, but now they are encouraging it," says Deborah Seligsohn, a Beijing-based Harvard alumni who often interviews applicants.

Seligsohn says the Chinese applicants she meets are usually students who have rejected engineering or science and want the luxury of time afforded by US universities to figure out their place in the world.

"What I've seen over and over again is that they are very socially committed. They're interested in broad questions of poverty and the environment," she says.

Isabelle Krishana, an American expatriate who works for Kemeixin Consulting, a Beijing-based academic adviser, is more cynical.

"I think the parents want their kids to make a lot of money," says Krishana, a Princeton graduate.

The obstacles to entry to an Ivy League school are daunting. Although many top universities select applicants regardless of their ability to pay, successful matriculants need to speak perfect English, which they cannot generally do unless they spend a high school year abroad. And that requires a good deal of money.

"It takes a lot of work for them to put together an application that is going to stand up next to 20,000 kids applying to Yale. They don't know what a college admissions person wants to see and hear," Krishana says.

She recalls one high school student she was advising, who, when asked to write an essay about a person she admired, picked Adolf Hitler. "It was one of those 'lost in translation' moments. I had to explain to her, 'Listen, this is really not going to work.'" For Shui, the path to Harvard began when she was in kindergarten and started dancing.

"We wanted her to have a special talent to develop her personality," Chang Zhitao, her father, says from the family's home in one of Shanghai's shiny new high-rise flats.

He says the family took a contrary approach to the education of their only child, rejecting the harsh methods of some ambitious parents - for example, the author of Harvard Girl wrote that her parents began teaching her words when she was 15 days old and that as a 10- year-old she held a piece of ice in her hand to develop discipline.

"We wanted to develop her own sense of responsibility, and with responsibility, she got freedom," Chang says.

"I grew up differently from my classmates," Shui says. "I spent a significant amount of time in dancing and extracurricular activities. I put in more time studying English."

At Qibao High School, Shui was among the top 10 students but not the valedictorian. She spent many weekends performing traditional Chinese dance with a student troupe, sometimes travelling abroad to France, Australia or North Korea.

She had an adviser who helped her with the complicated applications while she was attending high school in Seattle. She is surprised at Harvard's approval, she says, as she'd been rejected last year by Yale's early admissions programme.

Last month, Shui met some of her future classmates at an event organised by the Harvard Club of Shanghai. Like herself, she says, each has a special talent - one is an athlete, another a student government leader and a third a whiz at taking tests. "I met one boy with perfect 2,400 SAT scores," she says.

"But we all had the same question: why did Harvard pick me?" At least for now, Shui does not intend to commit the secrets of her success to paper. "She says it is too soon," her father says. "She hasn't accomplished anything yet."

McClatchy-Tribune

my mainland friends have told me about the school system in China. students go through so much pressure and hard work to get into university, so when they finally get there they are burnt out just want to play.

another thing is, of course Harvard is prestigious no matter where you are from, but it does say something about the level of education. China must improve it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=1344928&forum_id=1#15303976)