THE SECOND-CHANCE CONSULTING SERVICES EXPORTED TO CHINA
BY FLORENCE CHAN
With a precarious 1.9 cumulative grade-point average (GPA) at Ohio State University, Chupeng Yue, an international student from China, decided he had no choice but to seek out -- and pay for -- solutions to his academic crisis.
As American universities are admitting record numbers of Chinese students, a lucrative business opportunity has emerged -- study-abroad agencies touting crisis management services to students from China.
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"The study environment here is very different from China," Yue said. "We need this service."
In the 2016-17 academic year, there were more than 350,000 Chinese students enrolled in an educational institution in the United States, about one-third of all the international students in the country, according to the Open Doors report published by the Institute of International Education.
With this growing enrollment, demand for college-admission consulting has surged, spurring an entirely new realm of education agencies over the past decade. Their services range from tutoring classes for SAT tests to personal statement editing. One of the newest additions to the offerings is academic emergency consultation.
An Introduction to Education Agencies
Apart from services pertaining to college applications, study-abroad agencies also feature emergency consultations for students who face a range of academic challenges.
WholeRen Education is a company headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pa., with operations in eight cities across the U.S., and three in China. Apart from traditional agency services, the company also carries out a crisis management plan, namely emergency services, for students in the face of academic crises.
Cao handles student cases at her office.
It is the pioneering education organization in the U.S. to provide second-chance solutions to academic expulsions, said Jennifer Cao, an L.A.-based academic consultant at WholeRen Education.
The emergency consultation is tailor-made for students subject to academic warning, suspension and expulsion. It offers a series of services: advising on how to win an expulsion hearing, ironing out the college transfer process, and providing daily support to students with mental health issues. Service charge varies from cases to cases. It typically ranges from $1,500 to $4,500, the most expensive package, however, costs as much as $50,000 per year.
"We have around 10 students seeking emergency services or help every day, either through regular channels or social media," Cao said. "We see the business opportunities in this service."
While the U.S. economy collected more than $36 billion in tuition from international students in the 2016-17 academic year, Chinese students made a whopping contribution of $12 billion to American colleges and universities, said Jill Welch, the deputy executive director of public policy at NAFSA: Association of International Educators -- a non-profit association specializes in international education.
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With the huge investment pouring into the U.S. economy, Chinese parents would face substantial financial loss if their children leave the country without a college degree. The emergency solutions to academic crises are therefore marketed as a sort of insurance for parents to help keep the expulsion risk at bay.
WholeRen Education compiled the cases of 5,631 dismissed Chinese international students who involved in the company's emergency consultation from 2013 to 2018. In the company's fifth annual report in 2018, 1,000 cases were randomly selected from March 2017 to March 2018.
According to the report, poor academic results and academic dishonesty have topped the list of dismissal reasons since 2015. Even though the proportion of students getting expelled due to unsatisfactory academic performance has declined from a year prior, it still accounted for more than 40 percent of all causes of expulsion in 2018. While mental health issue made up 7 percent of the overall dismissal reasons, up from 0.4 percent in 2015, it lays bare the growing pressure on Chinese students abroad, the report said.
Yue, 19, is an emergency student at WholeRen Education coming from Sichuan, a province in southwest China. He moved to Los Angeles this August following the end of his freshman year at Ohio State University. After the three-year preparation for gaokao, a college entrance exam in China, Yue described his move to pursue a degree in America as an "escape from a hectic life".
His exodus from the intense study environment in China evoked a sense of gaiety and freedom, paving a way to his academic failures.
Yue was on the verge of getting a failing GPA at the end of his first semester at Ohio State University, where he received his first academic warning from school.
"I didn't care about that as I thought I could bring up my grades in spring," Yue said. "But it didn't work out."
The drag of social science and art courses alongside his indifferent attitude toward school work exacerbated his academic performance. By the end of the school year, his second academic warning landed on the back of his 1.9 cumulative GPA on his transcript.
Certificates issued to WholeRen Education.
But the worst was yet to come. When school counselors gave Yue an option to transfer out of Ohio State University for one year to improve his GPA, he found that most of the application deadlines of community colleges had passed. And this is the moment when his academic life and emergency services from WholeRen Education intertwined.
Santiago Canyon College is where Yue chose to improve his grades. It is a community college in the city of Orange, Calif., about three miles north of Santa Ana. "As long as I am getting all A's and B's for my classes, I can transfer back to Ohio State next year," Yue said.
Yue ascribed his poor academic results to the disparity in teaching styles between the U.S. and China.
With the overall surge in Chinese household wealth, sending children abroad is now considered an honorable move showcasing the family's socioeconomic status. But cultural differences between the U.S. and China are an obstacle for Chinese students aiming to succeed in America.
While there are a host of reasons contributing to the number of dismissal cases, the arduous challenge in adapting to the American teaching style appears to be one of the most common factors.
The tight instructional supervision of students' achievement is a norm in the Chinese education system. Yue said students are closely monitored by professors and tutors in ensuring their grades and attendance are at least on a par with the class average.
How emergency services at WholeRen Education helped Yue go through his academic crisis.
But when the American college education weaned him away from the dependent study approaches, problems started to emerge.
"In the past, people [teachers] looked at me and controlled me," Yue said. "But now it is a matter of self-control, and this is the problem."
In addition to the college-transfer services, his consultant at WholeRen Education offers him pointers on course selection and arranges after-class tutoring sessions to bump up his overall grade. With access to his school account, Yue said his consultant is keeping tabs on his academic performance and attendance on a daily basis.
"I can revise through their assistance," he said. "Their services are pretty useful."
So when it comes to emergency cases, Cao said consultants might have to fight daily battles with students over completing their assignments or force them to attend lectures by knocking on their doors.
"We are like their parents in the U.S. and help them develop the way right to study." she said.
However, the emergency services might not be suitable for everyone's appetite. "I refuse to give them opportunity to earn money from me." said Bo Fan, a 25-year-old Beijing native who got expelled from Indiana University in Bloomington. "They just want to earn money."
Fan plays Nintendo Switch in his spare time.
Fan was a chemistry major when he first got accepted to Indiana University Bloomington in fall 2011. After failing an organic chemistry class on the third attempt, he decided to switch his major to physics. But a change in his study field did not fuel his academic motivations. After being placed on three academic probations, he got booted out in 2015 with a cumulative GPA of 1.99.
As one of the highest-scoring students, Fan was in the top percentile in the gaokao system. In China, the most prestigious colleges, like Tsinghua and Peking Universities, only open doors to students who score in the highest percentile in gaokao. And Fan was one of those.
Similar to Yue, the Sino-American difference in education was the reason behind Fan's academic failure in the U.S. "Gaokao was forced my parents and teachers, it was not my intention to study hard." he said. "When teachers did not intervene, I did not study at all."
Apart from being expelled, the separation from his girlfriend had added salt to the wound. "She could not accept the fact that I got dismissed from school, so she broke up with me." he explained. When academic and relationship debacles happened in tandem, he slid deeper into depression and self-harmed himself.
In spite of all the obstacles, he did not hire an education agency to help him. Instead, he completed the transfer application, sought psychotherapy and made his way back to Indiana University Bloomington a year later of his own accord.
In May 2016, he made it to graduation at Indiana University in Bloomington with an undergraduate degree in liberal studies.
"With that expulsion experience, I treated studies and schoolwork a lot more serious than before." he said.
