Extreme Distance Learning

Shu Yang is a proud alumna of the University of Colorado at Denver. An economics major, she graduated at the top of her class and received her diploma last month.

But ask her to identify Denver on a map and Shu draws a blank. Mention the Broncos and she shakes her head. She has no idea who Denver’s mayor is. In fact, what she knows of the entire state of Colorado boils down to four words: “They have mountains there.”

A big reason for Shu’s lack of knowledge is that she has never actually set foot in the Centennial State--or any other part of the U.S., for that matter.

Despite her having nailed a 3.83 grade point average in earning her diploma from CU Denver, Colorado is about as familiar to Shu as the moon, and seemingly just as far away.

She got her degree through a pioneering program here that allows Chinese students to study for and attain a four-year undergraduate degree from CU Denver without ever leaving China.

The students attend classes taught by American and Chinese professors, use English-language textbooks and fulfill the same academic requirements as their counterparts in Denver, for about the same cost that Colorado-based students pay.

The program is unusual--but not unique. Globalization has hit the world of higher education, and populous China, long eyed by businesses as the Holy Grail of consumer markets, is beginning to receive some of the same kind of attention from American academia.

Two U.S. institutions, CU Denver and a Kansas college, already have set up shop in China to confer bachelor’s degrees, and other campuses are exploring the idea. More than a dozen American universities allow Chinese students to earn master’s degrees in such fields as hotel management, law and nursing without leaving their homeland.

Institutions such as these are increasingly knocking on China’s doors in hopes of enhancing their reach and reputation beyond American shores, keeping one step ahead of the competition and adding cash to their coffers.

What they find is a land where the huge demand for higher education far outstrips supply and where a growing number of students have the drive and wherewithal to pursue--and pay for--an American college degree, which they see as a ticket to success because of its cachet.

But the colleges also find an alien environment that has confounded even the savviest commercial businesses from around the world, a setting where cultural barriers, different rules and their own poor planning can compromise the education they promise to deliver.

The payoffs can be high--more tuition receipts, healthier enrollment figures--but so can the stakes: the colleges’ own reputations and integrity.

“The worst thing we could do here is give degrees to students who then go out and embarrass the university because they’re not qualified,” said Cheryl Reighter, a CU Denver anthropologist and former Beijing-based coordinator of the school’s program in China.

The many educational exchanges between the U.S. and China have long constituted one of the more stable elements in the two countries’ relationship. About 54,000 Chinese students--the most from any single foreign country--live in the U.S., most of them doing postgraduate work, according to the U.S. government.

But in recent years, the Chinese government has relaxed its restrictions on U.S. universities doing business in China. American MBA programs, offered by institutions such as Rutgers University, have become commonplace here and attract hundreds of students.

The universities say it makes good sense to target young people in a rising power like China who are well placed to become political leaders and captains of industry, especially as the world grows more tightly interwoven through technology and trade.

“Many of our industrial sponsors of the university, the hiring companies, have become globalized,” said Jun Ni of the University of Michigan, which just started a program allowing students at Jiaotong University in Shanghai to receive master’s degrees in engineering from Michigan. “And they like to see students who have the same global experience.”

The last, vast frontier for American universities lies in providing Chinese students not just professional and specialized graduate degrees but undergraduate education. Universities from other countries, such as Canada and Australia, are setting up undergraduate programs here as well.

The challenges of such endeavors are daunting: how to ensure that standards are upheld, that students have a command of English adequate for their classes, that qualified teachers are available and that a sufficient variety of courses is offered so that students can receive the kind of broad liberal arts education that American colleges pride themselves on providing.

Those are all problems that have bedeviled both the CU Denver and Kansas programs, which offer full bachelor’s degrees that the universities insist are as bona fide as the ones attained by students at home.

Bona fide now, anyway: CU Denver administrators acknowledge that when their program began, in 1994, the degrees were not really equivalent--though the university awarded them nonetheless.

“Four years ago, I would have said no,” said W. James Smith, dean of CU Denver. Then, the students’ English proficiency was not up to par--all CU Denver classes in China are taught in English--and the courses were therefore not as rigorous as they should have been, he said.

But “I expect in another two years, we’ll be pushing the rigor limits of CUD and sometimes exceeding them,” added Smith, who was in Beijing last month to hand out diplomas to this year’s graduating seniors. “These students are deadly smart. They work incredibly hard.”

Some See Flaws in U.S. Program

Not all applicants are accepted. By all accounts, the talent level of new enrollees has risen every year as admission has grown more selective, based on the students’ high school background, Chinese college-entrance test scores and fluency in English. The program also has expanded to offer two majors, economics and communications, instead of just the former.

Yet faculty and students raise complaints about the program, which CU Denver runs in conjunction with a Chinese partner, China Agricultural University, in northwestern Beijing.

The scheduling and availability of courses are a constant headache; students overload their schedules because they fear that the classes they need won’t be offered again before they’re due to graduate. The students are offered only a tiny fraction of the variety available at the home campus. Elective courses often are elective in name only; students feel forced to enroll in classes that do not interest them to accrue enough credits to graduate.

Facilities and equipment often fall far short of U.S. standards; a classroom TV and VCR are luxuries. “The libraries are pathetic,” one professor lamented. The instructors themselves are of uneven quality, students say; most are not CU Denver teachers but staff from other institutions who are on sabbaticals, retired or still pursuing their doctorates.

“I’ll tell people that I graduated from CUD, but I don’t feel I’ve gotten an equivalent education,” said Richard Wang, a junior who wants to deepen his knowledge by attending graduate school in the U.S.

Lack of Faculty Is a Drawback

Attracting faculty has been difficult. In some cases, so that students in Beijing can meet requirements, professors have been flown in from the U.S. at the last minute to cram into three weeks what they normally would teach in nine.

Racing against the graduation clock, Shu, the economics major, had to take two such “intensive classes” during her final semester. The courses met for three hours every morning and three hours every afternoon--an exhausting pace that dragged down her grade-point average, she says.

“Under normal circumstances,” Shu said, “I would have gotten A’s. But I’m not Superwoman.”

Then there are the misunderstandings between CU Denver and its Chinese host, which provides facilities and some instructors. Disputes have arisen over admission standards, late payment of tuition from the Chinese side to the American side, and CU Denver’s graduation requirements, which some students--misinformed by Chinese staff, the Americans say--believe are fluid.

“My position here has been to try to enforce regulations that originate 7,000 miles away, that are in many senses totally irrelevant to what Chinese students want,” Reighter said. “They want a foreign degree, period. I don’t think anyone knew how difficult it would be” to run such a program.

Still, several students say they would not trade their experience for a Chinese university education. Their classes have equipped them with critical thinking and other skills that Chinese institutions of higher learning often do not encourage, students say.

“American education values creativity and the equality of the relationship between students and the professors,” said Zhao Weisi, 22, who graduated last month. “They want us all to show our originality and our own ideas . . . to think more actively. When we first entered college, the professors would yell at us for not asking questions. That was useful.”

At SIAS University in central China--a private college founded by a San Marino businessman--a Kansas state university has set up a program that turns to technology to bolster its course offerings, on topics such as cinema and art.

All the classes offered in China by Fort Hays State University are on videotape. American teaching assistants hired to live in China help out by administering exams and answering basic questions, but in most respects the program is an extension of the “virtual college” the university offers to U.S. students.

The students in China communicate by e-mail with Fort Hays professors in Hays, Kan. The professors mark exams and issue grades from there.

By combining their pre-approved Chinese course work with American video classes, the students can earn general bachelor’s degrees from Fort Hays that require much less specialization than is expected of students who pursue majors in particular fields.

But “our faculty is not giving these degrees away,” said Cindy Elliott, dean of the virtual college. “This is solid. They’re not watered-down courses.”

When they finish, the Chinese students earn diplomas that “look exactly like the diplomas of our students in the United States,” Elliott said. “And hopefully they will get interviews with multinational companies that want to hire students with English skills and an American college degree.”

The eagerness to land an American degree has boosted enrollment in Fort Hays’ program from 25 to 180 students in little more than a year. Next fall, the target is 500. And the university plans to start a second program based in Beijing.

Its expansion in China also has increased Fort Hays’ overall enrollment figures, which are crucial to the university’s funding from the state of Kansas.

Money is a sensitive business in these programs. For most Chinese students, the cost of an American education--even one given in their own country--seems exorbitant, although most Americans probably would regard the fees as reasonable, even cheap. Shu, the economics major, estimates that her family spent about $12,000 on her education, in a country where households are lucky to make a tenth of that amount in a year.

The CU Denver program is supposed to be financially self-sufficient. To enable it to make ends meet, tuition has nearly doubled within the last four years, to the students’ chagrin.

But those efforts to become self-supporting did not prevent the university’s international offerings--its program in China and similar ones in Russia, Nepal and Mongolia--from receiving an internal audit two years ago or a scathing faculty report in Denver that criticized their academic quality.

Despite such problems, however, Reighter, the former Beijing-based program coordinator, says the endeavors are key in today’s globalized world.

“International colleges are the wave of the future,” she said. “We’re past the time of being isolationist or thinking we can do our own thing and ignore the rest of the world.”