A New School

By LI LI

A New School

By LI LI

Newly established non-profit college aims to bring tertiary education to some of China’s poorest people

“W e can stand living in poverty, but we cannot stand missing opportunities to make our lives better and improve ourselves,” said 19-yearold Sun Susu, a freshman at the Guizhou Forerunner College (GFC), while making a speech on behalf of her fellow students at the opening ceremony of the school’s fall semester on September 22.

Sun and her peers are the frst students to enroll in this three-year vocational college located in Guizhou, a land-locked province in China’s southwest.

Funded by the VIA Faith-Hope-Love Non-Proft Foundation, an NGO, the newly established vocational institution claims to be China’s frst non-proft private college. According to the college’s website, the school aims “to promote education equality in the western region of China, foster innovative teaching styles and stimulating classroom experiences.” The college also houses the Bright Angel College for the Blind, a school dedicated to imparting a world-class education to visually impaired students.

All of the 170 inaugural freshmen come from Guizhou, which is known for its treacherous terrain and diffcult farming conditions.

A big ambition

Harsh local weather and geographical conditions combined with Guizhou’s isolation from China’s industrial heartland have made it one of China’s poorest provinces. In 2010, Guizhou’s per-capita GDP stood at 13,221.4 yuan ($2,066), the lowest among China’s provincial-level economies.

However, for the GFC’s founders, the widespread poverty in rural Guizhou is an opportunity to introduce a new model of tertiary education, one that intends to provide the province’s least well-off residents with a world-class vocational education.

“The GFC represents a new concept in higher education in China,” said Sun Wei, Chair of the GFC, who also led the school’s founding committee during its two years of initial preparation work.

“We are committed to lifting rural families in China’s poorest areas out of poverty by teaching their children practical career skills for free and producing the moral citizens our society badly needs,” Sun toldBeijing Review. The college’s motto is “integrity, love and nobility.”

According to the college’s development vision, more than one third of GFC’s students will receive full scholarships; another third will receive half-tuition scholarships. Poor students who display academic excellence will also receive allowances to cover from 50-100 percent of the cost of living.

The Bright Angel College for the Blind, which specializes in training visually impaired students in physical therapy, will provide full tuition and living expense scholarships to its students.

Of the frst cohort of 170 students enrolled this year, 143 students received full scholarships while another 17 received half-tuition scholarships. Only 10 students have to pay the full tuition of 6,500 yuan ($1,015.6) per year.

Tuition fees are a major disincentive for rural students who want to pursue tertiary education, according to a recent survey on tuition burdens conducted by the China National Center for Student Assistance Administration. Among the students surveyed, 91 percent feel that tuitions were too expensive.

“I am excited about my new job,” said Tian Xingzhao, head of the GFC’s Division of Student Services and Administration. He said that while working for another college, prior to joining the GFC, one of his responsibilities was to persuade students who couldn’t afford their tuitions not to drop out of high education.

The GFC with its focus on educating underprivileged rural youth was made possible by a donation from Cher Wang, a highly successful IT entrepreneur and the richest person in Taiwan in 2011 according toForbesmagazine. Wang spent 180 million yuan ($28.1 million) to create a campus with state-of-the-art facilities that rival any university in Guizhou.

Sun worked with Wang in 2001-03.

Before joining the GFC to serve as its chair, Sun once worked as a tenured computer science professor at the State University of Florida at Miami. He is now also a professor and dean of the College of Software at Beihang University in Beijing, one of China’s top engineering universities.

CFP

SUN FENG

“My work experience in the academic arena and business world enables me to fnd resources for my students,” said Sun. Through the efforts of Sun and his colleagues, every new student has been given a laptop donated by HP China, and each laptop features software donated by Microsoft China. Nielsen donated the IT equipment used on the campus worth a total of 3 million yuan ($468,750).

Sun said he was in talks with Baidu, the world’s most-used Chinese search engine, which is willing to help the GFC by offering students internship opportunities and scholarships.

Sun firmly believes in the model of education expounded by Plato. “If you ask what is the good of education in general, the answer is easy, that education makes good men, and that good men act nobly.”Sun requires his students to participate in manual labor one day per week to cultivate their work ethic, and learn self-governance, self-restraint and self-discipline.

In October, Sun launched a campaign to recruit volunteer janitors from his students. He intends to keep all the campus lavatories as clean as those in star-rated hotels just by using volunteers, while the campus will have only two fulltime janitors.

Unexpected challenges

To make sure that each graduate will be employed with a reasonable salary immediately after graduation, the GFC has found partner companies for all of its majors. Collaborating enterprises will not only send veteran employees to train students, but also offer internship opportunities to students and hire qualifed graduates. For example, the School of Hotel Management is partnered with the Marriott Hotel, which has promised to hire all the qualifed graduates to work in its hotels in China’s major cities.

Sun said that one of the biggest challenges in the preparation period was persuading poverty-stricken families to send their children to the GFC. “Parents, sometimes even teachers in rural schools, think our scholarships and employment policies are too good to be true,” Sun toldBeijing Review.

Sun said the GFC’s private college status hindered its efforts to recruit students. With a history of less than 30 years in China, the private higher education sector has been plagued by fnancial scandals and allegations of poor education quality.

“I think it will take two to three years for local people to fully trust us,” Sun said. The GFC plans to recruit about 600 students next year from Guizhou and its neighboring provinces.

Sun and his colleagues look forward to the release of a national regulation on private colleges and universities, which will divide them into for-profit and non-profit organizations and provide non-proft ones with public subsidies and tax breaks.

“Some other students rejected us because we are not authorized by education authorities to grant a bachelor’s degree, which they believe guarantees a well-paid job,” Sun said. At the end of July, he paid home visits to about 20 potential applicants to his college who live deep in Guizhou’s mountainous areas. He found that most of these youngsters, whose homes are usually a two-hour walk from the nearest road, saw a university degree a guarantee of a better life and had never heard of the diffculties facing millions of unemployed or low-earning college graduates who live in cramped conditions on the outskirts of China’s large cities.

Sun also found that what seems like exciting professional opportunities to most urban residents didn’t resonate with these rural youngsters. For example, very few of the students he met were excited about job opportunities at Marriott Hotels as neither they nor their parents had ever seen a fvestar hotel.

However, these poor students’ lack of knowledge about the outside world only served to convince Sun and his colleagues that they were bridging a vital education gap.

“This is the first time I saw abject poverty personally. It is shocking. Seeing the smile on the youngsters’ face when they knew that their tuitions would be exempted, I felt that my job was really meaningful,” said Anny Chang, a GFC employee who paid home visits to promote the college.

While Sun thought it would be difficult to instill loving, ethical and moral components in his students’ campus lives, he toldBeijing Reviewthat he was proved wrong. “I asked all my students to make three etiquette changes by always wearing a smile, greeting strangers politely and speaking standard Mandarin Chinese or English instead of local dialects on the campus, and they have done very well so far,” Sun said.

The recruitment of volunteer teachers was surprisingly easy for the GFC’s founding team. About a dozen of foreign volunteers greeted students at the college’s opening ceremony, ranging from retired university professors to former senior executives of multinational companies.

“My goal is that half of our faculty will be volunteers and veteran employees from our partner companies,” said Sun, who is a volunteer himself. “As so many people from China and abroad are applying to work here as volunteers, it won’t take long to realize this goal.”